The first half of the twentieth century saw the creation of modern art, that is, a revolutionary art which broke with traditional ideas of representation; and since the public now looked at nature with eyes conditioned by photography, the gap between artist and public widened. Modern art grew out of impressionism and therefore began in Paris where impressionism had matured; but when impressionism was shown on a large scale at the Paris World Fair of 1900 it became international, and modern movements began to develop in Germany, Italy and Russia while the art of Paris itself became cosmopolitan. In France orthodox painting continued to be organised round the annual Salon from which the jury excluded all advanced work, so that the avant-garde had been forced to organise on its own, setting up first ad hoc impressionist exhibitions, then in 1884 the Salon des Independents and in 1903 the Salon d'Automne. So art was organised into conservatives and radicals like contemporary politics.

In 1900 two movements were dominant—divisionism and symbolism. The divisionists following Seurat tried to make impressionism scientific by painting in complementary colour dots which fused at a short distance. The symbolists followed Gauguin into rejecting science for poetry; they neither imitated nor analysed but sought a pictorial equivalent for nature in broad colour zones closed by decorative lines. During the next ten years three other artists came to be understood: Van Gogh, whose fierce colour and tempestuous brush stroke keyed painting to the expression of emotion; Cézanne, who, struggling to realise his sensations before a motive by modulating small colour planes, combined the freshness of impressionism with the solidity of a new classic structure; and the Douanier Rousseau, whose naive realism invested objects with an aura of wonder.