As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, artists reacted to the new era’s industrial innovations in various ways. Some embraced urbanisation and its technologies, making the metropolis the subject of their work. Others retreated to Arcadian idylls, composing pictorial sanctuaries of harmony and balance.

Post-Impressionist painters were among those who continued to create within established academic genres, seen here in a portrait by Vincent van Gogh, a landscape by Georges Seurat and a still life by Paul Cézanne. But if these artists’ subjects were traditional, their techniques were wholly inventive, including sinuous brushstrokes, divisionist dots and flattening facets adopted as a way to reject illusionism. Others mined non-Western cultures for fresh inspiration; paintings by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse in this gallery, for example, look to Tahiti and Japan, respectively, for their figures and forms.

At the same time, other artists revelled in portraying the spectacle culture of rapidly growing cities: Eugène Atget’s photographs, Jules Chéret’s posters, a painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and a film by Auguste and Louis Lumière all capture the media and movement of a newly wired Paris. The designs of Berlin-based Peter Behrens – industrial objects as well as the branding conceived to promote them – similarly speak to the electricity of the age.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, multiple artistic movements arose in response to rapid technological advances that were both generally productive, such as the invention of aeroplanes and automobiles, and destructive, including the devastating machines of the First World War.

Pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism compressed multiple perspectives into flat planes, conveying the fractured nature of vision in a newly stimulated society. Robert Delaunay’s and Sonia Delaunay’s resplendently coloured canvases addressed the effects of modernity on the perception of time, expressing the phenomenon of simultaneity, or the possibility of multiple experiences existing at once. Italian Futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, devoted their compositions to tracing dynamic trajectories and high-speed motion. And Marcel Duchamp, affiliated with Dada, dared to classify an everyday object as a work of art, introducing the radical concept of the readymade.

Machines also figured in artists’ inventions, whether in imagery or as actual objects. Fernand Léger paid homage to the propeller in his paintings and harnessed the kinetic quality of film to choreograph a mechanical ballet. Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and Charles Sheeler document the whirring gears and fiery furnaces of manufacturing equipment. The architect Le Corbusier declared houses to be ‘machines for living in’, and MoMA’s landmark 1934 exhibition Machine Art put steel objects on pedestals, elevating ball bearings and springs to the status of icons.

In the 1920s and 1930s, several international art movements arose that held a utopian view of art’s potential to communicate universally. Artists reduced forms to their essentials, eliminating decorative elements to create widely accessible forms of abstraction. In the years preceding and following the 1917 Russian Revolution, artists of that country’s avant-garde sought new languages to express a new society’s ideals. Lyubov’ Popova and Aleksandr Rodchenko were among those who developed Constructivism, which cast the artist as an engineer and emphasised the material reality of his or her productions, while Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism aimed to transcend the object in pursuit of ‘pure artistic feeling’. In the Netherlands, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg adopted a fundamental language of squares and rectangles, vertical and horizontal lines and a palette of primary colours plus black and white to pioneer a movement known as De Stijl (The Style). And in Uruguay, Joaquín Torres-Garcia created his own Constructivist ‘School of the South’.

These artists’ remarkable synthesis of mediums abolished distinctions between the fine and applied arts. The achievements of the Russian avant-garde included posters, theatre designs and films, and furniture and design objects were crucial manifestations of De Stjil. But it was perhaps the Bauhaus, the pioneering school that made its home in three German cities between 1919 and 1933, which offered the era’s ultimate expression of interdisciplinary practice: from László Moholy-Nagy’s painting and sculpture, to Gunta Stölzl’s weaving, to Marcel Breuer’s furniture, and beyond.

Many artists in the 1920s and 1930s broke from the formal restraint and rational order of abstraction to embrace narrative excess and the unconscious. Looking to both internal and external landscapes, their works draw on forms in nature and imbue everyday observations with a sense of the uncanny.

Surrealism, which began as a formal movement in Paris but also attracted more casual and widespread fellow travellers, comprised two dominant approaches. Painters including Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte applied, to quote Dalí, ‘the most imperialist fury of precision’ in their canvases, making incongruous scenes appear possible through the meticulousness of their technique. Others, such as Joan Miró, Jean Arp and Meret Oppenheim adopted biomorphic forms, evoking the soft structures of living organisms.

As the Second World War forced many of these artists to disperse from Europe, their networks became more far-reaching and came into contact with longstanding cultural traditions. In Cuba, Wifredo Lam merged Surrealist aesthetics with the religious iconography of Afro-Cuban Santeria. In Mexico, Frida Kahlo cited native folklore and nineteenth-century devotional paintings in her dreamlike canvases.

The work of various American artists during this period similarly engages both physical and psychic landscapes. Edward Hopper’s desolate scenes possess a palpable psychological charge; highly detailed drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe and photographs by Imogen Cunningham render flora otherworldly; and the architect Frederick Kiesler’s amoebic Endless House was designed to negotiate the relationship between the individual and his or her environment, making room for ‘the “visitors” from one’s own inner world’.

If in preceding decades Surrealism represented an art of introspection, the 1950s was an era of action. The discourse of the decade came to be dominated by the large gestures, canvases and personalities of a group of American painters alternately referred to as the Abstract Expressionists or the New York School.

Within this reigning approach, also dubbed Action Painting by the critic Harold Rosenberg, painters developed signature gestures, from Jackson Pollock’s vigorous drips to Franz Kline’s sweeping, muscular slashes. Other painters within the group imbued their vast canvases with more spiritual concerns: Mark Rothko sought to communicate ‘basic human emotions’ through his compositions’ vibrating, multi-hued rectangles; Barnett Newman aimed to express the sublime through vertical ‘zips’ of colour; and Ad Reinhardt strove for the absolute in his monochromes.

The kineticism characteristic of art of this period was not exclusive to painting. Fuelled by currents of air, Alexander Calder’s mobiles captured nature’s dynamism, and Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures cut like sharp knives into their surrounding space. Nor was this vitality limited to a single geography: in Brazil, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica pioneered a Neo-Concrete art, which not only foregrounded the action of the artist, but also prompted participation from the viewer.

In 1963 the art historian Peter Selz criticised the newly emergent Pop artists for their ‘passive acceptance of things as they are’. Despite Selz’s negative tone, his phrase captures something in common among a diverse group of artistic currents that arose in the 1960s and 1970s: from Pop art, with its unabashed celebration of consumer objects; to Minimalism, with its matter-of-fact repetition of elemental forms; to Post-Minimalism, with its emphasis on how materials respond to processes and exist in space.

As the name implies, Pop artists drew heavily on popular culture of the age, such as the new musical soundscape fuelled by the game-changing Fender Stratocaster guitar and disseminated on vinyl records with iconic cover designs. Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings co-opted the subject and style of mass-produced comics, while John Chamberlain and Kenneth Anger paid tribute to the ascendant American cult of the automobile in sculpture and film, respectively.

Working in a language of reduced geometry and a limited palette, artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt explored the infinite variations of primary structures in two and three dimensions. Sculptors including Lynda Benglis and Richard Serra expanded on these Minimalist foundations, subjecting metal to the effects of gravity in objects that intervene into the viewer’s experience.

ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN

In the 1960s, disaffection with functionalist modernism had permeated the fields of architecture and design. The emergence of a youth consumer market, more informal patterns of socialising and increased awareness of cultural diversity defied commitment to a single set of attitudes and beliefs. Openly taking a lead from popular culture and science fiction, collectives such as Archigram, a radical London-based group of architects, produced visionary creations that proposed nomadic and flexible alternatives to traditional ways of living. At the same time, in Italy, Ettore Sottsass envisaged a futurist techno-utopia in which there would be no work and no social conditioning or sexual inhibition.

Electronics and plastics technologies were hallmarks of MoMA’s landmark 1972 exhibition Italy: A New Domestic Landscape. On that occasion, a series of multipurpose living environments, colourful plastic furniture and innovative lighting, such as the Pillola lamp in the form of a giant drug capsule, reflected a fresh and playful approach to design. A sign of things to come, early video games heralded new forms of leisure, and computers opened up a language of virtual communication through universally accepted icons.

Describing the landscape of art in 1982, Sherrie Levine expressed the feeling that ‘every word, every image is leased and mortgaged’, making the artist a ‘plagiarist’ who draws on an ‘immense encyclopedia’ of sources. Indeed, appropriation was a key strategy used by artists in the 1980s and 1990s to co-opt and comment on a vast trove of cultural references.

Jeff Koons’s readymade sculptures, for example, turn everyday objects into icons, adopting conventions of display from commercial advertising. Christian Marclay’s videos splice snippets of found footage, stitching together fragmented narratives through judicious edits. These strategies often shaped investigations of identity, as in the photographs of Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons, which stage tableaux that question the roles played by women, or in works by Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon, which examine African-American experience by citing history and literature. Appropriation also gave shape to expressions of protest and mourning, as in artist group General Idea’s viral methods of raising AIDS awareness, or Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s metaphorically charged installations.

A punk spirit also permeated art of these decades, with poster designs for bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash influencing the vocabularies of young artists. It was a cultural era in which concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’ were forcibly inverted. Both Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon designed album covers and zines before applying an underground ethos to sculptures and drawings, including those on view here.

As the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, digital technologies both enabled an increasingly globalised world and allowed its contemporary networks to be represented. These open currents of information do not always guarantee borderless movement, however, and some of today’s artists and designers employ more traditional materials and methods to call attention to issues of immigration and displacement.

Designed by the Italian company Solari di Udine, the Split flap board flight information display system, 1996, exhibits an ever-changing panoply of potential destinations, while Aaron Koblin’s 2005 project Flight patterns plots data to model the crisscrossing paths of commercial aviation. Investigating the ways we store and categorise knowledge, Camille Henrot’s video Grosse fatigue, 2013, alludes to the exhaustion that can accompany an excess of information in an over-connected age.

Other contemporary projects address similar issues using more analogue methods. Composed of crumpled pieces of cast-off metal, El Anatsui’s shimmering wall sculpture speaks to cycles of colonialism and consumption. A panel woven by the National Union of Sahrawi Women maps the Algerian refugee camp in which that population has remained dislocated for more than four decades. And on a more individual level, Rineke Dijkstra’s recurring series of photographs of a Bosnian refugee – taken periodically since 1994 – powerfully traces the growth and movement of a single subject.