Like scientists and intellectuals, creative artists rejected old forms and old values after the war. Modernism in architecture, art, and music meant constant experimentation and a search for new kinds of expression.

The United States, with its rapid urban growth and lack of rigid building traditions, pioneered in the new architecture. In the 1890s the Chicago School of architects, led by Louis H. Sullivan (1856–1924), used cheap steel, reinforced concrete, and electric elevators to build skyscrapers and office buildings lacking almost any exterior ornamentation. The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), another visionary American architect, were renowned for their sometimes-radical design, their creative use of wide varieties of materials, and their appearance of being part of the landscape.

In Europe architectural leadership centered in German-speaking countries. In 1919 Walter Gropius (1883–1969) merged the schools of fine and applied arts at Weimar into a single interdisciplinary school, the Bauhaus. Throughout the 1920s the Bauhaus, with its stress on functionalism and good design for everyday life, attracted enthusiastic students from all over the world.

Art increasingly took on a nonrepresentational, abstract character. New artistic styles grew out of a revolt against French impressionism, which was characterized by an overall feeling, or impression, of light falling on a real-life scene before the artist’s eyes, rather than an exact copy of objects. Though individualistic in their styles, “postimpressionists” and “expressionists” were united in their desire to depict unseen inner worlds of emotion and imagination. Artists such as the Dutch expressionist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) painted the moving vision of the mind’s eye. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), a French expressionist, moved to the South Pacific, where he found inspiration in Polynesian forms, colors, and legends.

In 1907 in Paris the famous Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), along with Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, and other artists, established cubism — an artistic approach concentrated on a complex geometry of zigzagging lines and sharply angled overlapping planes. Since the Renaissance, artists had represented objects from a single viewpoint and had created unified human forms. In his first great cubist work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Picasso’s figures resemble large wooden African masks, presenting a radical new view of reality with a strikingly non-Western depiction of the human form. The influence of carved African masks on Picasso reflected the growing importance of non-Western artistic traditions in Europe in the early twentieth century.

The ultimate stage in the development of abstract, nonrepresentational art occurred around 1910. Artists such as the Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) turned away from nature completely. “The observer,” said Kandinsky, “must learn to look at [my] pictures . . . as form and color combinations . . . as a representation of mood and not as a representation of objects.”14

Radicalization accelerated after World War I. The most notable new developments were New Objectivity (Sachlichkeit in German), Dadaism, and surrealism. New Objectivity emerged from German artists’ experiences in the Great War and the Weimar Republic. Paintings by artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix were provocative, emotionally disturbing, and harshly satirical. Dadaism attacked all accepted standards of art and behavior, delighting in outrageous conduct. After 1924 many Dadaists were attracted to surrealism. Surrealists, such as Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), painted fantastic worlds of wild dreams and complex symbols.

Developments in modern music were strikingly parallel to those in painting. Attracted by the emotional intensity of expressionism, composers depicted unseen inner worlds of emotion and imagination. The pulsating, dissonant rhythms and the dancers’ earthy representation of lovemaking in the ballet The Rite of Spring by composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) nearly caused a riot when first performed in Paris in 1913. Likewise, modernism in opera and ballet flourished. Led by Viennese composer Arnold Schönberg (SHUHN-buhrg) (1874–1951), some composers turned their backs on long-established musical conventions. As abstract painters arranged lines and color but did not draw identifiable objects, so modern composers arranged sounds without creating recognizable harmonies. Accustomed to the harmonies of classical and romantic music, audiences generally resisted modern atonal music.