Art movements

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. Movements are how we organise five centuries of painting into something a museum visit, a textbook chapter or a quiz round can fit. The 19 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. Cubism makes more sense once you've read about Post-Impressionism; Surrealism makes more sense once you've understood the trauma the Cubists came out of. The goal is to give you the smallest amount of context that lets you actually see the difference between a Caravaggio and a Velázquez, between a Monet and a Van Gogh — and then to make that knowledge stick by playing.