During the second half of the nineteenth century, the dominant concern of avant-garde artists was to redefine the form and content of art in terms of modern urban life, and to find new meanings and functions for art within the context of middle class patronage. The most vital visual art of the century is found in the succession of different responses to these concerns by the Realists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Symbolists. The invention of photography added a new artistic medium, while also refreshing the pictorial conventions of traditional media. A similar if not greater stimulus to renew tradition came in the form of imported Japanese woodblock prints.

Traditional religion lost ground in the nineteenth century in face of the skeptical rationalism, trust to modern science and materialism pervading the modern secular city. Besides the neo-traditional Gothic Revival movement in art and architecture, there was scarcely any demand for religious art. Artists who addressed spiritual concerns did so on their own terms, and, in deference to the spirit of modernity, avoided supernatural and historical subjects. Instead they naturalized Christianity by alluding to spiritual aspirations in the life of modern people.

In the wake of political and social revolution, artists gave the urban, middle- and working classes a prominence not seen since seventeenth-century Dutch art. While Courbet depicted individuals from the lowest rungs of the social ladder, a wider range of urban types and city pleasures filled the canvases of other avant-garde artists.

Subsequently, the Symbolists reacted against the mundane world of pleasure to express an underlying ennui, and a sense of spiritual anxiety. American artists tended either to identify with the sophistication of European and especially Parisian artistic life, or develop a consciously rough-cut American identity.

Artistic interest in naturalistic representation generated a vital period of landscape painting, culminating in the work of the Impressionists, who brought to the representation of landscape an unprecedented brilliance and sense of immediacy. In their wake, Post-Impressionist artists sought to add to their coloristic brilliance either greater structural form or expressive emotion. American artists explored their vast continent through both realism and photography.

Most architects continued to pursue historicist styles. But some were concerned to meet the challenge of rapidly growing cities, with their modern industrial, commercial, and residential demands. They devised architectural forms and building types in keeping with new materials such as iron, steel, and reinforced concrete. They built the first steel-frame skyscrapers, large new department stores, and steel-cable suspension bridges.

The non-Western world and its art held special appeal for many avant-garde artists, who were spiritually and artistically dissatisfied with their own tradition. Artists paid great attention to the flood of Japanese prints that entered Europe with the reopening of Japan to the West. Gauguin turned in another direction, towards the "primitive," hoping to find in non-Western culture a way of life and form of art free from the burdensome conventions of Western tradition. While his was an isolated case, it was symptomatic of a wider search for fresh beginnings, which was expressed in even more radical terms in twentieth-century art.