Art movements
Five centuries, in waves. Schools, salons and ruptures — tap any movement to see its painters and a quick visual signature.
An art movement is what happens when a critical mass of painters, working roughly in the same time and place, share enough conviction about how a picture should look that the rest of art history has to take a position relative to them. The 21 movements gathered here cover Western painting from the early Italian Renaissance — when the rules of perspective and human proportion were being rewritten — to the contemporary art of our own decade.
Each page below is a short, opinionated reading guide: where the movement was born, what its painters were rebelling against, how to recognise it in three seconds at a museum, and which artists are worth knowing first. Use them as a map.
Perspective newly discovered; balanced figures, sfumato, the human body rebuilt from the inside out.
Flemish oil, microscopic detail, moralised landscapes; the same revolution, colder light.
Dramatic light, theatrical gesture, deep shadows; faith and power staged as a single scene.
Pastel flirtation, gilded curves, aristocratic leisure painted with sugar and silk.
Roman virtue against stormy feeling; ruins, awe, revolution, nature as moral weather.
Flat colour, cropped compositions, Hokusai and Hiroshige rewiring how Europe saw a picture plane.
Peasants, labourers, the unheroic: paint what you actually see, on the scale once reserved for kings.
Broken colour, plein-air, fleeting light; the studio walked out into the afternoon.
Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin — the impression keeps the colour but recovers structure and feeling.
Pointillism: the Impressionist flicker rebuilt as a science of dots, one pure tone at a time.
Dreams, allegory and decorative line; gold, lilies, and the end of the nineteenth century made ornament.
Anxiety made visible, hot colour straight from the tube, form distorted to carry feeling.
Many viewpoints at once; objects analysed, speed worshipped, the picture plane broken open.
Anti-art as art: collage, ready-mades and nonsense after the First World War left meaning in pieces.
No subject but the picture itself: line, colour, optical buzz, the canvas as its own argument.
Dreams, juxtaposition, the uncanny; Freud's unconscious dragged into oil paint and bright daylight.
Post-war New York paints big: drips, fields, gesture as autobiography on wall-sized canvas.
Soup cans, comic dots, Marilyn — the supermarket and the screen become legitimate subjects for paint.
Less, harder: industrial grids, one colour, no metaphor — what you see is what you see.
Figuration returns, angry and fast: Basquiat, Kiefer, Schnabel — paint as confession again.
Painting today: photo, identity, the digital, the political — the medium asked to do everything at once.