Back at the turn into the Twentieth Century, Modernism was a movement to liberate myth and abstraction from the encrustations of history. Freud's Viennese living room, filled as it was with draperies, overstuffed furniture, pictures, knick knacks and anthropological icons, would become in twenty years, all across the "modern" or economically developed world, a set of austere white walls surrounding single and dramatically placed objects (a family portrait, a piece of distinctively wrought furniture, Prometheus in Rockefeller Plaza). Modernism would attest to the essentially primitive and primal themes that prevailed, just as was the case in art which, for the next fifty years, would allow shapes and materials to prevail over content, swatches of color and form to be seen ever since the vanguard Impressionists as representations of the real structures that informed appearances. Subject matters were superficial. The real thing, the real art, was the form rather than the matter.