A good analysis will show how all of the artist’s formal choices work together toward the meaning of the work, i.e., whatever the artist was trying to convey or express about their subject matter (if there is any). The key to analyzing Modernist art is to pay very close attention, not just to the subject matter (what is represented in the work), but to the form or style (how the subject matter is represented): the use of line, shape, color, composition, etc. Note also that the modernists had many different reasons for departing from traditional subjects and styles, although if you need a broad generalization most of them tended to distort visible reality in order to express things that cannot be conveyed in a naturalistic representation of objects, such as emotions, energy, character, sensations, movement, synesthetic effects, etc.
Note that these artists vary widely in how ‘modernist’ they are and in what sense(s) the term applies. The artists and styles we are looking at for this topic include the Synchromists (Macdonald-Wright and Russell), the Precisionists (Sheeler, Demuth, maybe O’Keeffe), the Futurists (Stella, Weber), various expatriate artists who worked primarily in Europe (Zorach, Maurer, Bruce, Hartley), and a bunch of miscellaneous artists who exhibited in Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York City (Marin, Dove, and O’Keeffe). The Ashcan School and Aestheticism can already be seen as modernist in at least a couple of these senses. It can be generally defined in three ways: (1) by its reaction to modern social and technological conditions (industrialization, city life, etc.) (2) by its rejection of the traditional naturalistic style and (3) by the outraged reactions it tended to provoke from the general public (at least when it first appeared). Modernism is a blanket term that covers a lot of very different styles and issues. People, terms, and concepts : modernism, abstract (as a verb and as a noun), Synchromism, Precisionism, Futurism, The Armory Show, 291 Gallery, synesthesia.
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