Curated category
Art movements
- Abstract artAbstract art uses the visual language of shape, form, color, and line to build a composition that can stand apart from anything visible in the world.
- RomanticismRomanticism declared, in the words of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, that "the artist's feeling is his law".
- CubismCubism arrived in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century and changed the way humans look at objects forever.
- ImpressionismImpressionism took its name from an insult. In 1874, the critic Louis Leroy walked through an independent exhibition in Paris and stopped before a hazy…
- Post-ImpressionismPost-Impressionism was a name no painter ever asked for. The art critic Roger Fry coined it in 1906, and reached for it again in 1910 when he needed a label…
- PostmodernismPostmodernism has been called the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. That description comes from scholar Louis Menand, who noted that it is…
- Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodIn 1850, a painting hanging at the Royal Academy showed the Holy Family inside a carpenter's workshop, and the writer Charles Dickens looked at it and…
- SurrealismSurrealism announced itself to the world with a fistfight. In October 1924, two rival groups of artists and writers each published a manifesto claiming…
- Constructivism (art)Constructivism began with a handful of artists in Russia who decided that beauty was not enough. Founded in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko…
- Modernism"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." That line from W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" is how literary scholars often sum up Modernism, an early…
- Art DecoArt Deco appeared in Paris in the 1910s, just before the guns of World War I fell silent, and within a decade it had spread to every corner of the world.
- BaroqueBaroque began in Rome at the start of the seventeenth century, and within decades it had spread to every corner of the known world.
- RococoRococo emerged in France in the 1730s not as a grand declaration but as a deliberate turn away from something. The heavy, imposing grandeur of the Louis XIV…
- Socialist realismOn the 25th of October 1917, Bolshevik forces seized control of Russia and immediately began reshaping its cultural landscape.
- PrimitivismPrimitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that shaped some of the most celebrated and contested works in the Western artistic canon.
- Empire styleThe Empire style took its name from an emperor. It originated under the rule of Napoleon I during the First French Empire, and it was built to flatter him.