Modernism is far from a precise term--in art history or any other aspect of history. Chief objectives for this chapter include: grasping the unifying aspects of the period from 1900 to 1945, and understanding the essential features of each of a number of movements within the developments contained by this time period.

Goals for this chapter include:

• Recognize that Impressionism engendered a range of critical reactions and identify the essential features of each of these reactions as contained within the broad term, Post-Impressionism.

• Identify those aspects of early modernism that were pushed at least in part by resentment towards the developments of modern industrialism.

• Categorize the works and artists talked about in this chapter into one of the two major poles of modernism: formalism and expressionism.

• Understand the centrality of Cubism and German Expressionism to the foundation of twentieth-century modernism.

• Recognize the aesthetic basis of the "invention" and development of non-representational art.

• Recognize new techniques in both painting and sculpture, particularly collage and construction.

• Watch the emergence of a new aesthetic in architecture--an aesthetic that placed fully realized function in the realm of the beautiful.

• Observe the relationship between modern psychoanalysis and art--especially in the realm of Surrealism.

• Witness the growth of regionalism and a documentary impulse in American art between the wars.