Art movements

Emerging in early 17th-century Europe, Baroque art is defined by dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, rich colour, and dynamic compositions designed to evoke emotional intensity and grandeur. It flourished across painting, sculpture, and architecture under the patronage of the Catholic Church and royal courts.

A late 19th-century movement that rejected realism in favour of imagery drawn from dreams, mythology, and the spiritual, using symbolic figures and atmospheric moods to express ideas beyond the visible world.

Emerging in Germany in the early 20th century, Expressionism prioritizes the artist's inner emotional experience over objective depiction, using distorted forms, raw colour, and gestural marks to convey psychological states.

A tradition of medieval and early Renaissance painting centred in Siena, Italy, notable for its refined Byzantine-influenced style, luminous gold backgrounds, and graceful devotional imagery.

Art that does not attempt to represent external visual reality, instead using shape, colour, form, and gesture to achieve its expressive effect independent of any depicted subject.

A 19th-century French movement that broke from academic tradition to capture fleeting effects of light and atmosphere through loose brushwork and unblended colour observed directly from nature.

Founded in Paris in 1924, Surrealism channelled the subconscious mind, dreams, and irrationality into art and writing, seeking to liberate imagination from reason and social convention.

A 19th-century movement that emphasized individual emotion, imagination, and the sublime in nature, often as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and the disruptions of industrialization.

The 15th- and 16th-century flowering of Renaissance art in German-speaking lands, fusing Italian humanist ideals with a distinctly northern tradition of intensely detailed, emotionally charged painting and printmaking.

Flourishing in Europe roughly 1520 to 1600, Mannerism departed from Renaissance harmony to favour elongated figures, complex spatial arrangements, and an air of sophisticated, artificial elegance.

A post-World War II American movement combining abstract painting with the expressive intensity of Expressionism, encompassing gestural action painting and quieter, meditative colour field approaches.

The extraordinarily productive period of Dutch art in the 17th century, characterized by masterful rendering of light and texture across portraiture, landscape, still life, and domestic genre scenes.

The innovative oil painting tradition of the Low Countries from roughly 1420 to 1523, distinguished by meticulous rendering of surface texture, symbolically dense devotional imagery, and pioneering use of oil glazes.

An 18th-century European style known for its lightness, ornamental delicacy, pastel palettes, and playful subject matter, flourishing above all in French aristocratic decoration and painting.

The broad cultural and artistic flowering across Italy from the 14th through 16th centuries, reviving classical Greco-Roman ideals of beauty, humanism, and naturalism in painting, sculpture, and architecture.

An 18th- and early 19th-century movement that looked to ancient Greece and Rome as models of order, clarity, and moral seriousness, often as a deliberate contrast to the frivolity of Rococo.

A European cultural rebirth spanning the 14th through 17th centuries, marked by renewed interest in classical antiquity, naturalistic representation, and the centrality of human experience in art and thought.

Developed by Picasso and Braque in Paris around 1907-1914, Cubism broke with single-point perspective to show multiple viewpoints simultaneously, fracturing depicted subjects into geometric planes.

The brief flowering of Italian Renaissance art from around 1490 to 1527, exemplified by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and defined by idealized beauty, harmonious composition, and supreme mastery of the human figure.

A loose grouping of late 19th-century artists who built on Impressionism's freedom from academic convention while pursuing more personal, structural, or symbolically charged ends.

A Russian movement of the 1910s-1930s that rejected art for art's sake in favour of designs serving social and political purposes, using geometric abstraction and industrial materials.

A 19th-century movement originating principally in France that depicted contemporary everyday life without idealization, in direct opposition to academic history painting and Romantic embellishment.

Art made from roughly the 1970s to the present, engaging with issues of identity, globalization, technology, and cultural politics across a wide range of media and approaches.

An international anti-war, anti-bourgeois movement born in Zurich in 1916, Dada used absurdity, chance, and provocation to subvert conventional assumptions about art and society.

The tradition of painting centred in Venice from the 15th through 18th centuries, distinguished by mastery of colour, richly worked painterly surfaces, and a sensuous treatment of light.

Painting produced in the Baroque style: dramatic tenebrism, dynamic movement, and a theatrical command of light and shadow deployed across religious, mythological, and portrait subjects.

The Baroque tradition of the Spanish Netherlands, most closely associated with Rubens, combining dynamic energy, sensuous colour, and grand decorative ambition with a distinctly northern attention to surface and texture.

The French branch of Realism, led by Courbet, Daumier, and Millet, depicting peasants, workers, and everyday life with unflinching directness and social purpose.

Emerging in Britain and the United States in the 1950s-1960s, Pop art embraced imagery from mass media, advertising, and consumer culture, often applying commercial printing and reproduction techniques.

An aesthetic orientation toward the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, prizing order, harmony, balance, and restraint as universal standards of beauty.

The first phase of Renaissance art in 15th-century Italy, marked by the rediscovery of classical perspective and anatomy and the emergence of fully naturalistic representation in painting and sculpture.

An Italian avant-garde movement founded in 1909, Futurism celebrated speed, machinery, and the energy of modern life, rejecting the cultural weight of the past in favour of dynamic technological progress.

A 19th-century Western tradition of depicting the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia through a romanticized or exoticized lens, now understood as reflecting colonial-era power relationships as much as the regions depicted.

Founded by Malevich in Russia around 1915, Suprematism pursued pure geometric abstraction as the highest form of artistic sensation, stripping painting of any reference to the objective world.

A group of Post-Impressionist French painters active in the 1890s who drew on Gauguin's use of bold, flat colour to create decorative, symbolically charged images that anticipate Expressionism and abstraction.

A broad term covering art produced roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s that broke from academic and traditional forms through experimentation, abstraction, and the embrace of novelty as a value.

Founded in Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus school united fine art, craft, and industrial design under a single educational model, producing enormously influential work in typography, furniture, architecture, and painting.

A Dutch movement founded in 1917 that reduced painting and design to horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours plus black and white, pursuing universal visual harmony through strict geometric order.

A French movement active around 1905-1908 that used unnaturally vivid, unblended colour and loose brushwork in a deliberately wild rejection of academic restraint, taking its name from the French for 'wild beasts'.

The dominant style in medieval Europe from the 12th to the late 15th century, characterized in painting and sculpture by elongated figures, gold-ground devotional imagery, and spiritual rather than naturalistic aims.

A broad cultural movement of the late 19th and 20th centuries that embraced experimentation, rejected received tradition, and sought new artistic forms suited to the conditions of modern life.

An Italian movement of geometric and concrete abstraction founded in Milan in 1948, emphasizing clarity of form, rational construction, and the complete autonomy of the artwork from any external reference.

A German art movement of the 1920s that reacted against Expressionism with a cool, precise, and often satirical realism, depicting the social conditions of the Weimar Republic with documentary clarity.

The reception and adaptation of Italian Renaissance humanism and naturalism in northern Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, retaining a distinctly local tradition of detailed, symbolically rich painting.

A term coined by Apollinaire in 1912 to describe Delaunay's lyrical colour-based abstraction, which developed Cubism toward pure, rhythmic colour relationships evoking music and movement.

Art of 13th- and 14th-century Italy, particularly associated with Giotto, that anticipated the Renaissance by moving away from Byzantine formalism toward naturalism, depth, and human emotion.

An international ornamental style of the 1890s-1910s characterized by sinuous, organic forms drawn from plant and animal life, applied across painting, architecture, graphic design, and the decorative arts.

A cultural movement in Catalonia spanning roughly 1888-1911, closely related to Art Nouveau, characterized by ornate, craft-inflected architecture and decorative arts expressive of Catalan national identity.

A group of figurative painters active in Chicago from the late 1960s who combined Pop art's engagement with popular imagery with a rawer, irreverent, and often grotesque vision distinct from the New York art world.

A short-lived (1948-1951) European avant-garde movement named after the home cities of its founders (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam), drawing on primitivism, children's art, and spontaneous, gestural painting.

The broader tradition of painting in England, spanning several centuries from the Tudor period through the Royal Academy and into the modern era.

A late 19th-century Australian movement that brought Impressionist plein-air painting to the Australian landscape, establishing a distinctive national tradition of outdoor observation and local light.

A courtly style of painting and sculpture that spread across Europe around 1375-1425, characterized by elegant, elongated figures, rich surface decoration, and refined attention to natural detail.

A group of early 19th-century German and Austrian painters who sought to revive the spiritual sincerity of medieval and early Renaissance religious art, working in a deliberately archaic, linear style.

A photographic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that advocated for photography as a fine art, using soft focus, toning, and painterly composition to approach the qualities of painting.

A technique developed by Seurat and Signac in the 1880s in which tiny dots of pure colour are applied to the canvas to blend optically at a distance, creating luminous, vibrant surfaces.

Art of the later 19th century that grew out of Romanticism while evolving toward realism, symbolism, or early modernist concerns.

A tendency in modern Western art to borrow formal qualities from non-Western or prehistoric art, reflecting both genuine interest in unfamiliar visual languages and, historically, problematic assumptions about 'primitive' cultures.

The broad flowering of experimental art in Russia from roughly 1890 to 1930, encompassing Constructivism, Suprematism, Futurism, and other movements united by the aim of transforming art alongside society.

Robert and Sonia Delaunay's theory of placing contrasting colours in close proximity to create dynamic optical effects, applied across painting, textile, and graphic design.

Art that critically depicts the social conditions of working-class and marginalized people, typically using accessible realist imagery with explicit or implicit political intent.

A group of Dutch painters who studied in Rome and returned to Utrecht with Caravaggio's dramatic tenebrism, bridging Italian and Northern European approaches to figure painting.

The broad practice of art that departs from direct representation of the visible world, prioritizing form, colour, and gesture.

An artistic orientation arising from the philosophical position that human existence has no inherent meaning, associated especially with 20th-century theatre and literature.

Art produced in conformity with the principles taught by official academies, typically emphasizing technical mastery, idealizing the human figure, and favouring historical or mythological subjects.

A late 19th-century movement, particularly prominent in Britain, holding that art exists for its own sake and need not serve moral, social, or didactic purposes.

A Russian avant-garde style associated with Malevich around 1913-1915, combining deliberately irrational juxtapositions of objects and text to subvert logical pictorial narrative and conventional meaning.

The American adaptation of French Impressionism from the 1880s, characterized by similar loose brushwork and interest in light effects but often applied to local American subjects and settings.

The adaptation and development of European modernist ideas in the United States from roughly the 1910s onwards, finding a distinctly American inflection in the work of O'Keeffe, Hopper, and others.

An Australian modernist movement of the 1940s centred on the journal Angry Penguins, championing avant-garde art and literature against conservative cultural institutions.

A Brazilian cultural movement of the 1920s that advocated 'devouring' foreign cultural influences and transforming them into a distinctly Brazilian expression.

A term coined by Theo van Doesburg in 1930 for abstract art created entirely from formal, non-natural elements with no representational intent, emphasizing the artwork's own concrete reality.

An Italian movement of the 1960s-1970s that used humble, everyday, or natural materials (earth, rags, glass, twigs) to critique the commodification of art and the dominance of industrial consumer culture.

A broad term for art that pushes beyond accepted conventions, introducing experimental or radical ideas ahead of mainstream acceptance.

A group of mid-19th-century French landscape painters who settled near the forest of Fontainebleau, painting directly from nature in an approach that directly influenced the later Impressionists.

A Central European style of the early 19th century (roughly 1815-1848) characterized by intimate genre scenes, portraits, and landscapes painted with careful realism and quiet, domestic sentiment.

A circle of English intellectuals, writers, and artists active in the early 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry, known for their progressive cultural views and Post-Impressionist aesthetic.

The tradition of painting centred in Bologna, associated particularly with the Carracci family and the development of academic painting in the 17th century, influential across Italy and beyond.

An American abstract painting movement of the 1950s-1960s that used large areas of flat, unmodulated colour to create immersive, meditative visual experiences.

Art, emerging in the mid-1960s, in which the idea or concept behind the work takes precedence over its material execution or aesthetic qualities.

Abstract art based entirely on geometric forms and pure colour, with no reference to the visible world, following the principles laid out by Theo van Doesburg.

A Russian avant-garde style that synthesized French Cubism's fracturing of form with Italian Futurism's interest in speed and dynamic movement.

The label used by the Nazi regime to condemn and suppress modern art deemed un-German; the term is now used historically to describe the art targeted by the 1937 Munich exhibition of the same name.

A 19th-century movement centred at the Düsseldorf Academy known for landscape and history painting executed with precise finish, dramatic lighting, and moral or patriotic sentiment.

Emerging in Germany in the early 20th century, Expressionism prioritizes the artist's inner emotional experience over objective depiction, using distorted forms, raw colour, and gestural marks to convey psychological states.

A Victorian-era British genre depicting scenes from fairy tales, folklore, and the supernatural with elaborate detail and often an uncanny, erotic, or dreamlike undertone.

A group of Dutch Golden Age painters noted for extraordinarily fine, smooth technique and meticulous rendering of texture, light, and surface detail in small-format cabinet pictures.

An international movement of the 1960s-1970s that blurred the boundaries between art and everyday life through performances, scores, mail art, and readymade objects, rejecting art world hierarchies and commodification.

Abstract art that uses geometric shapes as its primary visual language, pursuing clarity, order, and the expressive potential of pure form.

The German strand of Romanticism, marked by landscape painting of metaphysical and spiritual intensity (above all Friedrich), engagement with Germanic mythology, and a longing for transcendence.

The period roughly 1880-1920 when advances in print reproduction enabled a flourishing of highly crafted commercial illustration in books, magazines, and advertising.

A form of abstract painting developed in the late 1950s-1960s using sharply defined areas of flat, unmodulated colour with no visible brushwork or gestural mark.

The reception of the International Gothic courtly style in Italian painting of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, blending French elegance with local traditions.

The influence of Japanese art, particularly woodblock prints, on Western painting, printmaking, and design from the 1860s onward, visible in the work of Monet, Degas, Whistler, and many others.

Art that incorporates real or apparent movement as a central element, from Calder's mobiles and Tinguely's motorized machines to optical illusions created on a static surface.

A group of Québécois artists in the 1940s who drew on Surrealist automatism to develop spontaneous, gestural abstraction, anticipating and influencing broader North American abstract painting.

The court tradition of painting in Mantua, Italy, associated particularly with Mantegna in the 15th century, and combining rigorous classicism with intense, dramatic naturalism.

A movement of the 1960s that stripped art to its most essential geometric forms and industrial materials, rejecting personal expression, art-historical allusion, and pictorial illusionism.

An Italian movement founded by Fontana in 1947, Spatialism sought to transcend the two-dimensional canvas by incorporating space, time, light, and environment as artistic materials.

Art made by self-taught artists working outside academic training, characterized by simplified forms, bright colour, and a directness not shaped by conventional perspective or professional technique.

A term applied to several 1950s and 1960s tendencies, including early Fluxus and aspects of Pop art, that revisited Dada's spirit of anti-art provocation and found-object aesthetics.

A mid-19th-century French and Anglo-American decorative style inspired by ancient Greek art, applying Hellenic ornament to contemporary furniture, painting, and interiors.

A French movement of the late 1880s-1890s that developed Impressionism into a more systematic and scientific method, above all through the Pointillist technique of Seurat and Signac.

A Russian avant-garde tendency of the 1910s that drew on the formal simplicity of peasant art, folk prints, and children's drawings as an alternative to academic Western models.

The adaptation of Italian Mannerism in the Low Countries, Germany, and France during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, developing its own distinctive forms of elongation and artifice.

A group of Seattle-based artists active from the 1930s to the 1950s whose work combined abstract and representational approaches with a sensibility shaped by the Pacific Northwest landscape.

A French movement founded by critic Pierre Restany in 1960 that incorporated everyday objects and fragments of the urban environment into art, related to but distinct from American Pop art.

Short for Optical Art, a 1960s movement using precise geometric patterns and carefully calibrated colour contrasts to create compelling illusions of movement, depth, and vibration.

An American photographic movement founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902 that advocated for photography as a fine art on equal footing with painting and sculpture.

A loose group of painters who gathered around Gauguin in Pont-Aven, Brittany in the 1880s-1890s, developing simplified, boldly outlined forms and non-naturalistic colour that anticipate Expressionism.

A broad cultural tendency from roughly the 1970s that questioned the grand narratives of modernism, embracing pastiche, irony, appropriation, and cultural plurality in art, architecture, and thought.

An American modernist style of the 1920s that depicted industrial and architectural subjects with smooth, precise contours and simplified geometric forms, also known as Cubist Realism.

A short-lived Russian abstract movement of the 1910s founded by Larionov and Goncharova, depicting the intersection of rays of reflected light in dynamic, intersecting strokes that approach pure abstraction.

A variant of Cubism associated with the Section d'Or group that exhibited at Paris Salons from 1911, applying Cubist fragmentation to larger-scale, more publicly legible and decorative compositions.

The tradition of court painting in the northern Italian city of Ferrara in the 15th and early 16th centuries, noted for its idiosyncratic, erudite imagery and northern European influences.

A tradition of Mannerist art developed at the French royal court at Fontainebleau in the 16th century by Italian and Flemish artists brought there by Francis I, blending Italian elegance with French decorative taste.

A loose term for the diverse community of mostly émigré artists living and working in Paris in the early 20th century, united by location rather than a single style.

A Cubist group formed in Paris in 1912, named after the golden ratio, that sought to develop Cubism in a more ordered, monumental, and classically proportioned direction.

The reception and development of Italian Renaissance ideas in Spain during the 16th century, often fused with existing Flemish influences and the distinctive demands of Spanish royal and religious patronage.

A 20th-century photographic approach championed by Stieglitz, Weston, and Strand that emphasizes sharp focus, unmanipulated prints, and honest, direct representation of the subject.

A Romanian arts society active in the early 20th century that promoted modernist tendencies and international awareness in Romanian visual art.

A Brazilian cultural movement of the late 1960s blending local popular music, art, and theatre with international avant-garde ideas in a playful, subversive critique of Brazilian nationalism and political authoritarianism.

The tradition of painting centred in Verona during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, distinct from but related to the Venetian school.

A German-Dutch art movement of the late 1950s-1960s that sought a new beginning for art after World War II through light, movement, and reduction of colour to white, silver, and gold.