A philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped Modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of WWI. Most broadly, it encompassed the activities and output of those who felt that the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organisation and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialised world. In art, Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.

It is often said that Modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against the effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values. While Turner was a member of the Romantic movement, as a pioneer in the study of light, colour and atmosphere he anticipated the French Impressionists and therefore Modernism in breaking down conventional formulas of representation. The dominant trends of industrial Victorian England were also opposed, from about 1850, by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who may be considered proto-Moderrnists and foreshadowed Manet, with whom Modernist painting most definitely began.

The movement was originally labelled 'avant-garde', the first use of that term, and the beginning of the 20th century saw an explosion of new art styles into which Modernism fragmented, including Expressionism, Abstractionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and others. However there continued to be many artworks whose style defied more precise categorisation.