ABSTRACT
The early modernists, who were combatting the familiar figure with their call to abstraction, were enormously successful. Thus modernism, in its infancy, made war on tradition, taking particular aim at a well-defined target which centered on depiction of the human figure. Art has proliferated far beyond abstraction, branching into many new and different categories that have become the coequals rather than mere subdivisions of earlier modernist tendencies. Modernism, split into many branches and weakened by decades of public adulation, has since grown nostalgic for the opposition it once inspired. There is an urge to mimic the early twentieth century. Yet the overall effect of modernism has been positive for figurative artists; it has given them a clean slate. Its new forms have opened new possibilities. Insofar as it responds to that slate, figurative art is a part of modernism and is entitled to a place in it.
