Post-Impressionists conveyed their personal responses to the world around them through the use of strong, unnatural colors and exaggerations of slight distortion of forms. An example is from French painter Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . It achieves an atmosphere of monumental dignity through the balanced arrangement of its" elements and the contours of its" figures.
In Modernism the period dating from roughly the 1860's through the 1970's is described as they style and ideology of art produced during that era concerned primarily with essential qualities of color and flatness and as exhibiting over time a reduction of interest in subject matter. Paintings such as Eduard Manets" Le Dejeuner Sur I"herbe are a clear example of modernism. .
Cubism is an art form derived from modernism and said to be invented by Pablo Picasso who invented a new style of painting, focusing mainly on line rather than color. Picassos" art changed radically around 1907, when he decided to incorporate some stylistic elements of African sculpture into his painting. Picassos" Les Demoiselles D"Arignon does violence to the human form by means of radical simplifications, arbitrary and harsh color combinations, and extreme distortions of human anatomy and proportions. The paintings space, moreover, does not conform to the logic of perspective, the traditional system for portraying depth in a picture, and is so fragmented that it is difficult to read clearly.
Fauvism can be seen as a branch of Cubism in its extreme outlook on life. Henri Matisses" Red Room defines Fauvism. Matisses" manner of depiction of middle class domesticity was considered highly revolutionary, especially in the way he assigned intense colors to objects arbitrarily and not according to their appearance in nature.
In Expressionism artists tried to present an emotional experience in its most compelling forms, through visual, literary, and performing arts.