Artists first represented the human body more than 30,000 years ago and haven’t stopped since. Figurative art has been a continuous tradition through human history. Even in societies where the biblical law forbidding the graven image is most strictly interpreted (Judaism and Islam for example), there have always been instances of figural art. The same is true for the era of modernist abstraction when artists found new ways to portray the body on canvas or with the lens of a camera that could profoundly describe the human condition in , and abstraction the post-holocaust era.

When people walk into an art museum they often expect to see treasures of their cultural history—beautifully crafted precious objects that express profound truths—images of God, nature, man’s heroism, but Campbell soup cans hawked on TV? Pop art sought to upend our comfortable understanding of what art is and it did just that. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and others confronted the visual reality of our commercial consumer culture by focusing on the mechanics of representation and the subject matter of daily life in the middle of the 20th Century.

“Primary Structures,” “ABC Art,” and “Minimalism” are terms that attempted to categorize the work of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt and other artists who produced hard edged, often geometric and seemingly machined objects in the later 1960s and early 1970s. These stark, often cold and cerebral forms were the very antithesis of the deeply emotive gestural art of the Abstract Expressionists and their followers who had dominated the New York art scene since the 1940s. Here was an art that renounced the authentic “hand’ of the artist and sought instead to create forms without reference to the world beyond the object’s own logic except perhaps as Platonic expressions of a pure ideal.

By the second half of the 20th Century, the avant-garde had an avant-garde of its own. Even as Pop, Minimal and Concept artists renounced the handmade work of art, a small group of women recognized the subversive value of handicraft in an age of industrial manufacturing and in an art world dominated by male artists and critics who sought theoretical purity. During her short career, Eva Hesse resituated the ancient question of how to meaningfully represent the human body and unleashed decades of experimentation that continues to this day. Judy Chicago, Linda Benglis, Jackie Windsor, Faith Ringgold, and others used the lowly status of craft and its historical association with female artisans to contrast with “high art.” By focusing of the act of making, on process and craft, these women began the process of fracturing Modernism’s reductive and largely male narratives.

Can art be an enactment? Can the “art” be relocated from the object crafted by an artist to the more ephemeral reaction of the viewer? Must an artist actually “make” a work of art at all? Conceptual artists recognized that when the 19th Century avant-garde broke with the academies and their emphasis on technical execution (the blending color or compositional clarity for example), they were freer to focus on more conceptual issues such as modern urban life, subjectivity, or pictorial language. Fast forward to the second half of the Twentieth Century when intellectual content became the defining characteristic of art and concept fully eclipsed craft. In the 1960 and 70s the art of Beuys, Haacke and others became increasingly conceptual. These artists used found objects, performance, and installation while de-emphasizing the act of “object making.”

If you’ve done the tutorials on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century art then you likely have an idea that by “Modernism,” art historians are referring to a set of ideas that characterize art and culture after about 1848. Key to understanding Modern art are the ideas of a heroic “avant-garde” that challenges authority and the expression of the individual (one that is invariably white and male). The term “Post-Modernism,” was initially used in the art world in 1979 for architecture that arbitrarily borrowed historical styles with little regard for original meaning or context. The term was quickly and broadly adopted, and came to refer to a strategy to undermine Modernism’s utopian and heroizing tendencies by using multiple yet simultaneous critical perspectives. Post-Modernism was not anti-Modernism, it was instead, an effort to destabilize Modernist narratives with deeply skeptical critical strategies that emphasized the plurality of gender, race, nationality, politics, and economic inequality.