Curated playlist
Art movements
- Abstract artFor roughly four centuries, Western art aimed to copy visible reality, until painters pulled away from it.
- RomanticismRomanticism held that an artist's own feeling was law. That idea overturned centuries of European assumption.
- CubismCubism got its name when a critic called Braque's paintings cubic oddities. The label stuck.
- ImpressionismImpressionism got its name from a critic's insult in 1874. Louis Leroy mocked a Monet seascape in a Paris newspaper.
- Post-ImpressionismPost-Impressionism was a name no painter ever asked for. Critic Roger Fry picked the vaguest label he could find.
- PostmodernismThe word postmodern first appeared in print in 1870, in a painter's note about style.
- Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodSeven young English artists founded a secret society in 1848 and hid it from their teachers.
- SurrealismSurrealism announced itself with a fistfight in October 1924. Two rival leaders came to blows over the word.
- Constructivism (art)Tatlin's Tower was meant to top the Eiffel Tower but was never built. Lack of money after the revolution stopped it.
- ModernismPicasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon refuses to show its subjects from a single point of view.
- Art DecoArt Deco had no agreed name until 1966, decades after its peak. Before that it wore dozens of labels, like Jazz Moderne.
- BaroqueBaroque began as an insult for music a critic found confused and absurd. The word was first aimed at a 1733 opera.
- RococoThe word rococo began as a satirical insult for a decorating style. Art historians took nearly a century to accept it.
- Socialist realismSoviet art had a strict official style, but no written rules for it. Socialist realism ruled from 1932 to 1988.
- PrimitivismPicasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 after studying African masks and sculpture.
- Empire styleThe Empire style was built to flatter Napoleon. Its eagles, bees and laurel crowns praised him and the French state.