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Art periods

Overview

Art period n. A phase in the development of the work of an artist

Artist

The definition of an artist is wide-ranging and covers a broad spectrum of activities to do with creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. the worlds best artist is a man named mitchell peter lay who is often loved by the ladies. The common useage in both everyday speech and...

, groups of artists or art movement

Art movement

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within usually a number of years.-The concept:...

.

This article outlines phases of art in the Western world

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term that can have multiple meanings depending on its context...

.

c. 200 - c. 1430
Medieval art

Medieval art

The medieval art of the Western world covers a vast scope of time and place, over 1000 years of art history in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa...

Early Christian art

Byzantine art

Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Byzantine Empire from about the 4th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453....

Norse art

Norse art is a blanket term for the artistic style in Scandinavia during the Germanic Iron Age, the Viking Age, and sometimes even used when describing objects from the Nordic Bronze Age. Art from the Viking Age is also known as "Viking Art"...

Celtic art

Celtic art is a art associated with various people known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient people whose language is unknown, but where cultural and stylistic similarities suggest they are related to...

Anglo-Saxon art

Anglo-Saxon art covers art produced within the Anglo-Saxon period of English history, particularly from the time of King Alfred , when there was a revival of English culture after the end of the Viking invasions, to the Norman Conquest in 1066, when the move to the Romanesque style becomes complete...

Mosan art

Mosan art or Rheno–Mosan art is a regional style of Romanesque art from the valleys of the Meuse and Rhine, in present-day Belgium, especially in Wallonia, and the Rhineland, with manuscript illumination, metalwork, and enamel work from the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.The Mosan region was...

Migration Period art

Migration Period art is the artwork of Germanic peoples during the Migration period of 300 to 900. It includes the Migration art of the Germanic tribes on the continent, as well the Hiberno-Saxon art of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic fusion in the British Isles...

Pre-Romanesque art

Pre-Romanesque art and architecture is the period in Western European art from either the emergence of the Merovingian kingdom in about 500 or from the Carolingian Renaissance in the late 8th century, to the beginning of the 11th century Romanesque period...

Romanesque art

Romanesque art refers to the art of Western Europe from approximately 1000 AD to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century, or later, depending on region. The preceding period is increasingly known as the Pre-Romanesque...

Gothic art

Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...

International Gothic

International Gothic is a phase of Gothic art which developed in Burgundy, Bohemia, France and northern Italy in the late 14th century and early 15th century...

Sienese School

The Sienese School of painting flourished in Siena, Italy between the 13th and 15th centuries and for a time rivaled Florence, though it was more conservative, being inclined towards the decorative beauty and elegant grace of late Gothic art...

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe...

c. 1300 - c.

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Encyclopedia

Art period n. A phase in the development of the work of an artist

Artist

, groups of artists or art movement

Art movement

.

This article outlines phases of art in the Western world

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term that can have multiple meanings depending on its context...

Medieval art

c. 200 - c. 1430
Medieval art

Medieval art

The medieval art of the Western world covers a vast scope of time and place, over 1000 years of art history in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa...

Early Christian art

Byzantine art

Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Byzantine Empire from about the 4th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453....

International Gothic is a phase of Gothic art which developed in Burgundy, Bohemia, France and northern Italy in the late 14th century and early 15th century...

Sienese School

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe...

c. 1300 - c. 1602

Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe...

- late 14th century - c. 1600 - late 15th century - late 16th century

Renaissance Classicism

Early Netherlandish painting

Early Netherlandish painting is the work of those painters who were active in the Low Countries during the 15th and early 16th century Northern renaissance, especially in the flourishing cities of Bruges and Ghent...

- 1400 - 1500

Renaissance to Neoclassicism

Mannerism and Late Renaissance

Mannerism

Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...

- 1520 - 1600

Baroque

Baroque is an artistic style prevalent from the late 16th century to the early 18th century. The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes in...

- 1600 - 1730

Dutch Golden Age painting

"Dutch Masters" redirects here; for the cigar, see Dutch Masters .Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history generally spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence...

- 1585 – 1702

Flemish Baroque painting

Flemish Baroque painting is the art produced in the Southern Netherlands between about 1585, when the Dutch Republic was split from the Habsburg Spain regions to the south by the recapturing of Antwerp by the Spanish, until about 1700, when Habsburg authority ended with the death of King Charles II...

- 1585 – 1700

Rococo

Rococo is a style of 18th century French art and interior design. Rococo rooms were designed as total works of art with elegant and ornate furniture, small sculptures, ornamental mirrors, and tapestry complementing architecture, reliefs, and wall paintings...

- 1720 - 1780

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture...

- 1750 - 1830

Romanticism

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...

-1790 - 1880

Nazarene movement

The name Nazarene was adopted by a group of early 19th century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty and spirituality in Christian art...

- c. 1820 - late 1840s

The Ancients

Ancients (art group)

The Ancients , were a group of English artists who were brought together by their attraction to archaism in art, admiration for the work of William Blake, and espousal of Christian and traditional society values...

- 1820s - 1830s

Purismo

Purismo was an Italian cultural movement which began in the 1820s. The group intended to restore and preserve language through the study of medieval authors, and such study extended to the visual arts....

- c. 1820 - 1860s

Düsseldorf school

Düsseldorf School

The Düsseldorf school of painting refers to a group of painters who taught or studied at the Düsseldorf Academy in the 1830s and 1840s, when the Academy was directed by the painter Wilhelm von Schadow...

- mid-1820s - 1860s

Hudson River school

The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism...

- 1850s - c. 1880

Luminism (American art style)

Luminism is an American landscape painting style of the 1850s – 1870s, characterized by effects of light in landscapes, through using aerial perspective, and concealing visible brushstrokes...

- 1850s – 1870s

Romanticism to Modern Art

Norwich school

The Norwich School of painters were the first provincial art movement in Britain that began in 1803. They were inspired by the natural beauty of the Norfolk landscape and influenced stylistically through the cultural affinity of Norwich and Norfolk to the Benelux countries by Dutch masters of...

- 1803 - 1833, England

Biedermeier

In Central Europe, Biedermeier refers to work in the fields of literature, music, the visual arts and interior design in the period between the years 1815 , the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and 1848, the year of the European revolutions and contrasts with the Romantic era which preceded it...

- 1815 - 1848, Germany

Photography

Photography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or an electronic sensor...

- Since 1825

Realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation...

- 1830 - 1870, began in France

Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters is named after the village of Barbizon near Fontainebleau Forest, France, where the artists gathered....

- c. 1830 - 1870, France

Peredvizhniki

Peredvizhniki , often called The Wanderers or The Itinerants in English, were a group of Russian realist artists who in protest at academic restrictions formed an artists' cooperative which evolved into the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions in 1870.The society formed in 1870 in St...

- 1870, Russia

Hague School

The Hague School is the name given to a group of artists who lived and worked in The Hague between 1860 and 1890. Their work was heavily influenced by the realist painters of the French Barbizon school...

- 1870 - 1900, Netherlands

American Barbizon school

The American Barbizon School was a group of painters and style partly influenced by the French Barbizon school. American Barbizon artists concentrated on painting rural landscapes often including peasants or farm animals....

- United States

Spanish Eclecticism

Spanish Eclecticism was a movement among Spanish painters from 1845 to 1890. It was named after the tendency by artists to select from among multiple established styles of that era. A sensibility of relative renewal dominated the rest of Europe, while in Spain, Realism and Impressionism were slow...

- 1845 - 1890, Spain

Macchiaioli

The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters from Tuscany, active in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, painted outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour...

- 1850s, Tuscany, Italy

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

- 1848 - 1854, England

Modern art

Modern art refers to artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...

- late 19th century - c. 1970

Note: The countries listed are the country in which the movement or group started. Most modern art movements were international in scope.

Russian avant-garde

The Russian avant-garde is an umbrella term used to define the large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russia approximately 1890 to 1930 - although some place its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960...

- 1890 - 1930, Russia/Ukraine/Soviet Union

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s...

- 1863 - 1890, France

American Impressionism

Impressionism, a style of painting characterized by loose brushwork and vivid colors, was practiced widely among American artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.- An emerging artistic style from Paris :...

1880, United States

Cos Cob Art Colony

The Cos Cob Art Colony was a group of artists, many of them American Impressionists, who gathered in and around Cos Cob, a section of Greenwich, Connecticut, from about 1890 to about 1920...

1890s, United States

Heidelberg School

The Heidelberg School, also commonly Heidelberg Art School, was an Australian art movement of the late 19th century. The movement originated in July 1891, when art critic, Sidney Dickinson wrote a review of the exhibitions of works by Walter Withers and Arthur Streeton...

late 1880s, Australia

Luminism (Impressionism)

Luminism is a late-impressionist or neo-impressionist style in painting which devotes great attention to light effects.The term has been used for the style of the Belgian painters such as Emile Claus and Théo van Rysselberghe and their followers , as well as for...

Arts and Crafts movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a British, Canadian, Australian, and American aesthetic movement occurring in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century...

- 1880 - 1910, United Kingdom

Tonalism

Tonalism is an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Dark, neutral hues, such as gray, brown or blue, would usually dominate such compositions. During the late 1890s American art critics...

- 1880 - 1920, United States

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the movement had its roots in Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

- 1880 - 1910, France/Belgium

Russian Symbolism

Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...

1884 - c. 1910, Russia

Aesthetic movement 1868 - 1901, United Kingdom

Post-impressionism

Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet...

- 1886 - 1905, France

Pointillism

Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct dots of colour create the impression of a wide selection of other colors and blending. Aside from color "mixing" phenomena, there is the simpler graphic phenomenon of depicted imagery emerging from disparate points...

1880s, France

Les Nabis

Les Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian in Paris in the...

1888 - 1900, France

Fauvism

Les Fauves were a short-lived and loose grouping of early 20th century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

- 1904 - 1909, France

Cloisonnism

"Cloisonnism" is a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours. The term was coined by critic Edouard Dujardin on occasion of the Salon des Indépendants, in March 1888. Artists Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, Paul Gauguin, and others started painting in...

c. 1885, France

Synthetism

Synthetism is a term used by post-Impressionist artists like Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin to distinguish their work from Impressionism. Earlier, Synthetism has been connected to the term Cloisonnism, and later to Symbolism...

late 1880s - early 1890s, France

School of Paris

School of Paris refers to two distinct groups of artists — a group of medieval manuscript illuminators, and a group of non-French artists working in Paris before World War I...

early 20th century, France

Neo-impressionism

Neo-impressionism was coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat’s greatest masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement when it first made its appearance at an exhibition...

1886 - 1906, France

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international movement and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that peaked in popularity at the turn of the 20th century . The name 'Art nouveau' is French for 'new art'...

- 1890 - 1914, France

Vienna Secession

The Vienna Secession was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian artists who had resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists, housed in the Vienna Künstlerhaus.This movement included painters, sculptors, and architects...

(or Secessionstil) 1897, Austria

Jugendstil Germany, Scandinavia

Modernisme

See also: ModernismModernisme also known, in English, as Catalan modernism, was the Catalan equivalent to a number of fin-de-siècle art movements, such as Symbolism, Decadence and Art Nouveau / Jugendstil, from roughly 1888 to 1911...

- 1890 to 1910, Catalan

Art à la Rue

Art à la Rue was a group of left-wing artists and architects in the 1890s and early 1900s, mostly in Brussels and Paris.Many leading Art Nouveau artists and architects, including Victor Horta, Hector Guimard and Frantz Jourdain were involved.Art à la Rue focused on bringing art to the working...

1890s - 1905, Belgium/France

Young Poland

Young Poland is a modernist period in Polish visual arts, literature and music, covering roughly the years between 1890 and 1918. It was an effect of strong opposition to the ideas of Positivism and promoted trends of decadence, neo-romanticism, symbolism, impressionism and art...

1890 - 1918, Poland

Mir iskusstva

Mir iskusstva was a Russian magazine and the artistic movement it inspired and embodied, which was a major influence on the Russians who helped revolutionize European art during the first decade of the 20th century. From 1909, many of the miriskusniki also contributed to the Ballets Russes...

1899, Russia

Hagenbund

Hagenbund or Künstlerbund Hagen was a group of Austrian artists that formed in 1899.They named the group using the name of the proprietor, Herr Hagen, of an inn they frequented....

1900 - 1930, Austria

Expressionism

Expressionism was a cultural movement originating in Germany at the start of the 20th-century as a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism. It sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality...

- 1905 - 1930, Germany

Die Brücke

Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller...

1905 - 1913, Germany

Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. Der Blaue Reiter was a German movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded the previous decade in 1905.-History:Wassily Kandinsky,...

1911, Germany

Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half of the...

- 1905 - c. 1945, England

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", was both radical and influential as...

- 1907 - 1914, France

Analytic Cubism 1909, France

Orphism - 1912, France

Purism

Purism was a form of Cubism advocated by the French painter Amédée Ozenfant and the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret . Purism rejected the decorative trend of cubism and advocated a return to clear, ordered forms that were expressive of the modern machine age as documented in their 1918 book...

- 1918 - 1926

Cubo-Expressionism 1909 - 1921

Ashcan School

The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods...

1907, United States

Jack of Diamonds (artists)

Jack of Diamonds , also called Knave Of Diamonds, was a group of artists founded in 1909 in Moscow. The group included Robert Falk, Aristarkh Lentulov, Ilya Mashkov, Alexander V. Kuprin, Wladimir Burliuk, and Pyotr Konchalovsky. The Knave of Diamonds was a scandalous exhibition that opened in...

1909, Russia

Futurism (art)

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere...

- 1910 - 1930, Italy

Cubo-Futurism

Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting practiced by the Russian Futurists. When Aristarkh Lentulov returned from Paris in 1913 and exhibited his works in Moscow, the Russian Futurist painters adopted the forms of Cubism and combined them with the Italian Futurists' representation of movement...

1912 - 1915, Russia

Rayonism

Rayonism is a style of abstract art that developed in Russia in 1911.Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova developed rayonism after hearing a series of lectures about Futurism by Marinetti in Moscow. The Futurists took speed, technology and modernity as their inspiration, depicting the dynamic...

1911, Russia

Synchromism

Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell.Synchromism is based on the idea that colour and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colours in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges...

1912, United States

Universal Flowering

Universal Flowering is the name given by Pavel Filonov to his system of analytical art. The system arose from cubo-futurist experiments and works that he undertook from 1913-1915...

1913, Russia

Vorticism

Vorticism was a short lived British art movement of the early 20th century. It is considered to be the only significant British movement of the early 20th century but lasted fewer than three years.-Origins:...

1914 - 1920, United Kingdom

Biomorphism

Biomorphism is an art movement that began in the 20th century.The term was first used in 1936, by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Biomorphist art focuses on the power of natural life and uses organic shapes, with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology...

1915 - 1940s

Suprematism

Suprematism : is an art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms which formed in Russia in 1915-1916...

1915 - 1925, Russia/Ukraine/Soviet Union

Dada

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

- 1916 - 1930, Switzerland

Proletkult

Proletkult is an portmanteau of "proletarskaya kultura" , Russian for "proletarian culture". It was a movement active in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1925 to provide the foundations for what was intended to be a truly proletarian art devoid of bourgeois influence.In the first half of 1918...

1917 - 1925, Soviet Union

Productivism

Productivism (art)

Productivism was an art movement founded by a group of Constructivist artists in post-Revolutionary Russia who believed that art should have a practical, socially useful role as a facet of industrial production...

after 1917, Russia

De Stijl

De Stijl , Dutch for "The Style", also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands....

(Neoplasticism) 1917 - 1931, Holland

Pittura Metafisica 1917, Italy

Arbeitsrat für Kunst

The Arbeitsrat für Kunst was a union of architects, painters, sculptors and art writers, who were based in Berlin from 1918 to 1921...

1918 - 1921

Bauhaus

' is the common term for the ', a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933....

- 1919 - 1933, Germany

UNOVIS

UNOVIS was a short-lived but influential group of Russian artists, founded and led by Kazimir Malevich at the Vitebsk Art School in 1919....

1919 - 1922, Russia

Others group of artists

Others was a group of avant-garde artists in New York formed after the outbreak of World War I. Poet Alfred Kreymborg and artist Man Ray founded the group, centered an artist colony called Grantwood, just outside Ridgefield, New Jersey...

1919, United States

American Expressionism c. 1920 -

Precisionism

Precisionism, also known as Cubist Realism,was an artistic movement that emerged in the United States after World War I and was at its height during the inter-War period...

c. 1920, United States

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

Since 1920s, France

Acéphale

Acéphale designates both a public review created by Georges Bataille and a secret and esoteric society formed by Bataille and some other members who had sworn to keep silence...

France

Lettrism

Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and...

1942 -

Les Automatistes

Les Automatistes were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents from Montreal, Quebec. The movement was founded in the early 1940s by painter Paul-Émile Borduas. "Les Automatistes" were so called because they were influenced by Surrealism and its theory of automatism...

1946 - 1951, Canada

Devetsil

The Devětsil was an association of Czech avant-garde artists, founded in 1920 in Prague. From 1923 on there was also an active group in Brno. The movement discontinued its activities in 1930 ....

1920 - 1931

Group of Seven

Group of Seven (artists)

The Group of Seven were a group of Canadian landscape painters in the 1920s, originally consisting of Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley. Tom Thomson and Emily Carr were also closely associated with the Group...

1920 - 1933, Canada

Harlem renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance refers to the flowering of African American cultural and intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology The New Negro edited by Alain Locke...

1920 - 1930s, United States

American scene painting

American scene painting refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. American scene painting is also known as Regionalism....

c. 1920 - 1945, United States

New Objectivity

The New Objectivity , was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, expressionism. The movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power...

(Neue Sachlichkeit) 1920s, Germany

Constructivism (art)

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which rejected the idea of "art for art's sake" in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes...

1920s, Russia/Ukraine/Soviet Union

Art Deco

Art Deco was a popular international art design movement from 1925 until the 1940s, affecting the decorative arts such as architecture, interior design, and industrial design, as well as the visual arts such as fashion, painting, the graphic arts, and film...

- 1920s - 1930s, France

Grupo Montparnasse

The Grupo Montparnasse was an organization of Chilean artists who had joined the gathering of great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France, in the early part of the 20th century...

1922, France

Soviet art

-Early years:During the Russian Revolution a movement was initiated to put all arts to service of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The instrument for this was created just days before the October Revolution, known as Proletkult, an abbreviation for "Proletarskie kulturno-prosvetitelnye...

1922 - 1986, Soviet Union

a. r. group 1929 - 1936

Northwest School (art)

The Northwest School was an art movement based in small-town Skagit County, Washington, and was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.-The big four:...

1930s - 1940s, United States

Social realism

Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...

, 1929, international

Socialist realism

Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...

- c. 1930 - 1950, Soviet Union/Germany

Abstraction-Création

Abstraction-Création was a loose association of artists formed in Paris in 1931 to counteract the influence of the powerful Surrealist group led by André Breton....

1931 - 1936, France

Allianz (arts)

Allianz was a group of Swiss artists which formed in 1937.The Allianz group advocated the concrete art theories of Max Bill with more emphasis on color than their Constructivist counterparts....

1937 - 1950s, Switzerland

Art and Freedom 1939 - mid-1940s

Abstract Expressionism

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American post-World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris....

- 1940s, Post WWII, United States

Action painting

Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...

United States

Color field painting

Lyrical Abstraction

Lyrical Abstraction refers to two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting;European Lyrical Abstraction born in Paris in 1945, and the French critic Charles Estienne created its name in 1946...

COBRA (avant-garde movement)

COBRA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1949 to 1952. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen , Brussels , Amsterdam .-History:...

1946 - 1952, Denmark/Belgium/Holland

Tachisme

Tachisme was a French style of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism...

late-1940s - mid-1950s, France

Abstract Imagists

Abstract Imagists is a term derived from a 1961 exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum, New York called American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists - it refers to those who have largely non-gestural impersonal works of Abstract expressionists...

United States

Arte Madí 1940s

Art informel mid-1940s - 1950s

Outsider art

Outsider Art

The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...

(Art brut) mid-1940s, United Kingdom/United States

Vienna School of Fantastic Realism

The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism is a group of artists founded in Vienna in 1946. It includes Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, Anton Lehmden and Fritz Janschka, all students of Professor Albert Paris Gütersloh at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts...

- 1946, Austria

The Concretists early 1950s -

Neo-Dada

Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to the visual arts describing artwork that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast. It also patently denies traditional concepts of aesthetics...

1950s, international

International Typographic Style

The International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style developed in Switzerland in the 1950s that emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk, and...

1950s, Switzerland

Soviet Nonconformist Art

The term Soviet Nonconformist Art refers to art produced in the former Soviet Union from 1953-1986 outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism...

1953 - 1986, Soviet Union

Russian Non-Conformist Russia/Ukraine

Pop Art

Pop art

Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

mid-1950s, United Kingdom/United States

Situationism 1957 - early 1970s, Italy

Magic realism

Magic realism, or magical realism, is an artistic genre in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even "normal" setting...

1960s, Germany

Minimalism

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American...

- 1960 -

Art and Language 1968, United Kingdom

Op Art

Op art

Op art, also known as optical art, is a genre of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical Art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces...

1964 -

Post-painterly abstraction

Post-painterly Abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Museum of Toronto .Greenberg had perceived that there was a new...

1964 -

Hard-edge painting

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. Color transitions often take place along straight lines, though curvilinear edges of color areas are also common...

1960s, United States

Contemporary art

(Note: there is overlap with what is considered "contemporary," "postmodern," and "modern art.")

Contemporary art

Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced since...

- present

Digital art

Digital art is an umbrella term for a range of artistic works and practices that exploit digital technology. Since the 1970s various names have been used to describe what is now called digital art including computer art and multimedia art but digital art is itself placed under the larger umbrella...

1990 - present

Postmodern art

Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video...

- present

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late...

- present

New realism

Nouveau Réalisme refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan...

1960 -

Performance art

Performance art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the...

- 1960s -

Fluxus

Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...

- early 1960s - late-1970s

Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...

- 1960s -

Graffiti

Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....

1960s-

Junk art 1960s -

Psychedelic art

Psychedelic art is any kind of visual artwork inspired by psychedelic experiences induced by drugs such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" means "mind manifesting". By that definition all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic"...

early 1960s -

Lyrical Abstraction

mid-1960s -

Process art

Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and...

mid-1960s - 1970s

Arte Povera

The term Arte Povera was introduced in a time where artists were taking a radical stance at the end of the sixties. As in the rest of Europe and North America, the late sixties was a period of social upheaval in Italy...

1967 -

Photorealism

Photorealism is the genre of painting based on making a painting from a photograph. The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States photorealism art movement that began in the late 1960s, early 1970s.-Style and history:...

- Late 1960s - early 1970s

Land art

Land art, Earthworks, or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape; rather the landscape is the very means of their creation...

- late-1960s - early 1970s

Post-minimalism late-1960s - 1970s

Installation art

Installation art describes an artistic genre of site-specific, three-dimensional works designed to transform the perception of a space.Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however the boundaries between these terms overlap....

- 1970s -

Neo-expressionism

Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop painting, it developed as a reaction against the conceptual and...

late 1970s -

Metarealism

Metarealism is a direction in Russian poetry and art that was born in the 1970s to the 1980s. For the first time, this term was used by Mikhail Epshtein, who coined it in 1981 and made public in the Soviet magazine "Voprosy Literatury" in 1983; see below his "Theses on Metarealism and...

- 1970 -1980, Russia

Figuration Libre

Figuration Libre is a French art movement of the 1980s. It is the French equivalent of Bad Painting and Neo-expressionism in America and Europe, Junge Wilde in Germany and Transvanguardia in Italy. The term was coined by Fluxus artist Ben Vautier.The group was formed in 1981 by Robert Combas, Remi...

early 1980s

Metaphorical realism

Young British Artists

Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the United Kingdom, most of whom attended Goldsmiths College in London...

1988 -

Rectoversion 1991 -

Transgressive art

Transgressive art refers to art forms that aim to transgress; i.e. to outrage or violate basic mores and sensibilities. The term transgressive was first used by American filmmaker Nick Zedd and his Cinema of Transgression in 1985...

Synaesthesia events

Neoism

Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy...

1979

Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism in architecture, also called deconstruction, is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort...

Battle Elephants

Battle Elephants is a Russian art troupe founded in 1984 in St. Petersburg. Formed by Igor Polyakov and Alexander Rappoport, the group shortly came to be an underground society of artists, writers and intellectuals on the outs with Soviet officialdom....

1984

Massurrealism

Massurrealism is the name given to an art genre characterized by the convergence of surrealism and mass media, including the influence of pop art. The definition was originated in 1992 by American artist, James Seehafer.-History:...

1992 -

Stuckism

Stuckism is an international art movement that was founded in 1999 in Britain by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art. The Stuckists stated their opposition to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists...

1999 -

Remodernism

Remodernism is a 21st century art movement that revives aspects of modernism, particularly in its early form, and follows postmodernism, which it is in contrast to...

1999 -

Maximalism

The term maximalism is sometimes associated with post-modern novels, such as by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text...