A movement in French painting which was at its height from the late 1860s to mid 1880s, and whose influence was felt until 1900.
Turning away from the stress on fine finish and realistic rendering in academic art, French Impressionists sought new ways to describe effects of light and movement, often using rich colors. Drawn to modern life, they often painted the city, but they also captured landscapes and scenes of middle-class leisure-taking in the suburbs.
movement-impressionism.htm
Edgar Degas
Pierre Auguste-Renoir
A term coined by critic Roger Fry to describe various reactions against Impressionism which began around 1886. The movement encompassed Symbolism and Neo-Impressionism before ceding to Fauvism around 1905
Post-Impressionists turned away from effects of light and atmosphere to explore new avenues such as color theory and personal feeling.
movement-post-impressionism.htm
Georges Seurat
A movement in French painting that began around 1898 but reached its peak and quickly dissolved around 1906
Evolving out of Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, the loosely affiliated group of artists developed a decorative, anti-naturalistic style to express personal feelings towards their subjects. Formally, their work is characterized by vivid, often unmixed color, striking surface design and a bold approach to execution.
movement-fauvism.htm
André Derain
Maurice de Vlaminck
The movement began with the founding of the Die Brücke group in Dresden in 1905, but its influence was later felt throughout Germany and beyond until at least 1920.
Reacting against Impressionism, but influenced by Symbolism, the Expressionists focussed on communicating spirituality and feeling in art. Drawn to primitivism and to modern life, they employed distorted imagery and a rich palette to convey profound emotion.
movement-expressionism.htm
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Developed by Picasso and Braque around 1907, the approach influenced artists on an international scale into the early 1920s and well beyond.
Narrowly conceived, the approach focussed on a new way of describing space, volume and mass in art, and led to the development of important new pictorial devices. More generally, Cubism pointed new paths towards abstract art, and suggested ways of describing the appearance and experience of life in the modern urban world.
movement-cubism.htm
Launched in Zurich in 1916 and quickly inspired similar groups in New York, Berlin, Cologne, Paris and elsewhere. Its influence waned after the Paris group collapsed and ceded to Surrealism.
Inspired by revulsion at the carnage of WWI, the artistic and literary movement developed an anarchic opposition to nationalism, rationalism and all dominant bourgeois values. All the various Dada groups opposed realism and embraced avant-garde shock tactics, but their tone differed; German Dada was far more political than the bohemian French strain.
movement-dada.htm
Kurt Schwitters
John Hearfield
Developed out of the collapse of the Paris Dada movement in 1924, it remained powerful until WWII and maintained a presence through the mid-1960s.
Surrealism shared the anarchic rejection of conventional bourgeois values that motivated the Dada movement. Powerfully influenced by Freudian theories, Surrealists sought ways to challenge reality by expressing the unconscious in art.
movement-surrealism.htm
A term designating a trend within Abstract Expressionism. It was coined by Clement Greenberg in the essay "American-type Painting", 1955, and his support for it encouraged its survival into the 1970s.
Greenberg believed that there was a tendency in modern painting to apply color in fields, and some recent painters were bringing that to a climax. Some early color field painting suggested grand and lyrical moods, while later work bearing geometric motifs bordered on Conceptual and Pop Art.
movement-color-field-painting.htm
The movement developed simultaneously in various cities in the mid 1950s. Its influence is still felt in contemporary art.
London's Independent Group may have been the first to consciously explore popular subject matter in their art, but Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg also made use of popular imagery as a route away from Abstract Expressionism, and towards a Neo-Dada style in the late 1950s. The movement truly flourished in New York in the 1960s, but it also saw manifestations in Paris, with Nouveau Realisme, and in the work of German artists such as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.
movement-pop-art.htm
Richard Hamilton
Sigmar Polke
A term coined by critic Jules Langsner in 1959 to describe the developments of a few California painters.
In the wake of Abstract Expressionism many painters began to move towards greater clarity of design, and to eschew the grandeur and melancholy of much gestural painting. Langsner observed this first in California, but the trend was widespread and attracted more adherents as the 1960s developed.
movement-hard-edge-painting.htm
Lorser Feitelson
A loosely affiliated group of mostly New York-based artists began to work in a similar mode in the early 1960s.
An approach to art - principally sculptural - which stressed anonymous, industrial manufacturing and austere, geometric forms. Led by articulate spokesmen such as former critic Donald Judd, the movement became a highly self-conscious attempt to overturn previous conventions of sculpture, to create objects with simple, indivisible forms, and to reject the appearance of art.
movement-minimalism.htm
Robert Morris
The term derives from the title of an exhibition organized by critic Clement Greenberg in 1964.
Post-painterly abstraction designates a variety of developments in painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, many of which moved towards greater clarity of design and color. The term embraces the 'hard-edge' painting of Frank Stella, Larry Poons and Ellsworth Kelly; the 'color field' painting of Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski; and 'Washington Color Painters' such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
movement-post-painterly-abstraction.htm
Jack Bush
Developed simultaneously in the mid 1960s in the United States, Latin America and Europe. The movement waned in the mid 1970s but its influence is still profound.
The movement is marked by a focus on ideas and communication rather than visual perception. Some of its practitioners have been drawn to a highly intellectual critique of the institution of art itself. Many eschew objects altogether, yet others have created a diverse output of media, from maps and found objects to texts and photographs.
movement-conceptual-art.htm
Sol LeWitt
Daniel Buren
Joseph Kosuth
Neo-Expressionism can be traced to the rise of German artist Georg Baselitz and his Neue Wilden group from the late 1960s, but it flourished internationally in the 1980s.
Disaffected with the intellectualism of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, many artists returned to painting in an expressionist style which reasserted the creative power of the individual. This took place almost simultaneously throughout the world and was marked by interests in primitivism, graffiti, and the revival of historical styles.
movement-neo-expressionism.htm
Georg Baselitz
Julian Schnabel
Francesco Clemente