Western painting

Greece and Rome

Bronze Age Aegean Civilizations

Minoan

Minoan painting was produced by the ancient Bronze Age Aegean Minoan civilization from about 3000 to 1100 BC. The best-preserved examples are on its pottery, and palace walls, with frescos displaying "the earliest pure landscapes anywhere".

Minoan painting was influenced by the neighboring painters of Ancient Egypt and the ancient Near East, which had long produced sophisticated urban art, but the mysterious character of the small, yet wealthy, mercantile Minoan cities seems very different, with little evidence of large temple-based religion, monarchs, or warfare, and "all the imaginative power and childlike freshness of a very young culture". Sinclair Hood described an "essential quality of the finest Minoan art, the ability to create an atmosphere of movement and life although following a set of highly formal conventions".

Mycenaean

The Minoans clearly dominated Mycenaean art and Cycladic art of the same periods, even after Crete was occupied by the Mycenaeans, but only some aspects of the tradition survived the Trojan War and Greek Dark Ages, after the collapse of Mycenaean Greece.

Classical Antiquity

Ancient Greece

After the Greek Dark Ages and legendary Dorian invasion, ancient Greeks in classical antiquity made remarkable contributions to painting, including innovations in perspective derived from scenography, contrasting with the composite or "mixed" perspective of ancient Egyptian and Minoan painting — faces and legs presented in profile, while eyes and torsos appear frontally.

Ancient Greek painting includes polychromy on pagan temples, sculpture, and figurines; as well as wall, panel, and vase painting, on pottery and ceramics, such as black-figure, red-figure, and white-ground, giving glimpses of ancient Greek society. Mosaics also provide insight into ancient painting.

Most ancient Greek painters are known only from texts. There are only few examples of wall paintings, such as those preserved in tombs. Only a single example of ancient Greek panel painting survives.

5th century BC Greek painters include Micon, Panaenus, and Polygnotus. According to Plutarch, Polygnotos was the lover of Elpinice, and regularly worked for free. He was more a draughtsman than the following generation of colorists.

Apelles (fl. 4th century BC) is described as the greatest painter of antiquity, noted for perfect technique in drawing, brilliant color, and modeling. Pyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus likened ataraxia to Apelles's attempt to paint a horse's mouth's foam. Apelles was at first so unsuccessful that, in a rage, he gave up and threw the sponge he was using to clean his brushes, and its mark on the panel produced the desired effect of foam.

Skiagraphia innovator Apollodorus influenced Zeuxis, who took his advances to new heights. According to Pliny the Elder, birds pecked at Zeuxis's realistically painted grapes. Parrhasius in turn painted a realistic curtain, which Zeuxis asked to be lifted to see the image, only to discover it was the image.

More examples of ancient Greek vase painting survive, including artists such as Exekias, Douris, and several unidentified artists given "notnames", like the Amasis Painter, Berlin Painter, Brygos Painter, and Niobid Painter.

Ancient Rome

Roman painting was influenced by Etruscan and Greek painting, shown in both frescoes and mosaics, but with its own unique characteristics, containing possibly the first examples of trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape. Gaius Fabius Pictor is traditionally the first Roman painter.

Surviving examples are divided into four styles and include wall, panel, and vase paintings, many from villas, such as those in Campania, in Southern Italy, at sites buried by the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius such as Boscoreale, Herculaneum, and Pompeii.

Some of the few surviving, ancient, painted portraits are several coffin-portraits found in the Egyptian cemetery of Al-Fayum. Few miniatures from Late Antique illustrated books survive; more copies of them are found from the early medieval period.

Middle Ages

Byzantine art

The fall of Rome and rise of Christianity imparted a different spirit and aim to medieval painting. Byzantine art, established by the 6th century, emphasized traditional iconography and style, and ranges across a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire. Medieval Greek and Russian Orthodox icon-painting such as by Andrei Rublev (c. 1360–c. 1430) is seen as representative of divine revelation up to the present day.

There were many frescos, but fewer have survived than mosaics, such as those in Hagia Sophia. Byzantine art is known for its flatness and highly stylised depictions of figures and landscape. However, some periods of Byzantine art are more flexible, especially 10th-century Macedonian art. Frescoes of the Palaeologan Renaissance of the early 14th century survive in the Chora Church in Istanbul.

Insular, Carolingian, and Ottonian painting

In medieval, Catholic Europe, the first distinctive, painting style was the Insular art of the British Isles, surviving only in miniatures from Illuminated manuscripts. Best known for their abstract decoration, figures, and sometimes scenes, were also depicted, especially in Evangelist portraits.

Influenced by classical, Byzantine, and Insular art, Carolingian paintings of the Carolingian Renaissance during the reign of Charlemagne (748–814) and his heirs, and Ottonian paintings of the Ottonian Renaissance during the Ottonian dynasty (919–1024), are sometimes known as "pre-Romanesque". They survive mostly in manuscripts, although some of several documented wall paintings remain. Archbishop of Trier Egbert (c. 950–993) was a notable patron of paintings.

High Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages and 12th-century renaissance saw the birth of similarly influenced Romanesque and Gothic art. Church walls were decorated with frescoes, sculpture, and windows using colorful stained glass, which became a staple, such as in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. Many of the few remaining murals have great intensity, and combine the decorative energy of Insular art with a new monumentality in the treatment of figures. Far more miniatures in Illuminated manuscripts survive from the period.

Panel painting becomes more common during the Romanesque period, under the heavy influence of Byzantine icons, such as from Italians like Berlinghiero (fl. 1228–1242), father of Barone (fl. 1228–1282), Bonaventura (fl. 1235–1244), and Marco (fl. 1232–1255).

Proto-Renaissance

Italian Medieval and Gothic painting became more realistic, innovatively depicting volume and perspective, with Byzantine-influenced Florentine Cimabue (c. 1240–1302) and his pupil Giotto (c. 1267–1337), the two great medieval masters of naturalistic Western painting.

Giotto advanced Cimabue's innovations to a higher level, setting the foundation for the western painting tradition. From Giotto on, painters' treatment of composition became much more free and innovative.

According to Lives of the Artists (1550), Florentine Andrea Pisano (1290–1348) taught Andrea Orcagna (c. 1308–1368). Orcagna was influenced by Giotto, and taught Andrea di Boniauto (1319–1377). Giotto also influenced Stefano Fiorentino (1301–1350), father of Giottino (fl. 1324–1369).

Sienese School

Byzantine art influenced the Sienese school led by Duccio (c. 1260–1319) and his pupil Simone Martini (c. 1284–1344), who influenced International Gothic, the dominant style from 1375 to 1425, which saw tempera panel paintings and altarpieces gain importance. The Sienese School also included the naturalism of brothers Ambrogio (c. 1290–1348) and Pietro Lorenzetti (c. 1280–1348), plus Bartolomeo Bulgarini (c. 1300–1378).

Bologna

Bologna also featured painters such as Vitale da Bologna (c. 1309–1360). Vitale influenced his successor Andrea da Bologna and Simone dei Crocifissi (c. 1330–1399), whose nephew was Lippo di Dalmasio (1352–c. 1410).

Early modern period

Renaissance

The Renaissance (French for 'rebirth') was a cultural movement roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th century, driven by humanism and the study of classical antiquity, leading to a revolution in science, philosophy, and technology which influenced painters, e. g. geography, astronomy, the Reformation, and invention of the printing press.

With the development of easel painting in the Renaissance, painting gained independence from architecture and could be hung easily on walls, a popular alternative to paintings fixed to furniture, walls or other structures.

While religious imagery was still popular, secular subject matter slowly returned to Western painting during the Renaissance. Artists included visions of the world around them, or the products of their own imaginations in their paintings. Those who could afford the expense could become patrons and commission portraits of themselves or their family.

Italian Renaissance

Early

Italian Renaissance painting emphasized the ideal. Florentine Masaccio (1401–1428) is credited with first making advances in linear perspective, the depiction of volume in his figures, and in portraying emotions on the faces of his figures in the 1420s. The Early Renaissance period lasts to about 1495, and includes artists such as Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455), Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–1492), Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506), Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–1469), and Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510).

High

During the High Renaissance from about 1495 to 1520, Florentines such as sfumato pioneer Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and Neoplatonists Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and Raphael (1483–1520), took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and developing unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques. Lives of the Artists author Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was a contemporary.

Venetian School

Venetian painters of the High Renaissance developed a more naturalistic style, such as Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516), musician Giorgione (c. 1475–1510), Titian (c. 1490–1576), and Veronese (1528–1588), less concerned with precision in their drawing than with the richness of color and unity of effect that could be achieved by a more spontaneous approach to painting.

Mannerism

The Italian High Renaissance also gave rise to a stylized art known as Mannerism after 1520. Mannerist Parmigianino (1503–1540) was one of the artists who had to flee the Sack of Rome (1527).

In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterized art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The calm and serene expressions of Renaissance subjects are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo (1494–1557) and the emotional intensity of El Greco (1541–1614). Restless and unstable compositions, often extreme effects of perspective, and stylized poses are characteristic of Italian Mannerists such as Pontormo, Tintoretto (1518–1594),and Bronzino (1503–1572), and appeared later in the work of Northern Mannerists such as Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611), and Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638).

Northern Renaissance

In Flanders, following developments made in the illumination of manuscripts, especially by the Limbourg Brothers (fl. 1385–1416), artists became fascinated by the tangible in the visible world and began representing objects in an extremely naturalistic way.

Early Netherlandish painting

Unlike the Italians, who drew heavily from ancient Rome, the Northern Renaissance painters retained the less idealized style of the sculpture and naturalistic, illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The adoption of oil painting, whose first use was traditionally, but erroneously, credited to Jan van Eyck (c. 1389–1441), made possible a new verisimilitude.

Oil paint was already present in the work of Melchior Broederlam (c. 1350–1409), but Robert Campin (c. 1378–1444, previously known as the Master of Flémalle) and van Eyck brought its use to new heights, capable of creating richer colors with a deep, intense tonality. The illusion of glowing light with a porcelain-like finish characterized Early Netherlandish painting, and was a major difference to the matte surface of tempera.

Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden (1400–1464), a pupil of Campin, stressed human emotion and drama. The work of Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) is remarkably extravagant. Other important artists were Hugo van der Goes (c. 1430–1482), highly influential in Italy, Dieric Bouts (c. 1415–1475), among the first northern painters to utilize a single vanishing point, Petrus Christus (c. 1420–c. 1475), Hans Memling (c. 1430–1494) and Gerard David (c. 1460–1523).

High

Flemish, Dutch and German painters of the Northern High Renaissance such as printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Lucas Cranach (c. 1472–1553), Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528), and Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–1543) incorporated the features of the Italian art into their own to varying degrees.

A generation later, the start of genre painting as a subject for large works began with Peter Aertsen (1508–1575) and Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525–1569). A later generation of Northern Renaissance painters who traveled to Rome and adopted much of the idealized approach of the Italian Renaissance became known as Romanists.

Baroque

Baroque was the dominant style of painting by 17th-century Old Masters. Baroque painting used quadratura on ceilings; and is characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, intense light and dark shadows, with the purpose of evoking emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality prized during the Renaissance.

Its associated movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation or Catholic Revival. However, Baroque painting in non-absolutist and Protestant states also shows its popularity, as the style spread throughout Western Europe.

Italian

The earliest Baroque painters, of the late 16th century, include the Carracci brothers, Annibale (1560–1609) and Agostino (1557–1602), and Caravaggio (1571–1610).

Caravaggio is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque painters and an heir of the humanist painting of the High Renaissance. His new style of painting shocked contemporaries, showing a realistic approach to the human figure, painted directly from life and dramatically spotlit against a dark background.

Caravaggio influenced subsequent Italian Baroque, which is epitomized by religious and mythological paintings in the Grand Manner by artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654), Guido Reni (1575–1642), and Luca Giordano (1634–1705). Illusionistic church ceiling frescoes by Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669) seemed to open to the sky. The landscapes and history paintings of Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), often set in dark and untamed nature, exerted considerable influence.

Flemish

Flemish Baroque painting of the Southern Netherlands was focused in Antwerp, with such artists as the dramatic Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), and Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678).

Dutch

The Dutch Baroque painting of the Dutch Republic is often referred to as Dutch Golden Age Painting and includes Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Frans Hals (c. 1582–1666), and Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675). Much quieter than other types of Baroque, easel paintings of everyday subjects were popular with middle-class collectors, and many painters became specialists in genre, others in landscape or seascape or still life.

However, Rembrandt excelled in painting every type of subject, and developed an individual painterly style in which the chiaroscuro and dark backgrounds derived from Caravaggio and the Utrecht Caravaggists lose their theatrical quality.

Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681), and Pieter de Hooch (1629–1679) brought great technical refinement to the painting of domestic scenes, as did Willem Claesz. Heda (1594–c. 1680) to still life. Vermeer's proficient technique has artists debate whether he used a camera obscura.

French

France in the early modern period became the cultural center of Europe, especially under the reign of "Sun King" Louis XIV (1638–1715), as well as the preceding Louis XIII (1601–1643). Louis XIV's court painters were Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) and Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743). Painters like Le Brun who preferred line were called Poussinists, followers of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), and those who emphasized color were called Rubenists, followers of Rubens. Additional French baroque painters include the Le Nain brothers, Antoine (c. 1600–1648), Louis (c. 1603–1648), and Mathieu (1607–1677), Georges de La Tour (1593–1652), and landscape painter Claude Lorrain (c. 1600–1682).

Frenchmen trained in Italy such as Poussin, Lorrain, and La Tour adopted a "classical" Baroque style, with less focus on emotion and color, and greater attention to the outline of the figures.

Spanish

Spanish Baroque painting includes Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682).

Rococo

During the 18th century, Rococo painting followed as a lighter extension of Baroque, often frivolous and erotic and using light pastel colours. Rococo developed first in the decorative arts and interior design in France, when Louis XV's succession brought a change in the court artists and general artistic fashion, reaching its height in the 1730s. Rococo maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns, but began to integrate its own variety of characteristics, including a taste for Oriental designs and asymmetry.

The French masters Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), François Boucher (1703–1773), and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) represent the style, as do Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), considered by some as Anti-Rococo, and one of the bests French painters of the 18th century. French Rococo also includes Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), the favorite painter of philosophe Denis Diderot, who excelled in portraits and history paintings. Pastel painter Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788), and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842) were highly accomplished portrait painters.

The Rococo style spread to Catholic parts of Germany, Bohemia, and Austria, merging with German Baroque traditions. German Rococo was applied with enthusiasm to churches and palaces, particularly in Southern Germany, while Frederician Rococo developed in the Kingdom of Prussia.

English portrait artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in Analysis of Beauty (1753) that undulating lines and S-curves, prominent in Rococo, were the basis for grace and beauty in art or nature, unlike the straight line or the circle in Classicism. The decline of Rococo started in the early 1760s as figures like Voltaire and Jacques-François Blondel criticized its superficiality and degeneracy. Blondel decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants" in contemporary interiors.

English portraiture

Artists such as Vigée-Lebrun focused on portraiture and were seen as transitional figures exiting the Rococo movement. While portraiture was an important component of contemporaneous Western painting, after Rococo it became the focus of a movement in England, led by blunt realist Hogarth and Francis Hayman (1708–1776), Swiss Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), and Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) in more flattering styles influenced by Flemish expat van Dyck.

Neoclassicism

By 1785, Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced first in architecture, and then in painting, by the severe order and seriousness of Neoclassical artists such as Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), whose imposing history paintings depicting both historical and contemporary events embodied the ideals of the French Revolution. The preceding American Revolution also saw its share of Neoclassical painters, such as Benjamin West (1738–1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738–1815). Neoclassicists in Germany include Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779).

19th century

By the mid-19th century, painting became more purely a means of personal expression, as painters were liberated from the demands of their patronage to only depict scenes from religion, mythology, portraiture or history.

Romanticism

David's heirs were Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835) and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). Ingres' work already contains much of the sensuality, but none of the spontaneity, that was to characterize Romanticism. The Romantics turned landscape painting into a major genre, considered until then as a minor genre or as a decorative background. Romantic painters include Russians Karl Brullov (1799–1852) and marine art master Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900), Englishmen John Constable (1776–1837) and marine art and landscape master J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Frenchmen Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), German Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), and Spaniard Francisco de Goya (1684–1721), whose late work demonstrates the Romantic interest in the irrational.

Romantic painters influenced the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's combination of devotion to nature with nostalgia for medieval culture, and Aesthetic movement artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) with his sophistication, decadence, and philosophy of "art for art's sake".

American Romantic landscape painters were known as the Hudson River School: including Thomas Cole (1801–1848), Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Thomas Moran (1837–1926), and John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872). Luminism was a related movement.

Realism

A major force in the turn towards Realism at mid-century was Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), whose unidealized paintings of common people offended viewers accustomed to the conventional subject matter and licked finish of academic art, but inspired many younger artists.

The leading Barbizon School painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) painted landscapes and scenes of peasant life. Loosely associated with the Barbizon School was Camille Corot (1796–1875), who painted in both a romantic and a realistic vein; his work prefigures Impressionism, as did the paintings of Johan Jongkind (1819–1891) and Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), one of the first French landscape painters to paint en plein air.

In Russia, Ilya Repin (1844–1930) was a realist.

Impressionism

In the late 19th century Impressionists such as Claude Monet (1840–1926), Édouard Manet (1832–1888), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) worked in a more direct approach than had previously been exhibited publicly. They eschewed allegory and narrative in favor of individualized responses to the modern world, sometimes painted with little or no preparatory study, relying on deftness of drawing and a highly chromatic palette.

Boudin was an important influence on the young Monet. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley painted landscapes en plein air together, with the transience of light and weather playing a major role in their work. By painting in sunlight directly from nature, and making bold use of the vivid, synthetic pigments available since the beginning of the century, they developed a lighter and brighter manner of painting. While Sisley most closely adhered to the original principals of the Impressionist perception of the landscape, Monet sought challenges in increasingly chromatic and changeable conditions.

Manet, Degas, Renoir, Morisot, and Cassatt concentrated primarily on the human subject. Both Manet and Degas reinterpreted classical figurative canons within contemporary situations; in Manet's case the re-imaginings met with hostile public reception. Renoir, Morisot, and Cassatt turned to domestic life for inspiration, with Renoir focusing on the female nude.

Russian impressionists include Valentin Serov (1865–1911). American Impressionists included Childe Hassam (1859–1935), John Henry Twachtman (1853–1902), and Theodore Robinson (1852–1896). It also exerted influence on painters who were not primarily impressionists, like the portrait and landscape painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).

Contemporaneously, American painting saw a native and nearly insular realism, displayed in the figurative work of Thomas Eakins (1775–1851), the Ashcan School, and the landscapes and seascapes of Winslow Homer (1836–1910), all of whose paintings were deeply invested in the solidity of natural forms. The visionary landscape, a motive largely dependent on the ambiguity of the nocturne, found its advocates in Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) and Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1917).

Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionists of Belle Époque Paris such as Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), and divisionist and pointillist Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859–1891) are seen as a precursor of 20th-century art, leading painting to the edge of modernism.

Cézanne wished to unite classical composition with a revolutionary abstraction of natural forms, while Van Gogh's turbulent method of paint application was coupled with a sonorous use of color. For Gauguin, Impressionism gave way to a personal symbolism. Seurat transformed Impressionism's broken color into a scientific optical study, structured on frieze-like compositions, attracting many followers such as Paul Signac (1863–1935).

Symbolism

In the late 19th century there also were several, rather dissimilar, groups of symbolist painters whose works resonated with younger artists of the 20th century, especially with the Fauvists and the Surrealists. Among them were the mysterious, Romanticism influenced Swiss Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) and parallelist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Frenchmen Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), and Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Belgian Les XX member Félicien Rops (1833–1898), Dutchmen Jan Toorop (1858–1928), Austrian Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), and Russian Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910).

Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than just an art style, Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and avant-garde Les Nabis, such as Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947).

20th century

20th century western painting influenced all the visual arts, from modernist architecture and design, to avant-garde film, theatre and modern dance; and became an experimental visual laboratory, from photography and concrete poetry to advertising art and fashion .

Fauvism

The heritage of Post-Impressionist painters was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and André Derain (1880–1954), along with several other artists including Georges Braque (1882–1963) , Charles Camoin (1879–1965) , Raoul Dufy (1877–1953), Albert Marquet (1875–1947), Dutchman Kees van Dongen (1877–1968) , and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that its critics called Fauvism after the Salon d'Automne of 1905. Fauvism had no concrete theories, and was short lived, no longer a shocking movement by 1907. Fauvism emphasized painterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values, following the spirit expressed in 1888 by Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) to Paul Sérusier (1864–1927),

How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.

Cubism

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), often contrasted with Matisse, made his first Cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. Picasso's style is reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own Cubist inventions. Picasso and Braque jointly developed Cubism from about 1908 through 1912, a school including Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), Albert Gleizes (1881–1953), Fernand Léger (1881–1973), Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946), and Robert Delaunay (1885–1941). Juan Gris (1887–1927), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), Joseph Csaky (1888–1971) and others soon joined. Synthetic cubism, practiced by Picasso and Braque, is characterized by different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter. Frenchman Delaunay and Czech František Kupka (1871–1957) were pioneers of Cubism-influence Orphism.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, several other important movements emerged following Cubism; such as Suprematism (Malevich) and Constructivism (Tatlin).

Expressionism

Symbolism and expressionism characterized several movements constituting much of the avant-garde art being made in Western, Eastern and Northern Europe (France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria), largely between World War I and World War II.

The expressionists included Marc Chagall, Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Chaïm Soutine, James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Georges Rouault, Amedeo Modigliani, and some Americans abroad such as Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis, were considered influential expressionist painters. While Alberto Giacometti was primarily a Surrealist sculptor, he also made intense expressionist paintings.

Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, including Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members included Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. This seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism.

Der Blaue Reiter was a German expressionist movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, including Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Lyonel Feininger and others. Der Blaue Reiter lacked a central artistic manifesto, but was centered around Kandinsky and Marc. Artists Gabriele Münter and Paul Klee were also involved.

Abstract art

Kandinsky is one of the first modern painters of abstract art. As an early modernist, he theorized, as did contemporary occultists and theosophists like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music. They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality, and Kandinsky penned Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Other major pioneers of abstract art include Swede Hilma af Klint, Russian Kazimir Malevich, and Swiss Paul Klee. Delauney's orphism influenced abstract painting with his bold use of color and his experimentation of both depth and tone. Synchromists such as Morgan Russell similarly were influenced by color's relation to music.

Piet Mondrian's art was also related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908 he became interested in theosophy, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge.

De Stijl also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917, including Theo van Doesburg , Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, and Bart van der Leck. De Stijl was also the name of a journal that was published by van Doesburg propagating the group's theories. The De Stijl movement was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about "ideal" geometric forms (such as the "perfect straight line") in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers.

Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order, advocating pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.

Futurism

Futurism was an artistic movement which glorified modernity and "aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past." The futurists were founded by poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), and included painters Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), Fortunato Depero (1876–1944), Gino Severini (1883–1966), Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), and Luigi Russolo (1885–1947).

American and European modernism, Bauhaus

American modernist painters during the period between World War I and World War II tended to go to Europe for recognition. Marsden Hartley, Patrick Henry Bruce, Stuart Davis, and Gerald Murphy created reputations abroad. Hartley experimented with expressionism, while Bruce created Cubist related paintings in Europe. During the 1920s photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Alfred Henry Maurer, Charles Demuth, John Marin and other artists including Europeans Matisse, Rodin, Henri Rousseau, Cézanne, and Picasso, at his New York City gallery the 291.

In Europe, Bonnard and Matisse continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement. The modernist Bauhaus movement saw painters influenced by De Stijl like Kandinsky and Klee utilize geometric shapes and balance.

Dada and Surrealism

Giorgio de Chirico moved to Paris in July 1911, joining his brother known as Alberto Savinio, who knew Pierre Laprade, a member of the Salon d'Automne jury, which exhibited his mysterious and dreamlike works, instrumental to the beginning of Surrealism. During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, noticed by Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire among others.

Marcel Duchamp came to international prominence in the wake of the New York City Armory Show in 1913. He subsequently pushed the art of painting to radical new limits using part painting, part collage, part construction. Duchamp, soon to renounce artmaking for chess, became closely associated with the Dada movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland during World War I, peaking from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily advanced its antiwar politic and rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Other artists associated with the Dada movement include Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Jean Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, which became synonymous with the avant-garde and featured artists whose works varied from the abstract to the super-realist. In 1924, André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto.

Francis Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. Yves Tanguy, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí are particularly known for their realistic depictions of dream imagery and fantastic manifestations of the imagination. Dalí and Magritte created some of the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935. Bernard Delvaille has described Magritte's surrealism as "Symbolism plus Freud".

During the 1920s André Masson's work was decisive in helping the young artist Joan Miró find his roots in Surrealist painting. Miró, Jean Arp, André Masson, and Max Ernst were very influential, especially in the United States during the 1940s. Ernst studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in Freud and the alternative realities experienced by the insane.

Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high-water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Surrealist groups in Japan, and especially in Latin America, the Caribbean and in Mexico produced innovative and original works. Other prominent surrealist artists include Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Leonor Fini.

Neue Sachlichkeit, Social realism, and American Scene painting

During the Great Depression in Germany, Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") emerged as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz and others politicized their paintings. The work of these artists grew out of expressionism, and was a response to the political tensions of the Weimar Republic, and was often sharply satirical.

Radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to Surrealism, including Picasso, who supported the revolutionaries during the Spanish Civil War.

From the Great Depression of the 1930s through the years of World War II and beyond, American art was characterized by Social Realism and American Scene Painting. Regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world in the USA. Artists such as George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Ben Shahn, Grant Wood, George Tooker, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh, and others became prominent. Precisionism and "Immaculate" painters such as Charles Demuth removed extravagant detail, considered proto pop-art.

In Italy during this time, Giorgio Morandi was the foremost still-life painter, exploring a wide variety of approaches to depicting everyday bottles and kitchen implements.

Abstract expressionism

During the 1930s through the 1960s, abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into abstract expressionism, which included Color Field painting, Post-painterly Abstraction, shaped canvas painting, Op art, hard-edge painting, Minimalism, and Lyrical Abstraction, and new forms of expressionism. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction with Art brut.

Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and Color Field painting were synonymous with the New York School. The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, combining lessons learned from European Modernists via American teachers like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors.

Post-Second World War American abstract expressionism included artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, John D. Graham, Fairfield Porter, Balthus, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Philip Pearlstein, Grace Hartigan, Robert De Niro, Sr., Elaine de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Tobey, James Brooks, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Conrad Marca-Relli, Jack Tworkov, Esteban Vicente, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Jimmy Ernst, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Theodoros Stamos, among others.

Gorky's work shows the evolution of abstract expressionism from the context of figure painting, cubism and surrealism. Gorky created bio-morphically shaped and abstracted figurative compositions that by the 1940s evolved into totally abstract paintings. Gorky's work seems to be a careful analysis of memory, emotion and shape, using line and color to express feeling and nature.

Porter was largely self-taught, and produced representational work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists.

After World War II the term School of Paris often referred to Tachisme, the European equivalent of American Abstract expressionism and those artists are also related to Cobra. Important proponents being Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff, and Georges Mathieu, among several others. During the early 1950s Dubuffet (who was always a figurative artist) and de Staël abandoned abstraction, and returned to imagery via figuration and landscape.

De Staël's return to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) during the early 1950s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters like Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, Joan Brown and others made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mid-1950s. Younger painters practiced the use of imagery in new and radical ways. New realist Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Christo, Niki de Saint Phalle, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl, and Vija Celmins were a few who became prominent between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Much of de Staël's late work – in particular his abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s – prefigures Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Avery through his use of color and his interest in seascape and landscape paintings connected with the Color field aspect of abstract expressionism as manifested by Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, as well as the lessons American painters took from Matisse.

Surrealism was an important predecessor for Abstract expressionism with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson. Another important early manifestation of abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all over" look of Pollock's drip paintings.

Additionally, Abstract expressionism has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic "action paintings", with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the sometimes violent and grotesque figurative paintings of Willem de Kooning.

Another important artist is Franz Kline, as demonstrated by his painting High Street (1950), who was labelled an action painter because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas.

Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in Mark Rothko's work (which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied was abstract), are classified as abstract expressionists, albeit from what Clement Greenberg termed the Color field direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell can be described as practitioners of action painting and Color field painting.

During the 1960s and 1970s artists as powerful and influential as Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Lee Krasner, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Agnes Martin, Sam Francis, Gene Davis, Joan Mitchell, Friedel Dzubas, and younger artists like Sam Gilliam, Sean Scully, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Murray, Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Joan Snyder, Richard Tuttle, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.

Color Field

Color Field painting refers to a particular type of abstract expressionism, especially the work of Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Zox It essentially involved abstract paintings with large, flat expanses of color that expressed the sensual, and visual feelings and properties of large areas of nuanced surface. Art critic Clement Greenberg perceived Color Field painting as related to but different from Action painting. The overall expanse and gestalt of the work of the early color field painters speaks of an almost religious experience, awestruck in the face of an expanding universe of sensuality, color and surface. Gene Davis along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and several others was a member of the Washington Color School painters who began to create Color Field paintings in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s and 1960s. Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Ronald Davis, Neil Williams, Robert Mangold, Charles Hinman, Richard Tuttle, David Novros, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s.

During the 1960s Color Field painting and Minimal art were often closely associated with each other. The convergence of Color Field painting, Minimal art, Hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction, and Postminimalism blurred the distinction between movements that became more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s.

Post-painterly abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction reacted against abstract expressionisms' mysticism, hyper-subjectivity, and emphasis on making the act of painting itself dramatically visible – as well as the solemn acceptance of the flat rectangle as an almost ritual prerequisite for serious painting.

Neo-dada

Neo-Dada is also a movement that started in the 1950s and 1960s and was related to Abstract expressionism only with imagery. This trend, in which manufactured items are combined with artist materials, is exemplified by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg's "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography. Rauschenberg, Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz among others created new conventions of art-making; they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion of unlikely materials as parts of their works of art.

Op-art and hard-edge

Many Geometric abstract artists, minimalists, and Hard-edge painters elected to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. Morris Louis was an important pioneer in advanced Colorfield painting, his work can serve as a bridge between Abstract expressionism, Colorfield painting, and Minimal Art. Two influential teachers, Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, introduced a new generation of American artists to their advanced theories of color and space. Albers is best remembered for his work as a Geometric abstractionist painter and theorist. Albers' theories on art and education were formative for the next generation of artists, forming the foundation of both hard-edge painting and Op art.

Stella, Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann, Ilya Bolotowsky, Burgoyne Diller, Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, John McLaughlin, Barnett Newman, Larry Poons, Ronald Davis, John Hoyland, Larry Zox, Al Held, Mino Argento are artists closely associated with Geometric abstraction, Op art, Color Field painting, and in the case of Hofmann and Newman Abstract expressionism as well. Agnes Martin, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Richard Tuttle, Neil Williams, David Novros, Paul Mogenson, are examples of artists associated with Minimalism and (exceptions of Martin, Baer and Marden) the use of the shaped canvas also during the period beginning in the early 1960s.

Still other important innovations in abstract painting took place during the 1960s and the 1970s characterized by Monochrome painting and Hard-edge painting inspired by Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Milton Resnick, and Ellsworth Kelly.

Lyrical Abstraction

Lyrical Abstraction in the late 1960s is characterized by the paintings of Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield, Peter Young and others, and along with the Fluxus movement and Postminimalism sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting.

Abstract illusionism

Abstract illusionism was derivative of expressionism and hard-edge.

Minimalism

One of the first artists associated with Minimalism was Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The widths of the stripes were not entirely subjective, but were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." Stell These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and emotionally charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and leaned more toward less gestural, coloristic field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

Artists such as Larry Poons—whose work related to Op Art with his emphasis on dots, ovals and after-images bouncing across color fields—Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had also begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 1950s through the 1960s.

Because of a tendency in Minimalism to favor the literal—as demonstrated by Robert Mangold, who understood the concept of the shape of the canvas and its relationship to objecthood—there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd started as a painter, but ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" influenced Minimalist aesthetics. Specific Objects were not comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture, a part of their value for Judd. Judd rejected the residual, inherited European artistic values in American art, endorsing an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Earl Ortman, who distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries.

In a much more general sense, one might find European roots of Minimalism in the geometric abstractions painters in the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, in Russian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. American painters such as Brice Marden and Cy Twombly show a clear European influence in their pure abstraction, minimalist painting of the 1960s. Ronald Davis polyurethane works from the late 1960s pay homage to Duchamp.

This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s.

The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Greenbergian critic Michael Fried, who objected on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act of observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled, which he saw as a failure.

Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."

Anti-art

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a reaction against painting. Critics like Douglas Crimp viewed the work of artists like Ad Reinhardt, and declared the "death of painting". Artists began to practice new ways of making art. New movements gained prominence some of which are: Happening, Video art, Installation art, Mail art, the situationists, Conceptual art, Earth art, arte povera, photorealism, performance art and body art among others.

Pop art

Pop art in America was to a large degree initially inspired by the works of Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and Robert Rauschenberg, although the paintings of Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth during the 1920s and 1930s foreshadow pop art.

In New York City during the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg and Johns created works of art that at first seemed to be continuations of Abstract expressionist painting. Actually their works, and the work of Larry Rivers, were radical departures from abstract expressionism especially in the use of banal and literal imagery and the inclusion of mundane materials into their work. Johns' use of various images and objects like chairs, numbers, targets, beer cans and the American Flag; Rivers' paintings of subjects drawn from popular culture such as George Washington crossing the Delaware, and his inclusions of images from advertisements like the camel from Camel cigarettes; and Rauschenberg's surprising constructions using inclusions of objects and pictures taken from popular culture, hardware stores, junkyards, the city streets, and taxidermy, gave rise to a radical new movement in American art. Eventually by 1963 the movement came to be known worldwide as Pop art.

Pop art is exemplified by the artists Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Wayne Thiebaud, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein among others. Warhol helped usher in Pop art as a major art movement that relied on themes from popular culture, merging popular and mass culture with fine art, while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery and content into the mix.

Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots to reproduce the appearance of commercial printing. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's." Pop art merges popular and mass culture with fine art, while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery and content into the mix.

Earlier in England in 1956 the term Pop Art was used by Lawrence Alloway for paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected Abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of English artist David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, and Eduardo Paolozzi, are considered seminal examples in the movement. In New York's East Village 10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of Pop art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. There is a connection between the radical works of Duchamp, and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists – with a sense of humor; and Pop Artists like Alex Katz, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and the others.

Neo-expressionism

In the late 1960s the abstract expressionist painter Philip Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects. These works were inspirational to a new generation of painters interested in a revival of expressive imagery. The Neo-expressionism movement is related to earlier developments in Abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, Lyrical Abstraction and Postminimal painting.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was also a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France and Britain. These movements were called Transavantguardia, Neue Wilde, Figuration Libre, Neo-expressionism, the school of London, and in the late 80s the Stuckists respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism.

Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting that became popular in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. It developed in Europe as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner) in a rough and violently emotional way using vivid colors and banal color harmonies. The veteran painters Philip Guston, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck and Georg Baselitz, along with the slightly younger artists Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, the Americans Eric Fischl, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Keith Haring, the Italians Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi, and many others became known for working in this intense expressionist vein of painting. Critical reaction was divided. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries.

Anselm Kiefer is a leading figure in European Neo-expressionism. By the 1980s, Kiefer's themes widened from a focus on Germany's role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involves not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult symbolism, theology and mysticism. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life.

Painting still holds a respected position in contemporary art. Art is an open field no longer divided by the objective versus non-objective dichotomy. Artists can achieve critical success whether their images are representational or abstract. What has currency is content, exploring the boundaries of the medium, and a refusal to recapitulate the works of the past as an end goal.

Contemporary painting

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, with the advent of Modern and Postmodern art forms, distinctions between what is generally regarded as the fine arts and the low arts have started to fade, as contemporary high art continues to challenge these concepts by mixing with popular culture.

Mainstream painting has been rejected by artists of the postmodern era in favor of artistic pluralism. According to art critic Arthur Danto there is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on", and consequently "nothing going on" syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity.