The twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of styles, resulting in part from rapid global communication. Early in the century, the innovations of Matisse, Kandinsky, and Picasso revolutionized the approach to the picture plane. These three, like many avant-garde artists, sought to break the hold of the Classical tradition on Western consciousness. To this end, they studied the non-Classical forms of African and other non-Western art. But because Europe was shattered by two world wars, many artists by the end of World War II had emigrated to New York, which supplanted Paris as the art center of the Western world.
Newness became an end in itself, leading to such innovative styles as Dada and Surrealism, Cubism and Futurism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism, Photo-Realism and others. Before 1917, Moscow had been a center of the avant-garde, along with Dresden and Munich. But totalitarianism in Russia and Germany considered modernism subversive. In the United States, the influx of European artists, combined with the young generation of Americans, enriched the visual arts. There had also been a rise in the cultural contributions of black artists, writers, and philosophers that formed the Harlem Renaissance. In addition, new media were explored—plastics, manufactured objects, and video—that opened up new artistic possibilities. In the early years of the twenty-first century, these trends continued, and the arts increasingly reflected the cross-cultural character of globalization.