Modern

Baudelaire believed an artist was modern when he or she turned his or her back on the past and chose to paint contemporaries instead of religious or historical figures.  

The artist was supposed to be in the present and not in the past, as was the art. 

It was ok to be a year or two in the past--Gustave Caillebotte was allowed to begin his painting, "Paris Street; Rainy Day," in 1876 and finish it it 1877--but a painting couldn't be much older than that.

It's easy to see now how representational painting--the glory of which is Impressionism--exhausted itself by continuing to insist on picturing the present.

Gradually, abstraction took time completely out of the equation, and because it did it looked new.

Abstraction looks old now. One question is: does an abstraction look old or older than a representation of what looked new at the time?

Sunday is a good day to look at painting in the spirit of Matisse's saying that he hoped to make paintings that were calming to the mind, something like "a good armchair is to a businessman at the end of the day."