several years ago my wife and I went to Rome. We toured the Vatican. There are statues and paintings dating back close to a 1,000 years and you can almost see them breathing. As you walk thru the historical art exhibit you eventually reach the period starting in 1890. It was in 1890, or so it seems, that all people with any real artistic talent died. From 1890 onward all the “art” was pure crap and ugly crap at that.
It was pretty much inevitable.
Once photograph gained a grip,
its accurate depiction of a subject
did away with the need for laborious
painting for other than pleasure.
The art of painting had also reached
a pinnacle of what was possible to
do with paint and a brush. New artists
that were moving up needed some way
to break through convention and be
recognized. The only way to do that
was to back away from representational
art into something new.
The other arts followed, with the Armory
Exposition of 1913 being the break out
in the US of non-realistic art.