Early Modernism: 1900-1920 from The Moderna Museet Collection

In this exhibition, we highlight works from Moderna Museet’s rich collection of early 20th century art, including artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Siri Derkert, Sonia Delaunay, Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and many others. Thanks to this presentation, visitors to Moderna Museet Malmö can learn more about the early phase of modernism.

Paris was still the European capital of painting, attracting young artists from all over the continent who sought to study, encounter the new art and meet other artists. Solo exhibitions of Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin in the early 1900s, introduced many of them to the inspiringly colourful and expressive style of post-impressionism. Other young artists discovered non-European art that had been brought back to Paris from the colonies and by explorers and was now exhibited in ethnographic and anthropological museums. Masks and sculptures from Africa, Oceania and South America, which had formerly not been regarded as art, now made a deep impression on artists and opened up to new expressions in art.

Two movements stand out among the great variety of expressions and styles that arose during this period: expressionism, based on the qualities and potential of colour, and cubism, based on form. Both movements can be said to have originated in Paris, and both are prodigiously represented in the Moderna Museet collection.