Art Movements

The visual tradition that runs from Greek temples to today's galleries. Every movement below is one answer to a recurring question: what should a picture show, and how should it show it?

from Western Art

Greek and Roman art pursued idealised proportion, balance, and the perfected human body. Its canon of harmony became the standard the West would return to again and again.

from Classical Art

As the classical body dissolved into gold-ground mosaics and flat, frontal icons, Byzantine art traded illusion for the radiance of the sacred — a spiritual, not a natural, order.

from Byzantine Art

Soaring cathedrals, pointed arches, and stained glass drew the eye and the soul upward. Late Gothic painting began to soften the icon, reaching once more toward tender, observed detail.

from Gothic Art

A rebirth of the classical ideal armed with new science: linear perspective, anatomy, and oil paint. Masters like Leonardo and Raphael made the picture a convincing window onto the world.

from Renaissance

The generation after the High Renaissance strained its perfect balance on purpose — elongated bodies, acid colour, and unstable space — prizing artifice and elegance over harmony.

from Mannerism

Born partly of the Counter-Reformation, Baroque art overwhelmed with drama, motion, and deep chiaroscuro. Caravaggio, Rubens, and Bernini staged emotion at operatic scale.

from Baroque

The aristocratic afterglow of the Baroque turned light, playful, and ornamental: pastel colours, curling forms, and scenes of flirtation and pleasure for the salons of the ancien régime.

from Rococo

Reacting against Rococo frivolity, artists like David returned to classical restraint, clear line, and heroic moral subjects — the visual language of the Enlightenment and revolution.

from Neoclassicism

Romantics answered Neoclassical reason with feeling: the sublime power of nature, exotic passion, and the individual imagination. Turner, Delacroix, and Friedrich made mood the true subject.

from Romanticism

Courbet and Millet rejected both classical myth and Romantic drama to paint ordinary labourers and everyday life truthfully — art turned toward the here and now of the modern world.

from Realism

Painting outdoors with loose, broken brushwork, Monet and Renoir chased fleeting light and atmosphere. Rejected by the Salon, they made perception itself — not the object — the subject.

from Impressionism

Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin pushed past the fleeting impression toward structure, emotion, and symbol — sowing the seeds from which nearly all of modernist painting would grow.

from Post-Impressionism

Following Van Gogh's charged colour, the Expressionists distorted form and hue to project inner anguish and feeling outward — art as a scream rather than a mirror.

from Post-Impressionism

Building on Cézanne, Picasso and Braque shattered the single viewpoint, showing objects from many angles at once on a flat plane. It broke perspective's four-century reign in a single stroke.

from Cubism

Drawing on Freud, the Surrealists mined dreams and the unconscious for uncanny, illogical imagery. Dalí and Magritte painted the impossible with photographic precision.

from Surrealism

Pollock and Rothko made the canvas an arena of pure gesture and colour, with no subject at all. It shifted the art world's centre from Paris to New York for the first time.

from Abstract Expressionism

Reacting against abstract solemnity, Warhol and Lichtenstein embraced advertising, comics, and consumer goods — collapsing the line between high art and mass culture.

from Abstract Expressionism

Stripping art to plain geometric forms and industrial materials, minimalists like Judd and Stella rejected illusion and personal expression alike — the object is simply what it is.

from Pop Art

Doubting modernism's faith in progress and originality, postmodern art embraced irony, quotation, and pastiche — mixing styles freely and questioning whether any one of them is truer than the rest.