n art can be seen in French 19th-century avant-garde painting, which resulted in several movements, including impressionism and postimpressionism. The common denominator among leading late-19th-century artists was a diminished concern for realism and a greater emphasis on personal freedom of expression. About the turn of the century, a group of French painters formed a movement called fauvism, which focused on utilizing dramatic lines and colors and had a significant impact on modern art. French and German artists, including the fauves and a German group known as Die Brcke, were influenced by the boldness and power of the art of indigenous peoples from around the world. Around 1911 some work of a second group of German artists, Der Blaue Reiter, moved toward semiabstract and abstract painting.Interested in indigenous sculpture also played a role in the development of cubism, which arose between 1907 and 1914 with the help of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The most influential style of the modern period, it emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane and rejected traditional perspective. Several Italian artists employed the cubist style but emphasized motion. Their movement was called futurism. Cubism was crucial to the development of abstract art, which began to be seen in German and Swiss art around 1910. Simultaneously, Russian artists were aware of cubism and developed two branches of it: suprematism and constructivism.Dutch artists sought to create a universal, harmonious style suitable to every aspect of contemporary life. Their movement, De Stijl, involved the expression of pure plastics (forms) and often reduced the range of color in a work to just primary colors. The dada movement, which arose both in Europe and America during World War I (1914-1918), comprised a group of war resisters who chose a nonsense word, dada (French for "hobbyhorse"), to describe their antiaesthetic works. By 1922 some practitioners...
