Modernism burst onto the Swedish art scene in 1909 when Swedish students of the French artist Henri Matisse made their debut in Stockholm. The modernists distorted shapes and pushed colours to more intense shades. The tremendous social changes of the time were to be depicted with intense colour expressionism! Several Swedish students of Matisse, such as Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald, are represented in Moderna Museet's collection.

But modernism also took other forms. From the end of the 1910s, Naïve art emerged and became an influential part of Swedish art for several decades. Naïve art often portrayed idyllic scenes and landscapes, but sometimes the spread of industrial society could be glimpsed in the background or at the edge of the paintings. See, for example, the bombers in the top left corner of Sven X:et Erixson's Konstnärens hus