Braque, Man with a Guitar, 115×78 cm, 1911, MoMA, New York
Kandinsky, Composition IX, 113x195 cm, 1936, Saint-Étienne Museum of Modern Art
Kahlo, The Funeral of Anarchist Galli, 185×260 cm, 1911, MoMA, New York
Klee, Tunisian Landscape, 21.8x31.5 cm, 1914, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Chagall, White Crucifix, 61x55 cm, 1938, Art Institute of Chicago
Ernst, The Last Forest, 113x146 cm, 1960–70, Saint-Étienne Museum of Modern Art

The 20th century was an era of material civilization. After the Western Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, human civilization accelerated its evolution. Within modernization, humanity’s politics, economy, and society entered a new structural situation. Especially in the West, under empirical science, a brilliant industrial civilization developed, bringing unprecedented convenience and hope to humanity.

However, this booming era of commerce and industry did not bring the promised paradise. Instead, it harbored inherent human contradictions and conflicts, leading to the catastrophe of two World Wars. This shattered all human value systems and beautiful ideals. Furthermore, modernization brought crises, the collapse of traditional systems, ecological destruction, and urbanization. Humans became parts of machines, resulting in dehumanization.

After the war, the confrontation between Eastern and Western blocs, the Cold War, and economic crises led to the collapse of ideologies, ending in the post-Cold War "very times." Humanity was filled with indifference, anxiety, and unease, leading life toward emptiness. As the 19th-century German philosopher Nietzsche predicted the arrival of nihilism, humans, after self-liberation in modernization, felt lost. They sought to fill spiritual emptiness with material goods, thus indulging in material civilization.