Modernism is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature and other arts of the early 20th century. Modernist art is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th Century traditions and of their consensus between artist and audience: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist artists tended to see themselves as an avant-garde, disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their audience by adopting complex and difficult …showed first 75 words of 2380 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2380 total…men could be more deserving of the title avant-garde as Picasso was the forefather of cubism and abstraction art, Jackson Pollock the father of abstract expressionism, the drip technique and action technique. Josef Albers may be regarded as the precursor of minimal art and optical art. The critic Clement Greenberg even stated that "all profoundly original art looks ugly at first." Lastly To use de Koonings famous and often quoted remark, "they broke the ice."