Art History: Major Art Movements from the Renaissance to Pop Art

Revival of classical ideas, humanism, realistic anatomy and linear perspective. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli.

Filippo Brunelleschi

Elongated figures, strained poses, odd colors and crowded compositions instead of calm balance. Example: Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck.

Drama, movement, strong light-and-dark contrast and emotion, often serving the Counter-Reformation. Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez.

Chiaroscuro

Light, playful, ornate art of the French aristocracy with pastel colors and scenes of leisure and romance. Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard (The Swing).

A return to Greek and Roman order, clarity and civic virtue in reaction to Rococo. Jacques-Louis David (Oath of the Horatii), Ingres, Canova.

Emotion, imagination, nature's power and the sublime. Delacroix (Liberty Leading the People), Goya, Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner.

Ordinary people and everyday life shown truthfully, without idealizing. Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet (The Gleaners).

A critic used the title to mock the group's 1874 exhibition.

Quick, visible brushstrokes capturing light and the moment, often painted outdoors (en plein air). Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot.

Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin and Seurat built on Impressionism but added more structure, symbolism or emotional color.

Pointillism

Flowing, organic lines inspired by plants and flowers, used in posters, architecture and design (about 1890–1910). Alphonse Mucha, Antoni Gaudí, Hector Guimard.

Distorted forms and intense color to express inner emotion rather than reality. Edvard Munch (The Scream), Die Brücke (Kirchner), Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky).

Fauvism (“wild beasts”)

Objects broken into geometric shapes and shown from several viewpoints at once. Founded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is a key early work.

Analytic: objects broken into many small facets in muted colors. Synthetic: simpler, flatter shapes, brighter colors and collage.

An Italian movement (launched by Marinetti's 1909 manifesto) celebrating speed, machines, technology and violence. Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla.

An anti-art movement born during WWI that rejected logic and tradition. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a signed urinal, is the famous readymade.

Dreamlike, irrational images drawn from the unconscious, launched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto. Salvador Dalí (The Persistence of Memory), René Magritte, Max Ernst.

The Bauhaus

Large abstract works showing emotion through gesture or color, centered in New York after WWII. Jackson Pollock (drip painting), Mark Rothko (color fields), Willem de Kooning.

Images from mass media, ads and consumer products, often in bright, flat styles. Andy Warhol (Campbell's Soup Cans), Roy Lichtenstein (comic-style dots).

Simple geometric forms, industrial materials and no expressive content: the work is just what it is. Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin.