Female nude by George John Illian (1894-1932), American exhibited at the Salmagundi Club Annual Exhibition. George John Illian born in 1894 and was largely inspired by the 1900s and 1910s growing up. The dynamic development of pictorial art defined the first decades of the twentieth century. It was an era of experimentation and post-Impressionism, with artists first investigating Expressionism and Abstraction. A variety of collectives and groups of artists across the globe developed many ways of expressing these crucial innovations. In Italy, artists such as Boccioni, Severini and Balla were hoping to capture the speed and dynamism of the machine age, in a movement called Futurism.