1900–1917

About

Between 1900 and the last years of the First World War, European art changed at extraordinary speed. In Vienna, Gustav Klimt set lovers against fields of gold leaf in The Kiss (1907–08). At the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1905, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and Henri Manguin showed canvases of unmixed, arbitrary colour and were nicknamed the Fauves, the wild beasts; that same year Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and friends founded Die Brücke in Dresden, working in jagged forms and acid tones.

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque then broke objects into shifting planes in Cubism, from about 1908, and later glued newspaper and wallpaper onto the picture surface. The Italian Futurists glorified speed and machines, as in Umberto Boccioni's striding bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). Wassily Kandinsky moved towards pure abstraction around 1911, Kazimir Malevich showed his Black Square in 1915, and in 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a factory-made urinal as sculpture.