This is “The Comedian,” by  Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.

And yeah, it is exactly what it looks like. A banana, bought from a  supermarket, duct taped to a wall.

When asked about the work’s meaning, Cattelan said  simply, “The banana is supposed to be a banana.” And people went bananas when it debuted  at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in 2019. And it enraged plenty who balked at its $150,000   price tag and the fact that anyone  would call it “art” to begin with. Artists have always innovated, but when  did they start bucking tradition entirely?

Hi, I’m Sarah Urist Green, and  this is Crash Course Art History. [THEME MUSIC] In most areas of your life,   “modern” is going to mean what you think  it does–current, or related to the present. But when it’s used to describe art, “modern”  usually indicates it’s from the past. And associated with a historical  movement called Modernism, which   describes a phenomenon–beginning  in the late 19th and early 20th   Century–when artists started to reject  traditional styles, ideas, and subjects.

This rejection has become  such a big part of today’s   culture that it’s hard to imagine life without it. Like, the banana was surprising but not really,   because bucking artistic tradition  has become an artistic tradition. But it wasn’t always that way!

To understand the shift, let’s jump back in time. Picture this: it’s the turn of the 20th Century, and the world around you is changing fast. New technologies, like railroads and phone lines,   are transforming how people  work, travel, and communicate.

Cities are growing larger, and fewer  people are living in small towns. Religion is playing a less central role in  society, and fields like psychology are emerging. All of a sudden, you have to worry not  just about whether you got enough sleep,   but about what your dreams mean.

Seriously though, when am I going to stop having stress dreams about being late to class? At the same time, former European colonies,   like Cuba and Indonesia, are fighting  for — and winning — their independence. Which is inspiring artists in those countries to break from traditional European ideas of art.

And then there are the World Wars. One after another redefines  not only political boundaries,   but what war can look like  and how widespread it can get. With so much change, the old ways of  making art weren’t gonna cut it anymore.

Why follow the rules of the strict art academies  when the world around you is falling apart? I mean, when your world changes, don’t you want  your music, movies, and culture to reflect that? Likewise, artists of the time searched  for new ways to communicate the chaos   and confusion of their rapidly changing world.

And one major thread was to create art that  represented abstract things — inner thoughts,   feelings, and ideas, using  lines, shapes, and colors. Rather than representing concrete things  the way they look in the “real” world. Instead of a horse looking like this,  they started looking more like this.

The same goes for the night  sky, a woman at a tram stop. This kind of art, where artists try to evoke  rather than recreate, is called abstraction. The shift from representational art to  abstraction marks the place and time   most scholars agree “modern” modern art began.

And even now, many official records will tell you   it all started in Europe with three guys  named Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. But that’s like saying that Elvis invented rock   and roll…. it doesn’t begin  to tell the whole story. For one thing, there were others  exploring abstraction before them,   like the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.

There’s also the reality that  abstract forms have been part   of many cultural traditions around the  world, for as far back as we can trace! And many European artists were  drawing inspiration from other   cultures, incorporating elements of South Asian  philosophies, and the work of African artists, as   well as indigenous peoples from  Australia and the Pacific Islands. Like, take a look at Picasso’s “Les  Demoiselles d'Avignon,” from 1907.

It depicts five nude women, a subject  not at all unfamiliar to European art. But it does break from tradition,   and not only because of the geometric  shapes that form the women’s bodies. Picasso loved African art;   he first came across it in a collection  of masks he saw at a museum in Paris.

And you can see this influence very directly in   the shapes and colors that  make up the women’s faces. Picasso had even started to collect African  masks by the time he made this work. And this wasn’t just a Picasso thing.

During the 19th century, France was  a major colonial power in Africa,   meaning they had taken control  of many African countries. Art dealers would plunder, or, er, steal, works  and sell them to the cultural elite back home. Artists, collectors, and curators tended  to overlook the specific uses and cultural   significance of these works, focusing  mostly on their designs and patterns.

And that led folks like Picasso to imitate these  artistic styles in relatively simplistic ways,   completely detached from their original contexts. Art historians today would call this  kind of appropriation primitivism. Essentially, European culture-makers  viewed art from colonized or formerly   colonized countries like you might  view art by a talented child.

It was considered underdeveloped and  inferior, but still intriguing and impressive. It was worth copying, but not really  deserving full credit in its own right. This perspective has garnered a lot  of criticism in more recent decades.

Like, in 1984, the Museum of Modern  Art in New York displayed Picasso’s   work and that of other European artists alongside   objects and artifacts from Indigenous  American, Oceanic, and African groups. And while the exhibit was trying to acknowledge  the influence of indigenous works on European art,   critics argued the two weren’t placed on  equal footing — because the non-European   works were presented without much context. The exhibit didn’t include the dates they were  made, their cultural functions, and so forth.

So they couldn’t be understood in their own right,   only as stepping stones to what  the European modernists were doing. One critic, Thomas McEvilley, called it a  demonstration of, quote “Western egotism   still as unbridled as in the centuries  of colonialism and souvenirism.” Woof. Critiques like these have pushed art historians  and curators to decenter Europe in art history.

And to explain what that means,  it’s helpful to look at a map. Most world maps used today are based on  what’s called the Mercator projection,   which puts Europe more or  less at the center of things. But that’s not the only way to see the world.

Like, take “Inverted America,” drawn by  Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García in 1943. He flips South America on its head,  so now his country is at the center. In this way, he shows us  that map-making is selective.

Just as he prioritized his cultural identity,  the makers of the Mercator did the same. After all, Earth is a sphere in space. Which way is up totally  depends on your perspective.

So, to decenter Europe from art  history would mean imagining it   not as the central hub of art, from  which everything else emanates. But instead, as part of a  swirling network of influences. And that’s a key aspect of modernism.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the world  became more connected than it had ever been   before, and that showed in the ways that  cultures overlapped and blended in art. Like, Wifredo Lam’s work incorporates influences  not only from Cuba, where he was born, but also   the Afro-Caribbean culture he experienced  there, as well as his travels in Europe. Here are two of his paintings that are  similar in composition — with figures   among stalks of sugarcane representing thousands  of Cuban laborers who worked on sugar plantations.

But this later work is made up of  even more abstract lines and shapes,   as Lam blended his style with elements  he liked from European abstraction. Zia Pueblo artist Velino Shije Herrera also  intentionally melded cultures in “Design,   Tree and Birds,” made in 1930. In order to make his work more accessible  to non-indigenous audiences, he combined   abstract symbolism from his culture with a more  modernist look popularized by European artists.

He created his own distinct style,   while also responding to a moment in history  when a market for indigenous art was growing. No matter that American schools  were forbidding indigenous   students from speaking their languages or  expressing their cultures, but I digress. So when we look at modern  art from a wider perspective,   we see a web of influences begin to take  shape–multiple modernisms emerging from   cultural moments all over the  world during the 20th century.

And many of those modernisms emerged  out of postcolonial countries that   were newly independent from European rule. Artists created works that rejected European  identities and sought to define their own. Take Indian artist Gaganendranath Tagore’s  painting of a Kolkata bazaar from the early 1920s.

He was fascinated by modernist works  that relied on geometric shapes   and showed multiple perspectives  at once, a style called cubism. You can see how he fragments  the colorful architecture and awnings of the marketplace. But he and other Indian artists worked together to   develop a unique modernism that  reflected modern Indian life.

Rather than trying to be realistic,   Tagore’s experiment in cubism captures the  essence of a bazaar through shape and color. In many ways, Tagore’s work encapsulates  the complexity of modern art. An Indian man, in a former British colony,  paints a local bazaar, in a style popularized by   Europeans, that was itself heavily influenced by  Indigenous American, African, and Oceanic artists.

Globalism and modernism are  delightfully intertwined. So, modernism isn’t just one thing from one place. It’s countless responses to moments in history  when the world became a whole lot smaller.

And that shrinking of geography — thanks to  advances in communication and transportation,   but also war— helps explain why nearly every  modernist artwork has cross-cultural influences. And that’s not just the impact  of Europe reaching the world;   it’s the impact of the world reaching the world. The closer we look at the whole canvas of art   history, the clearer it becomes that  artistic influence knows no borders.

And great art can come not just  from anywhere — but from everywhere. Next time, we’ll explore the deliciously thorny   topic of public art, looking at  monuments, memorials, and memory. I’ll see you there.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the Indianapolis   Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these thoroughly modern people. If you want to help keep Crash  Course free for everyone,   forever, you can join our community on Patreon.