20th century 20th century The 20th (twentieth) century was a century that began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. It was the tenth and final century of the 2nd millennium. It is distinct from the century known as the 1900s which began on January 1, 1900 and ended on December 31, 1999. The 20th century was dominated by a chain of events that heralded significant changes in world history as to redefine the era: flu pandemic, World War I and World War II, nuclear power and space exploration, nationalism and decolonization, the Cold War and post-Cold War conflicts;
New materials in 20th-century art Delaunay and scores of young artists in Paris made their first modern paintings venturing toward abstraction and other new ways of formulating figurative, still-life and landscape imagery. During the first decade of the 20th century modern art developed simultaneously in several different areas in Europe (France, England, Scandinavia, Russia, Germany, Italy), and in the United States. Artists began to formulate different directions of modern art, seemingly unrelated to one another. In printmaking, the linocut was invented by the artists of Die Brücke in Germany between 1905 and 1913. At first they described their prints as woodcuts, which sounded more respectable.