At the end of its insatiable and impossible quest, realism burned itself out in the first decade of the 19th century.  It's last phase, Impressionism, by discarding material data, weakened the ties with the object; and a nonrepresentational realism is a contradiction in terms. Now it was borne back onto the flood of multiplicity, always in motion, always transforming itself; it was cast adrift from the moorings of certainty on which the senses allied with reason had depended. The new school, by removing visual data from the realm of common consent, by offering it up to the implacable and personal analysis of the individual artist, opened the door to subjective variations, for each organism perceives the same external datum in a different way. Who then could decide where sensory diversity ends and emotional diversity begins? How could the painter respect the uncertain boundary separating the two?

Picasso and Braque sent art off on another tack, that of the free interpretation of reality—an interpretation determined by the artist's temperament, and soon by his whim. Furthermore, by severing contour from form, form from colour, and colour from light.  This paved the way for the opposite tendency and led to non-representational art which led to the making of objects, shapes and patterns according to various manifestos based on different interpretations of the purposes and meanings of art.