Avant-garde artists of the first half of the twentieth century sought to redefine art and architecture to address the modern world, as they experienced it. Modernity included the legacy of the late nineteenth-century and the psychological impact of World War I, the spread of technology, the disaffection with traditional Western values, and the findings of Freudian and Jungian psychology.

Frank Lloyd Wright devised a modern form of architecture to express modern spirituality. Visual artists sought to express this spirituality and portray the essence of reality in terms of abstraction. An exception was Rouault, who offered a vision of redemptive human suffering.

Some artists sought to explore the Modernist Self through a Promethean urge to reinvent the arts. They transformed the language and syntax of Western art and influenced how the themes of human suffering and alienation, chaos and randomness, the irrational and the subconscious were expressed. American artists remained, on the whole, indifferent to European modernism, and focused instead on rural virtue and urban solitude. American photographers explored possibilities both surreal and documentary.

In dealing with nature, Modern artists rejected mimesis and nineteenth-century naturalism. They approached landscape in both formalist and expressionistic terms, as a site for artistic experimentation and as a metaphor for suffering and fear. They also conceived landscape as a pleasurable escape and an arena for a Surrealist world of dream and fantasy.

During this period architects developed influential prototypes for modern design and devised schemes to handle the stresses of the modern city. They sought to create an architectural language consistent with the materials and values of a technological society. While this produced a severe machine aesthetic, which eventually spread worldwide, some architects advocated a more sculptural approach, the use of natural materials and a more organic integration of buildings and their environments.

The art of Africa attracted Western artists shortly after the late nineteenth century. By contrast, in Mexico, the historic tension between traditional Indian and modern Western values inspired artists to address the profound dilemmas of a divided identity, both national and personal.