Modern Art or Modernism is the loose term given to the succession of styles and movements in art and architecture which dominated Western culture from 19th Century up until the 1960’s. Movements associated with Modern art include Impressionism, Cubism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Futurism, Pop Art and Op Art. Modern Art rejects the past as a model for the art of the present and is characterized by constant innovation. Modern Art grew out of the Impressionist's rejection of the 'imitation of life' school of art. Their emphasis on the act of painting, on the paint itself, can be seen in the Expressionist and Cubist art of the turn-of-the-century. Modern art was also often driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. From the 1970’s artists and movements began to react against Modernism and post-modernism was formed.
Some different types of the movements in art are: abstract, action art, American realism, architecture, art deco, and art nouveau, Asian, Bauhaus, black and white, celebrity, cityscape, colorful, comic book art, conceptual art, contemporary art, cubism, cuisine, exclusive, expressionism, fauvism, figurative, floral, framed prints, Modern art and many more. There were a lot of movements in the art industry ever since the beginning of Modern art which started in the 19th Century.
Surrealism is a style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or non-rational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions.
Surrealism was developed by the 20th-century literary and artistic movement. The surrealist movement of visual art and literature flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I.
According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. This movement continues to flourish at all ends of the earth. Continued thought processes and investigations into the mind produce today some of the best art ever seen.

Having a great influence on pop culture, minimalist and conceptual art, René François Magritte was born to humble beginnings, the eldest son of a tailor father and milliner mother. When he was just 14 years old, his mother committed suicide by throwing herself into the River Sambre near their Belgium home. Magritte witnessed rescuers pulling his mother from the river, the fabric of her dress covering her face. It is said that the vision haunted him, and was the inspiration behind a series of works he painted in the late 1920’s, including his famous Les Amants. Magritte’s first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey, was painted in 1926 and featured at his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. The exhibition was a critical failure, and the depressed Magritte moved with his wife Georgette Berger to Paris. It was there that he met André Breton and began his association with the surrealist community.
Magritte eventually returned to Brussels, and having been a poster and advertisement designer in the early 1920’s, he formed an advertising agency with his brother. He remained in Brussels during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, and this caused a falling out with Breton and some of the other surrealists, although Magritte continued to paint. Magritte is best known for his juxtaposition of ordinary objects in unusual context and for giving familiar objects new translations. He also enjoyed painting objects, only to point out that the objects he painted were not actually the object. For example, both in his painting The Treachery of Images, a painting of a pipe; and another painting depicting an apple, Magritte indicate that the paintings are not the object he has painted. He wanted the observer of his work to realize that no matter how closely he captured the image of an apple, a pipe, or any other object, the painting could not actually BE that object.
Magritte’s popularity grew, especially in the pop culture arena throughout the 1960’s. His work was shown multiple times in New York City, including a large retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1965. René Magritte died from pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967. He is buried Schaarbeek Cemetery in his home of Brussels, Belgium.