Introduction- Modern art is the art of almost the whole of the twentieth century, but it began in the nineteenth. During the 1880s, three very different pioneers, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, started to push beyond impressionism, trying to find for their painting a new moral and emotional framework. The impressionists had been content to look at nature with attention but without passion. They did not want to question it, or place themselves in it. The post-impressionists expected to get involved and in this way brought a renewed, almost righteous, ripple of feeling back into their work. In a short time the ripple became a tidal gush of vividly coloured emotions which inundated painting. For a time it became an artist's duty to fill the canvas with sensibility. This flowed unchecked for the first decade of the new century, until it provoked the reaction of cubism.