The history ofWestern painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition fromantiquity until the present time.^[1] Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned withrepresentational and traditional modes of production, after which time moremodern,abstract andconceptual forms gained favor.^[2]

Initially serving imperial, private, civic, and religious patronage, Western painting later found audiences in thearistocracy and the middle class. From theMiddle Ages through theRenaissance painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy.^[3] Beginning with theBaroque era artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class.^[4] The idea of "art for art's sake"^[5] began to find expression in the work of theRomantic painters likeFrancisco de Goya,John Constable, andJ. M. W. Turner.^[6] During the 19th century commercialgalleries became established and continued to provide patronage in the 20th century.^[7][8]

Western painting reached its zenith in Europe during the Renaissance, in conjunction with the refinement of drawing, use ofperspective, ambitious architecture,tapestry,stained glass, sculpture, and the period before and after the advent of theprinting press.^[9] Following the depth of discovery and the complexity of innovations of the Renaissance, the rich heritage of Western painting continued from theBaroque period toContemporary art.^[10]

• 
  AurochsCave painting,Lascaux, France
• 
  Lascaux,horse
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  Lascaux,Bulls and Horses
• 
  Petroglyphs, from Sweden,Nordic Bronze Age (painted)

Thehistory of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic artists, and spans all cultures. The oldest known paintings are at theGrotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted usingred ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth, or humans often hunting.

Prehistoric Europeancave paintings share common themes with other prehistoric paintings that have been found throughout the world; implying the universality of purpose and similarity of the impulses that might have inspired the artists to create the imagery.^{[citation needed]} Various conjectures have been made as to the meaning these paintings had to the artists who made them. Prehistoric men may have painted animals to "catch" theirsoul or spirit in order to hunt them more easily, or the paintings may represent ananimistic vision and homage to surroundingnature, or they may be the result of a basic need ofexpression that isinnate to human beings, or they may be recordings of the life experiences of the artists and related stories from the members of their circle.

• 
  Knossos,Minoan civilization,Bronze AgeCrete
• 
  Fresco of aMycenaean woman
• 
  Pitsa panels, one of the few surviving panel paintings fromArchaic Greece, c. 540–530 BC
• 
  Symposium scene in theTomb of the Diver atPaestum,c. 480 BCGreek art
• 
  Mural ofsoldiers fromAgios Athanasios, Thessaloniki,Ancient Macedonia, 4th century BC
• 
  Banquet fresco detail from the tomb ofAgios Athanasios, Thessaloniki, Greece, 4th century BC
• 
  Hellenistic Greekterracotta funerarywall painting, 3rd century BC
• 
  Fresco of anancient Macedonian soldier (thorakitai) wearingchainmail armor and bearing athureos shield, 3rd century BC
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  Roman art,Pompeii,Villa of the Mysteries, c. 60–50 BC
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  Roman art showingHercules andTelephus
• 
  Roman art,Villa Boscoreale frescos, c. 40 BC
• 
  Roman art, Pompeii
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  Roman art, Pompeii
• 
  Banquet scene,fresco,Herculaneum, Italy, c. 50 BC
• 
  Roman art,Fayum mummy portraits fromRoman Egypt, c. 120–130 AD
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  Roman art from theHouse of the Vettii, Pompeii, 1st century AD
• 
  Cupids playing with alyre, Roman fresco fromHerculaneum
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  Roman fresco with a seatedVenus, the so-called "Dea Barberini", 4th century AD
• 
  Roman art,Fayum mummy portraits fromRoman Egypt
• 
  Silenus playing thelyre, from theVilla of the Mysteries,Pompeii, c. 50 BC
• 
  Roman glass with a painted figure of agladiator, found atBegram,Afghanistan (once part of theGreco-Bactrian Kingdom, then under theKushan Empire), 52–125 AD^[11]
• 
  Dura Europos Synagogue,Roman Syria, fresco showingDavid anointed bySamuel, 3rd century AD

Minoan painting is the art produced by theBronze AgeAegeanMinoan civilization from about 3000 to 1100 BC, though the most extensive and finest survivals come from approximately 2300 to 1400 BC. It forms part of the wider grouping ofAegean art, and in later periods came for a time to have a dominant influence overCycladic art. Since wood and textiles have decomposed, the best-preserved (and most instructive) surviving examples of Minoan art are itspottery, palace architecture (withfrescos which include "the earliest pure landscapes anywhere"),^[12] small sculptures in various materials, jewellery, metal vessels, andintricately-carved seals.

It was influenced by the neighbouring cultures ofAncient Egypt and theancient Near East, which had produced sophisticated urban art for much longer, but the character of the small but wealthy mercantile Minoan cities was 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".^[13] All these aspects of the Minoan culture remain rather mysterious.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".^[14]

The largest and best collection of Minoan art is in theHeraklion Archaeological Museum ("AMH") nearKnossos, on the northern coast of Crete. Minoan art and other remnants ofmaterial culture, especially the sequence of ceramic styles, have been used by archaeologists to definethe three main phases ofMinoan culture (EM, MM, LM), and their many sub-phases. The dates to be attached to these remain much discussed, although within narrowing ranges.^[15]

The relationship of Minoan art to that of other contemporary cultures and laterAncient Greek art has been much discussed. It clearly dominatedMycenaean art andCycladic art of the same periods,^[16] even after Crete was occupied by the Mycenaeans, but only some aspects of the tradition survived theGreek Dark Ages after the collapse ofMycenaean Greece.^[17]

Around 1100 BC, tribes from the north of Greece conquered Greece and its art took a new direction. The culture ofancient Greece is noteworthy for its outstanding contributions to the visual arts. Painting onpottery of ancient Greece andceramics gives a particularly informative glimpse into the way society in ancient Greece functioned. Many fine examples ofblack-figure vase painting andred-figure vase painting still exist.

Some famous Greek painters who worked on wood panels and are mentioned in texts areApelles,Zeuxis andParrhasius; however, with the single exception of thePitsa panels, no examples of ancient Greek panel painting survive, only written descriptions by their contemporaries or later Romans. Zeuxis lived in the 5th century BC and was said to be the first to usesfumato. According toPliny the Elder, the realism of his paintings was such that birds tried to eat the painted grapes. Apelles is described as the greatest painter ofantiquity, and is noted for perfect technique in drawing, brilliant color, and modeling.

Roman art was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as a descendant of ancient Greek painting. However, Roman painting does have important unique characteristics. Surviving Roman paintings include wall paintings andfrescoes, many from villas inCampania, in Southern Italy at sites such asPompeii andHerculaneum. Such painting can be grouped into 4 main "styles" or periods^[18] and may contain the first examples oftrompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape.^[19]

Almost the only painted portraits surviving from the ancient world are a large number ofcoffin-portraits of bust form found in the Egyptian cemetery ofAl-Fayum. Although these were neither of the best period nor the highest quality, they are impressive in themselves, and give an idea of the quality that the finest ancient work must have had. A very small number ofminiatures from Late Antique illustrated books also survive, and a rather larger number of copies of them from the early medieval period.

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  Byzantineicon, 6th century
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  Byzantine, 6th century
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  Book of Kells
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  Book of Kells
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  Carolingian
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  CarolingianSaint Mark
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  The Morgan Leaf, from theWinchester Bible 1160–75, Scenes from the life ofDavid
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  Yaroslavl Gospels c. 1220s
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  Cimabue
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  Bonaventura Berlinghieri,St Francis of Assisi, 1235
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  Giottino
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  Vitale da Bologna
• 
  Simone Martini
• 
  Andrei Rublev
• 
  Andrei Rublev
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  Ambrogio Lorenzetti
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  Pietro Lorenzetti
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  Duccio
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  Limbourg Brothers

The rise of Christianity imparted a different spirit and aim to painting styles.Byzantine art, once its style was established by the 6th century, placed great emphasis on retaining traditionaliconography and style, and gradually evolved during the thousand years of theByzantine Empire and the living traditions of Greek and RussianOrthodoxicon-painting. Byzantine painting has a hieratic feeling and icons were and still are seen as a representation of divine revelation. There were manyfrescos, but fewer of these have survived thanmosaics.Byzantine art has been compared to contemporaryabstraction, in its flatness and highly stylised depictions of figures and landscape. Some periods of Byzantine art, especially the so-calledMacedonian art of around the 10th century, are more flexible in approach. Frescoes of the Palaeologian Renaissance of the early 14th century survive in theChora Church in Istanbul.

In post-Antique Catholic Europe the first distinctive artistic style to emerge that included painting was theInsular art of the British Isles, where the only surviving examples are miniatures inIlluminated manuscripts such as theBook of Kells.^[20] These are most famous for their abstract decoration, although figures, and sometimes scenes, were also depicted, especially inEvangelist portraits.Carolingian andOttonian art also survives mostly in manuscripts, although some wall-painting remain, and more are documented. The art of this period combines Insular and "barbarian" influences with a strong Byzantine influence and an aspiration to recover classical monumentality and poise.

Walls ofRomanesque andGothic churches were decorated withfrescoes as well as sculpture and many of the few remainingmurals have great intensity, and combine the decorative energy of Insular art with a new monumentality in the treatment of figures. Far more miniatures inIlluminated manuscripts survive from the period, showing the same characteristics, which continue into theGothic period.

Panel painting becomes more common during theRomanesque period, under the heavy influence of Byzantine icons. Towards the middle of the 13th century,Medieval art andGothic painting became more realistic, with the beginnings of interest in the depiction of volume and perspective in Italy withCimabue and then his pupilGiotto. From Giotto on, the treatment of composition by the best painters also became much more free and innovative. They are considered to be the two great medieval masters of painting in western culture. Cimabue, within the Byzantine tradition, used a more realistic and dramatic approach to his art. His pupil, Giotto, took these innovations to a higher level which in turn set the foundations for the western painting tradition. Both artists were pioneers in the move towards naturalism.

Churches were built with more and more windows and the use of colorfulstained glass become a staple in decoration. One of the most famous examples of this is found in the cathedral ofNotre Dame de Paris. By the 14th century Western societies were both richer and more cultivated and painters found new patrons in the nobility and even thebourgeoisie. Illuminated manuscripts took on a new character and slim, fashionably dressed court women were shown in their landscapes. This style soon became known asInternational Gothic style and was dominant from 1375 to 1425 with andtempera panel paintings and altarpieces gaining importance.

• 
  Jan van Eyck, 1434
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  Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435
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  Hugo van der Goes, c. 1470
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  Dieric Bouts, 1464–1467
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  Hans Memling, c. 1466–1473
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  Petrus Christus, c. 1470
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  Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1480–1505
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  Paolo Uccello, c. 1470
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  Masaccio, 1426–1427
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  Filippo Lippi, 1440–1445
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  Andrea Mantegna, c. 1458–1460
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  Piero della Francesca, 1463–1465
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  Sandro Botticelli, 1483–1485
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  Leonardo da Vinci, 1503–1506
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  Raphael, 1505–1506
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  Michelangelo, c. 1511
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  Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530
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  Albrecht Dürer, 1500
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  Matthias Grünewald, 1512–1516
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  Giovanni Bellini, c. 1480
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  Giorgione, c. 1505
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  Pontormo, 1526–1528
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  Bronzino, 1540–1545
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  Pieter Bruegel, 1565
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  Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527
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  Jacopo Tintoretto, 1582
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  Paolo Veronese, 1562–1563
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  Joachim Wtewael, 1595
• 
  El Greco, 1596–1600

The Renaissance (French for 'rebirth'), a cultural movement roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th century, was driven byRenaissance humanism and the study of classical sources. In painting, in the 1420s and 1430s leading painters in Italy and theLow Countries separately developed new ways of painting which allowed the paintings to appear more realistic than in the works of established painters, whose style is referred to asInternational Gothic, or in some cases as Proto-Renaissance (mainly in Italy). This period, lasting until about 1495, became known as theEarly Renaissance.

In the Flanders area of the Low Countries, following developments made in theillumination of manuscripts, especially by theLimbourg Brothers, who died in 1416, artists became fascinated by the tangible in the visible world and began representing objects in an extremely naturalistic way.^[21] The adoption ofoil painting whose first use onpanel paintings was traditionally, but erroneously, credited toJan van Eyck, made possible a newverisimilitude in depicting this naturalism. The medium of oil paint was already present in the work ofMelchior Broederlam (who died in 1409), butRobert Campin (previously known asthe Master of Flémalle) and van Eyck brought its use to new heights and employed it to represent the naturalism for which they were aiming. With this new medium, the painters of this period were capable of creating richer colors with a deep intense tonality. The illusion of glowing light with a porcelain-like finish characterizedEarly Netherlandish painting and was a major difference to the matte surface oftempera paint used in Italy.^[21]

Unlike the Italians, whose work drew heavily from the art of ancient Rome, the northerners retained a stylistic residue of the sculpture andilluminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages (especially its naturalism). Another important Netherlandish painter of this period wasRogier van der Weyden, a pupil of Campin, whose compositions stressed human emotion and drama, demonstrated for instance in hisDescent from the Cross, which ranks among the most famous works of the 15th century and was the most influential Netherlandish painting of Christ's crucifixion. Other important artists wereHugo van der Goes (whose work was highly influential in Italy),Dieric Bouts (who was among the first northern painters to demonstrate the use of a single vanishing point),^[21]Petrus Christus,Hans Memling andGerard David. Collectively, the advances in painting in Europe north of the Alps is known as theNorthern Renaissance.

InItalian Renaissance painting, the art ofClassical antiquity inspired a style of painting that emphasized the ideal.Masaccio is credited with 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. Then, artists such asPaolo Uccello,Fra Angelico,Piero della Francesca,Andrea Mantegna,Filippo Lippi, andSandro Botticelli, in theEarly Renaissance period lasting to about 1495, and thenLeonardo da Vinci,Michelangelo Buonarroti, andRaphael during theHigh Renaissance from about 1495 to 1520, took painting to a higher level through the use ofperspective, the study ofhuman anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques. A somewhat more naturalistic High Renaissance style emerged inVenice. Painters of theVenetian school, such asGiovanni Bellini,Giorgione,Titian, andVeronese, were 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.

Flemish, Dutch and German painters of theNorthern High Renaissance such asAlbrecht Dürer,Lucas Cranach,Matthias Grünewald, andHans Holbein the Younger had a different approach than their Italian counterparts, one that is more realistic and less idealized. Some northern painters, beginning with Dürer in the 1490s, traveled to Italy to see works of the Italian High Renaissance and they incorporated the features of the Italian art into their own to varying degrees. A generation later, the start ofgenre painting as a subject for large works began withPeter Aertsen andPieter Bruegel. A later generation of Northern Renaissance painters who traveled to Rome and adopted much of the idealized approach of the Italian Renaissance became known asRomanists.

Renaissance painting reflects the revolution of ideas and science (astronomy,geography) that occurred in this period, theReformation, and the invention of theprinting press.Printmaking became increasingly important, and practiced by many painters. Dürer, considered one of the greatest of printmakers, states that painters are not mereartisans butthinkers as well. With the development ofeasel painting in the Renaissance, painting gained independence from architecture. Easel paintings—movable pictures which could be hung easily on walls—became a popular alternative to paintings fixed to furniture, walls or other structures. Following centuries dominated by religious imagery, secular subject matter slowly returned to Western painting. 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.

TheHigh Renaissance in Italy gave rise to a stylized art known asMannerism after 1520, although some painters, such as Titian andPaolo Veronese, continued painting in a High Renaissance style late into the century. 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 Virgins of Raphael and serene expressions of Leonardo's subjects are replaced by the troubled expressions ofPontormo and the emotional intensity ofEl Greco. Restless and unstable compositions, often extreme or disjunctive effects of perspective, and stylized poses are characteristic of Italian Mannerists such asTintoretto, Pontormo, andBronzino, and appeared later in the work ofNorthern Mannerists such asHendrick Goltzius,Bartholomeus Spranger, andJoachim Wtewael.

• 
  Caravaggio, 1595–1597
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  Artemisia Gentileschi, 1614–1620
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  Peter Paul Rubens, 1632–1635
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  Frans Hals, 1624
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  Judith Leyster, 1630
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  Rembrandt van Rijn, 1642
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  Pieter de Hooch, 1658
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  Johannes Vermeer, c. 1660
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  Jan Steen, c. 1665
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  Jacob van Ruisdael, 1670
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  Willem Claesz. Heda, 1631
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  Diego Velázquez, 1656–1657
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  Jusepe de Ribera, 1620–1624
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  Nicolas Poussin, c. 1637–1638
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  Georges de La Tour, 1640s
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  Guido Reni, 1625
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  Salvator Rosa, c. 1645
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  Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, c. 1650–1655
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  Claude Lorrain, 1648
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  Anthony van Dyck, 1635–1636
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  Canaletto, 1723
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  Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, c. 1752–1753
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  Antoine Watteau, c. 1720
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  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, c. 1767–1768
• 
  François Boucher, 1751
• 
  Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, after 1782
• 
  Maurice Quentin de La Tour, c. 1761
• 
  Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1770
• 
  Joshua Reynolds, 1769
• 
  Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, c. 1728
• 
  William Hogarth, c. 1757
• 
  Angelica Kauffman, c. 1780

Baroque painting is associated with theBaroquecultural movement, a movement often identified withAbsolutism and theCounter Reformation or Catholic Revival;^[22][23] the existence of important Baroque painting in non-absolutist and Protestant states also, however, underscores its popularity, as the style spread throughout Western Europe.^[24]

Baroque painting is characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, and intense light and dark shadows with the purpose of the art being to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance. The earliest Baroque painters included the Caracci brothers,Annibale andAgostino, in the last score of the 16th century, andCaravaggio in the last decade of the century. Caravaggio is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque painters and an heir of thehumanist painting of theHigh Renaissance. Hisrealistic approach to the human figure, painted directly from life and dramatically spotlit against a dark background, shocked his contemporaries and opened a new chapter in the history of painting. Baroque was the dominant style of painting beginning around 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century. Among the greatest painters of the Baroque areRubens,Velázquez,Rembrandt,Frans Hals,Johannes Vermeer,Le Nain,Jusepe de Ribera,Poussin,Tour, andClaude Lorraine, who focused on landscape painting. Poussin, Claude and La Tour, all French, adopted a "classical" Baroque style with less focus on emotion and greater attention to the outine of the figures in the painting than on colour. Most of these painters traveled to Italy as part of their training and would then take the Baroque style back to their homelands, although in some cases they remained in Italy for large portions of their career (Claude and Poussin). In Italy, the Baroque style is epitomized by religious and mythological paintings in theGrand Manner by artists such asthe Carracci,Guido Reni, andLuca Giordano. Illusionistic church ceiling frescoes byPietro da Cortona seemed to open to the sky.

A much quieter type of Baroque emerged in theDutch Republic, where easel paintings of everyday subjects were popular with middle-class collectors, and many painters became specialists ingenre, others in landscape or seascape or still life. Vermeer,Gerard ter Borch, andPieter de Hooch brought great technical refinement to the painting of domestic scenes, as didWillem Claesz. Heda to still life. In contrast, Rembrandt excelled in painting every type of subject, and developed an individualpainterly style in which the chiaroscuro and dark backgrounds derived from Caravaggio and theUtrecht Caravaggists lose their theatrical quality. Dutch Baroque painting is often referred to asDutch Golden Age Painting.

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.Louis XV's succession brought a change in the court artists and general artistic fashion. The 1730s represented the height of Rococo development in France exemplified by the works ofAntoine Watteau andFrançois Boucher. Rococo still maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns, but by this point, it had begun to integrate a variety of diverse characteristics, including a taste for Oriental designs and asymmetric compositions.

The Rococo style spread with French artists and engraved publications. It was readily received in the Catholic parts of Germany,Bohemia, and Austria, where it was merged with the lively German Baroque traditions. German Rococo was applied with enthusiasm to churches and palaces, particularly in the south, whileFrederician Rococo developed in theKingdom of Prussia.

The French mastersWatteau,Boucher andFragonard represent the style, as doGiovanni Battista Tiepolo andJean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin who was considered by some as the best French painter of the 18th century – theAnti-Rococo.Portraiture was an important component of painting in all countries, but especially in England, where the leaders wereWilliam Hogarth, in a blunt realist style, andFrancis Hayman,Angelica Kauffman (who was Swiss),Thomas Gainsborough andJoshua Reynolds in more flattering styles influenced byAnthony van Dyck. In France during the Rococo eraJean-Baptiste Greuze (the favorite painter ofDenis Diderot),^[25] excelled in portraits andhistory paintings, andMaurice Quentin de La Tour andÉlisabeth Vigée-Lebrun were highly accomplishedportrait painters. La Tour specialized inpastel painting, which became a popular medium during this period.

William Hogarth helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in hisAnalysis of Beauty (1753) that the 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 inClassicism). The beginning of the end for Rococo came in the early 1760s as figures likeVoltaire andJacques-François Blondel began to voice their criticism of the superficiality and degeneracy of the art. Blondel decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants" in contemporary interiors.^[26]

By 1785, Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced by the order and seriousness ofNeoclassical artists such asJacques-Louis David, whose imposing history paintings depicting both historical and contemporary events embodied the ideals of theFrench Revolution.

• 
  Jacques-Louis David, 1787
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  John Singleton Copley, 1778
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  Antoine-Jean Gros, 1804
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  John Constable, 1802
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  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1808
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  Francisco Goya, 1814
• 
  Théodore Géricault, 1819
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  Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1822
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  Karl Brullov, 1827
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  Eugène Delacroix, 1830
• 
  J. M. W. Turner, 1838
• 
  Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850
• 
  Gustave Courbet, 1849–1850
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  Albert Bierstadt, 1866
• 
  Camille Corot, c. 1867
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  Camille Pissarro 1872
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  Claude Monet, 1872
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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876
• 
  Edgar Degas, 1876
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  Édouard Manet, 1882
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  Mary Cassatt, 1893–1894
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  Valentin Serov, 1887
• 
  Vincent van Gogh, 1888
• 
  Arnold Böcklin, 1883
• 
  Ilya Repin, 1891
• 
  Paul Gauguin, 1897–1898
• 
  Georges-Pierre Seurat, 1884–1886
• 
  Thomas Eakins, 1884–1885
• 
  Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1890
• 
  Winslow Homer, 1899
• 
  Ferdinand Hodler, 1906
• 
  Paul Cézanne, 1906

AfterRococo there arose in the late 18th century, in architecture, and then in painting severeneo-classicism, best represented by such artists asDavid and his heirIngres. Ingres' work already contains much of the sensuality, but none of the spontaneity, that was to characterizeRomanticism.

By the mid-19th century, painters became liberated from the demands of their patronage to only depict scenes from religion, mythology, portraiture or history. Art became more purely a means of personal expression in the work of painters likeFrancisco de Goya,John Constable, andJ. M. W. Turner. Romantic painters turnedlandscape painting into a major genre, considered until then as a minor genre or as a decorative background for figure compositions.Some of the major painters of this period areEugène Delacroix,Théodore Géricault, J. M. W. Turner,Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable. Francisco Goya's late work demonstrates the Romantic interest in the irrational, the work ofArnold Böcklin evokes mystery, the work of thePre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England combines assiduous devotion to nature with nostalgia for medieval culture, and the paintings ofAesthetic movement artistJames Abbott McNeill Whistler evoke sophistication,decadence, and the philosophy of "art for art's sake". In the United States the Romantic tradition of landscape painting was known as theHudson River School:^[27] exponents includeThomas Cole,Frederic Edwin Church,Albert Bierstadt,Thomas Moran, andJohn Frederick Kensett.Luminism was a movement in American landscape painting related to the Hudson River School.

A major force in the turn towardsRealism at mid-century wasGustave Courbet, whose unidealized paintings of common people offended viewers accustomed to the conventional subject matter andlicked finish ofacademic art, but inspired many younger artists. The leadingBarbizon School painterJean-François Millet also painted landscapes and scenes of peasant life. Loosely associated with the Barbizon School wasCamille Corot, who painted in both a romantic and arealistic vein; his work prefiguresImpressionism, as did the paintings ofJohan Jongkind andEugène Boudin (who was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors). Boudin was an important influence on the youngClaude Monet, whom in 1857 he introduced toplein air painting.

In the latter third of the century Impressionists such asÉdouard Manet, Claude Monet,Pierre-Auguste Renoir,Camille Pissarro,Alfred Sisley,Berthe Morisot,Mary Cassatt, andEdgar Degas 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. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley used the landscape as their primary motif, the transience of light and weather playing a major role in their work. Following a practice that had become increasingly popular by mid-century, they often ventured into the countryside together to paint in the open air, but not for the traditional purpose of making sketches to be developed into carefully finished works in the studio.^[28] By painting in sunlight directly from nature, and making bold use of the vivid synthetic pigments that had become available since the beginning of the century, they developed a lighter and brighter manner of painting.

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. 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, culminating in his series of monumental works ofWater Lilies painted inGiverny.

Post-Impressionists such asPaul Cézanne and the slightly youngerVincent van Gogh,Paul Gauguin, andGeorges-Pierre Seurat led art to the edge ofmodernism. 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. The painting technique he developed, calledDivisionism, attracted many followers such asPaul Signac, and for a few years in the late 1880s Pissarro adopted some of his methods. Van Gogh's turbulent method of paint application, coupled with a sonorous use of color, predictedExpressionism andFauvism, and Cézanne, desiring to unite classical composition with a revolutionary abstraction of natural forms, would come to be seen as a precursor of 20th-century art.

The spell of Impressionism was felt throughout the world, including in the United States, where it became integral to the painting ofAmerican Impressionists such asChilde Hassam,John Henry Twachtman, andTheodore Robinson. It also exerted influence on painters who were not primarily Impressionistic in theory, like the portrait and landscape painterJohn Singer Sargent. At the same time in America at the turn of the 20th century there existed a native and nearly insular realism, as richly embodied in the figurative work ofThomas Eakins, theAshcan School, and the landscapes and seascapes ofWinslow Homer, 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 inAlbert Pinkham Ryder andRalph Albert Blakelock.

In the late 19th century there also were several, rather dissimilar, groups ofSymbolist painters whose works resonated with younger artists of the 20th century, especially with theFauvists and theSurrealists. Among them wereGustave Moreau,Odilon Redon,Pierre Puvis de Chavannes,Henri Fantin-Latour,Arnold Böcklin,Ferdinand Hodler,Edvard Munch,Félicien Rops,Jan Toorop, andGustav Klimt, and theRussian Symbolists such asMikhail Vrubel.

Symbolist painters minedmythology 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 familiaremblems of mainstreamiconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporaryArt Nouveau movement andLes Nabis. In their exploration of dreamlike subjects, symbolist painters are found across centuries and cultures, as they are still today;Bernard Delvaille has describedRené Magritte's surrealism as "Symbolism plusFreud".^[29]

• 
  Henri Matisse, 1905,Fauvism
• 
  Henri Rousseau, 1905, the reason for the term Fauvism] and the original "Wild Beast"
• 
  Henri Matisse, 1909, late Fauvism
• 
  Pablo Picasso, 1907, earlyCubism
• 
  Georges Braque, 1910,Analytic Cubism
• 
  Juan Gris, 1912, Cubism
• 
  Giorgio de Chirico, 1914, pre-Surrealism

The heritage of painters likeVan Gogh,Cézanne,Gauguin, andSeurat was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th centuryHenri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubistGeorges Braque,André Derain,Raoul Dufy andMaurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics calledFauvism. Henri Matisse's second version ofThe Dance signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.^[30] It reflects Matisse's incipient fascination withprimitive art: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation andhedonism.Pablo Picasso made his firstcubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids:cube,sphere andcone. With the paintingLes Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso created a new and radical picture depicting a brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent ofAfrican tribal masks and his own Cubist inventions.Cubism was jointly developed from about 1908 through 1912 by Pablo Picasso andGeorges Braque, whoseViolin and Candlestick, Paris (1910) is shown here. The first clear manifestation of Cubism was practised by Braque, Picasso,Jean Metzinger,Albert Gleizes,Fernand Léger,Henri Le Fauconnier, andRobert Delaunay.Juan Gris,Marcel Duchamp,Alexander Archipenko,Joseph Csaky and others soon joined.^[31]Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque and Picasso, is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces,collage elements,papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.^[31]

TheSalon d'Automne of 1905 brought notoriety and attention to the works ofHenri Matisse andFauvism. The group gained their name after criticLouis Vauxcelles described their work with the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"),^[32] contrasting the paintings with aRenaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.^[33] The jungle sceneThe Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope byHenri Rousseau (who was not a Fauve) hung near the works by Matisse and may have inspired the sarcastic term used in the press.^[34] Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in the daily newspaperGil Blas, and passed into popular usage.^[33][35]

In the first two decades of the 20th century and after cubism, several other important movements emerged;Futurism (Balla),Abstract art (Kandinsky)Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky andFranz Marc),Bauhaus (Kandinsky andKlee),Orphism, (Delaunay andKupka),Synchromism (Russell),De Stijl (van Doesburg andMondrian),Suprematism (Malevich),Constructivism (Tatlin),Dadaism (Duchamp,Picabia andArp), andSurrealism (de Chirico,André Breton,Miró,Magritte,Dalí andErnst). Modern painting influenced all the visual arts, fromModernist architecture and design, toavant-garde film, theatre andmodern dance and became an experimental laboratory for the expression of visual experience, from photography andconcrete poetry toadvertising art and fashion.

• 
  Wassily Kandinsky,Der Blaue Reiter, 1903
• 
  Henri Matisse,The Green Stripe,Fauvism, 1905
• 
  André Derain,Fauvism, 1906
• 
  Maurice de Vlaminck,Fauvism, 1906
• 
  Alexej von Jawlensky,Der Blaue Reiter, 1909

Fauvism was a loose grouping of early 20th-century artists whose works emphasizedpainterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. The leaders of the movement wereHenri Matisse andAndré Derain – friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. UltimatelyMatisse became theyang toPicasso'syin in the 20th century. Fauvist painters includedAlbert Marquet,Charles Camoin,Maurice de Vlaminck,Raoul Dufy,Othon Friesz, the Dutch painterKees van Dongen, and Picasso's partner in Cubism,Georges Braque amongst others.^[36]

Fauvism had no concrete theories, and was short lived, beginning in 1905 and ending in 1907. They had only three exhibitions. Matisse was seen as the leader of the movement, due to his seniority in age and prior self-establishment in the academic art world. His 1905 portrait of Mme. Matisse,The Green Stripe, caused a sensation in Paris when it was first exhibited. He said he wanted to create art to delight, and it can be said that his use of bright colors tries to maintain serenity of composition. In 1906 at the suggestion of his dealerAmbroise Vollard, André Derain went to London and produced a series of paintings includingCharing Cross Bridge, London in theFauvist style, paraphrasing the famous series by theImpressionist painterClaude Monet.

By 1907 Fauvism no longer was a shocking new movement, andAppolinaire said of Matisse in an article published inLa Falange, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable."^[37]

Die Brücke was a group of Germanexpressionist artists formed inDresden in 1905. Founding members wereFritz Bleyl,Erich Heckel,Ernst Ludwig Kirchner andKarl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members includedMax Pechstein andOtto Mueller. This seminal group had a major impact on the evolution ofmodern art in the 20th century and created the style ofExpressionism.^[38]

Der Blaue Reiter was a German movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism.Wassily Kandinsky,Franz Marc,August Macke,Alexej von Jawlensky, whose psychically expressive painting of the Russian dancerPortrait ofAlexander Sakharoff (1909) is seen here,Marianne von Werefkin,Lyonel Feininger and others founded the Der Blaue Reiter group in response to the rejection of Kandinsky's paintingLast Judgement from an exhibition. Der Blaue Reiter lacked a central artistic manifesto, but was centered around Kandinsky and Marc. ArtistsGabriele Münter andPaul Klee were also involved. The name of the movement comes froma 1903 painting by Kandinsky. For Kandinsky,blue is the color of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal.^[39]

• 
  Gustav Klimt,Expressionism, 1907–1908
• 
  Marc Chagall,Expressionism andSurrealism, 1911
• 
  Arthur Dove, earlyAmerican modernism, 1911
• 
  Egon Schiele,Symbolism andExpressionism, 1912
• 
  Pierre Bonnard, 1913, Europeanmodernist Narrative painting
• 
  Amedeo Modigliani,Symbolism andExpressionism, 1917
• 
  Marsden Hartley,American modernism, 1914
• 
  Paul Klee,Bauhaus, 1921
• 
  Stuart Davis,American modernism, 1921
• 
  Patrick Henry Bruce,American modernism, 1929–1930

Expressionism andSymbolism are broad rubrics that involve several related movements in 20th-century painting that dominated much of theavant-garde art being made in Western, Eastern and Northern Europe. Expressionist works were painted largely between World War I and World War II, mostly in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria.Fauvism,Die Brücke, andDer Blaue Reiter are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters.Marc Chagall's paintingI and the Village tells an autobiographical story that examines the relationship between the artist and his origins, with a lexicon of artistic Symbolism.Gustav Klimt,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 asMarsden Hartley andStuart Davis, were considered influential expressionist painters. AlthoughAlberto Giacometti is primarily thought of as a Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well.

American painters during the period between World War I and World War II tended to go to Europe for recognition.Modernist artists like Marsden Hartley,Patrick Henry Bruce,Gerald Murphy and Stuart Davis created reputations abroad. While Patrick Henry Bruce^[40] createdcubist related paintings in Europe, both Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy made paintings that were early inspirations for Americanpop art^[41][42][43] and Marsden Hartley experimented with expressionism. During the 1920s photographerAlfred Stieglitz exhibitedGeorgia O'Keeffe,Arthur Dove,Alfred Henry Maurer,Charles Demuth,John Marin and other artists including European Masters Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Henri Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, and Picasso, at his New York City gallerythe 291.^[44] In Europe masters like Henri Matisse andPierre Bonnard continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement.

• 
  Piet Mondrian, 1911, earlyDe Stijl
• 
  Robert Delaunay, 1912,Simultaneous Windows on the City,Kunsthalle Hamburg,Orphism andDada
• 
  Wassily Kandinsky, 1913, birth ofAbstract Art

Wassily Kandinsky is generally considered one of the first important painters ofmodernabstract art. As an earlymodernist, he theorized as did contemporaryoccultists andtheosophists, that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music. They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality. His earliest abstractions were generally titled as the example in theComposition VII, making connection to the work of the composers of music. Kandinsky included many of his theories about abstract art in his bookConcerning the Spiritual in Art. Other major pioneers of early abstraction include Swedish painterHilma af Klint, Russian painterKazimir Malevich, and Swiss painterPaul Klee.Robert Delaunay was a French artist who is associated withOrphism, (reminiscent of a link between pure abstraction and cubism). His key contributions to abstract painting refer to his bold use of color and his experimentation of both depth and tone.

• 
  Francis Picabia, 1916,Dada
• 
  Max Ernst, 1921), Surrealism
• 
  André Masson, 1922, earlySurrealism
• 
  Kurt Schwitters, 1919,painted collage, Dada
• 
  Hannah Höch, collage, 1919, Dada
• 
  Max Ernst, 1920, early Surrealism
• 
  Joan Miró,Horse, Pipe and Red Flower, 1920, early Surrealism

Marcel Duchamp came to international prominence in the wake of the New York CityArmory Show in 1913 where hisNude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 became a cause célèbre. He subsequently createdThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,Large Glass. TheLarge Glass pushed the art of painting to radical new limits being part painting, part collage, part construction. Duchamp (who was soon to renounce artmaking for chess) became closely associated with theDada movement that began in neutralZürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic design to advance its antiwar politic and rejection of the prevailing standards in art throughanti-art cultural works. Other artists associated with the Dada movement includeFrancis Picabia,Man Ray,Kurt Schwitters,Hannah Höch,Tristan Tzara,Hans Richter,Jean Arp, andSophie Taeuber-Arp. Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, the movement that dominated European painting in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1924André Breton published theSurrealist Manifesto. TheSurrealist movement in painting became synonymous with theavant-garde and featured artists whose works varied from the abstract to the super-realist. With works on paper likeMachine Turn Quickly, 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 andSalvador Dalí are particularly known for their realistic depictions of dream imagery and fantastic manifestations of the imagination. During the 1920sAndré Masson's work was decisive in helping the young artistJoan Miró find his roots in Surrealist painting. Miró'sThe Tilled Field (1923–1924) verges on abstraction while suggesting a complex of objects and figures and arrangements of sexually active characters; it was Miró's first Surrealistmasterpiece.^[45] Joan Miró, Jean Arp, André Masson, andMax Ernst were very influential, especially in the United States during the 1940s.

Max Ernst, whose 1920 paintingMurdering Airplane is seen here, studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane. His paintings may have been inspired by thepsychoanalystSigmund Freud's study of the delusions of a paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber. Freud identified Schreber's fantasy of becoming a woman as acastration complex. The central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber's hermaphroditic desires. Ernst's inscription on the back of the painting reads:The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance one another.^[46]

Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. ASurrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936London 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 includeGiorgio de Chirico,Méret Oppenheim,Toyen,Grégoire Michonze,Roberto Matta,Kay Sage,Leonora Carrington,Dorothea Tanning, andLeonor Fini.

• 
  George Grosz, 1920,Neue Sachlichkeit
• 
  Thomas Hart Benton, 1920,Regionalism
• 
  George Bellows, 1924,American realism
• 
  Charles DemuthSpring, 1921, AmericanPrecisionism (protoPop Art)
• 
  Charles Demuth, 1931,Precisionism
• 
  Georgia O'Keeffe, 1921,Southwestern modernism
• 
  Grant Wood,American Gothic, 1930,Social Realism.
• 
  Diego Rivera, Recreation ofMan at the Crossroads (renamedMan, Controller of the Universe), originally created in 1934
• 
  Edward Hopper, 1942,American Scene painting

During the 1920s and the 1930s and theGreat Depression, the European art scene was characterized by Surrealism, late Cubism, theBauhaus,De Stijl, Dada,Neue Sachlichkeit, and Expressionism; and was occupied by masterfulmodernist color painters likeHenri Matisse andPierre Bonnard.

In GermanyNeue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") emerged asMax 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 theWeimar Republic, and was often sharply satirical.

During the 1930s radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to Surrealism, includingPablo Picasso.^[47] On 26 April 1937, during theSpanish Civil War, theBasque town ofGernika was the scene of the "Bombing of Gernika" by the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. The Germans were attacking to support the efforts of Francisco Franco to overthrow the Basque Government and the Spanish Republican government. Pablo Picasso painted his mural sizedGuernica to commemorate the horrors of the bombing.

Guernica is an immense black-and-white, 3.5-metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8-metre (23 ft) wide mural painted in oil. The mural presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. The choice to paint in black and white invokes the immediacy of a newspaper photograph.^[48]The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1937, then Scandinavia and London, and in 1939 at Picasso's request the painting was sent to the United States in an extended loan (for safekeeping) atMoMA. Finally in accord with Picasso's wish to give the painting to the people of Spain as a gift, it was sent to Spain in 1981.

From theGreat Depression of the 1930s through the years of World War II,American art was characterized bySocial Realism andAmerican Scene Painting.Regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world in the USA. Artists such asBen Shahn,Thomas Hart Benton,Grant Wood,George Tooker,John Steuart Curry,Reginald Marsh, and others became prominent.

American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood from 1930. Portraying a pitchfork-holding farmer and a younger woman in front of a house ofCarpenter Gothic style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art. Art critics assumed it was satirical in intent; it was thought to be part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America exemplified bySherwood Anderson's1919Winesburg, Ohio,Sinclair Lewis' 1920Main Street, andCarl Van Vechten'sThe Tattooed Countess in literature.^[49] However, with the onset of theGreat Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.

A renaissance of the arts in Latin America included theUruguayan painterJoaquín Torres García, the Mexican painterRufino Tamayo, artists of the Mexicanmuralist movement such asDiego Rivera,David Siqueiros,José Orozco,Pedro Nel Gómez andSantiago Martinez Delgado, and theSymbolist painterFrida Kahlo. The muralists conveyed historic and political messages. Diego Rivera is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural,Man at the Crossroads, in the lobby of the RCA Building atRockefeller Center. When his patronNelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait ofLenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff.

Frida Kahlo's works relate to Surrealism and to theMagic Realism movement in literature. Her works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings 55 are self-portraits, which frequently incorporate symbolic portrayals of her physical and psychological wounds.^[50]

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of Americanabstract expressionism, a movement that combined lessons learned from European Modernists via great teachers in America likeHans Hofmann andJohn D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence ofPiet Mondrian,Fernand Léger,Max Ernst and theAndré Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, andPeggy Guggenheim's galleryThe Art of This Century, as well as other factors.

Post-Second World War American painting called Abstract expressionism included artists likeJackson Pollock,Willem de Kooning,Arshile Gorky,Mark Rothko, 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, andTheodoros Stamos, among others. American Abstract expressionism got its name in 1946 from the art criticRobert Coates.^[51][52]Abstract expressionism,Action painting, andColor Field painting are synonymous with theNew York School.^[53]

Technically 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 ofAndré Masson. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artistMark 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 violent and grotesqueWomen series ofWillem de Kooning. Woman V is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He began the first of these paintings, Woman I, in June 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished. The art historianMeyer Schapiro saw the painting in de Kooning's studio and encouraged the artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; Woman II,Woman III, and Woman IV. During the summer of 1952, spent atEast Hampton, de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He finished work on Woman I by November 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time.^[54] TheWoman series are decidedlyfigurative paintings. Another important artist isFranz Kline, as demonstrated by his paintingHigh 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 inMark 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 whatClement Greenberg termed theColor field direction of abstract expressionism. BothHans Hofmann andRobert Motherwell can be described as practitioners ofaction painting and Color field painting.

During the 1950sColor Field painting initially referred to a particular type ofabstract expressionism, especially the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman,Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb. 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. During the early-to-mid-1960sColor Field painting came to refer to the styles of artists likeJules Olitski,Kenneth Noland, andHelen Frankenthaler, whose works were related to second-generation abstract expressionism, and to younger artists likeLarry Zox, andFrank Stella – all moving in a new direction.

• 
  George Bellows, 1924,American realism
• 
  Edward Hopper,Nighthawks, 1942,Cityscape

During the 1930s through the 1960s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such asabstract expressionism, Color Field painting,Post-painterly Abstraction,Op art,hard-edge painting,Minimal art,shaped canvas painting, andLyrical Abstraction. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction allowing imagery to continue through various new contexts like theBay Area Figurative Movement in the 1950s and new forms ofexpressionism from the 1940s through the 1960s. Throughout the 20th century many painters practicedRealism and used expressive imagery in landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects. They include artists as varied asMilton Avery,John D. Graham,Fairfield Porter,Edward Hopper,Andrew Wyeth,Balthus,Francis Bacon,Frank Auerbach,Lucian Freud,Leon Kossoff,Philip Pearlstein,Willem de Kooning,Arshile Gorky,Grace Hartigan,Robert De Niro, Sr., andElaine de Kooning.

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.^[55]

Arshile Gorky's portrait of Willem de Kooning is an example of the evolution ofabstract expressionism from the context of figure painting,cubism andsurrealism. Along with his friends de Kooning andJohn D. Graham 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.^[56][57]

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 is a painting by the Irish-born artistFrancis Bacon and is an example of Post World War II EuropeanExpressionism. The work shows a distorted version of thePortrait of Innocent X painted by the Spanish artistDiego Velázquez in 1650. The work is one of a series of variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, over a total of forty-five works.^[58] When asked why he was compelled to revisit the subject so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against the Popes, that he merely "wanted an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of falsefauve manner."^[59] The Pope in this version seethes with anger and aggression, and the dark colors give the image a grotesque and nightmarish appearance.^[60] The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent, and seem to fall through the Pope's face.^[61]

The figurative work of Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud, Andrew Wyeth and others served as a kind of alternative to abstract expressionism.Nighthawks (1942) is a realist painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtowndiner late at night. It is not only Hopper's most famous painting, but one of the most recognizable in American art. The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others but instead is lost in their own thoughts. This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work. One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is Wyeth's tempera painting,Christina's World, in the collection of theMuseum of Modern Art inNew York City. It depicts a woman lying on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at and crawling towards a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house.^[62]

After World War II the termSchool of Paris often referred toTachisme, the European equivalent of American Abstract expressionism and those artists are also related toCobra. Important proponents beingJean Dubuffet,Pierre Soulages,Nicolas de Staël,Hans Hartung,Serge Poliakoff, andGeorges 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 AmericanBay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters likeRichard Diebenkorn,David Park,Elmer Bischoff,Wayne Thiebaud,Nathan Oliveira,Joan Brown and others made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mid-1950s. Much of de Staël's late work – in particular his abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s – predicts Color Field painting andLyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Milton Avery as well through his use of color and his interest in seascape and landscape paintings connected with the Color field aspect of Abstract expressionism as manifested byAdolph Gottlieb andMark Rothko as well as the lessons American painters took from the work ofHenri Matisse.^[63][64]

Pop art in America was to a large degree initially inspired by the works ofJasper Johns,Larry Rivers, andRobert Rauschenberg, although the paintings ofGerald Murphy,Stuart Davis andCharles Demuth during the 1920s and 1930s foreshadow the style and subject matter of Pop art.

In New York City during the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg and Johns created works of art that at first seemed to be continuations ofAbstract 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 theAmerican Flag; Rivers' paintings of subjects drawn from popular culture such asGeorge Washington crossing theDelaware, and his inclusions of images from advertisements like the camel fromCamel cigarettes; and Rauschenberg's surprising constructions using inclusions of objects and pictures taken from popular culture, hardware stores, junkyards, the city streets, andtaxidermy, 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 artistsAndy Warhol,Claes Oldenburg,Wayne Thiebaud,James Rosenquist,Jim Dine,Tom Wesselmann andRoy Lichtenstein among others. Lichtenstein used oil andMagna paint in works such asDrowning Girl (1963;Museum of Modern Art, New York), which was appropriated from the lead story inDC Comics'Secret Hearts #83.^[65]) Thick outlines, bold colors andBen-Day dots 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."^[66] Pop art merges popular and mass culture with fine art, while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery and content into the mix. In October 1962 theSidney Janis Gallery mountedThe New Realists, the first major Pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. The show sent shockwaves through theNew York School and reverberated worldwide.Campbell's Soup Cans (sometimes referred to as32 Campbell's Soup Cans) is the title of anAndy Warhol work of art that was produced in 1962. It consists of thirty-two canvases of equal size, each consisting of a painting of aCampbell's Soup can—one of eachcanned soup variety the company offered at the time. The individual paintings were produced with a semi-mechanisedsilkscreen process, using a non-painterly style. They helped usher in Pop art as a major art movement that relied on themes frompopular culture.

Earlier in England in 1956 the termPop Art was used byLawrence 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.^[67] The early works of English artistDavid Hockney, such asA Bigger Splash, and the works ofRichard Hamilton,Peter Blake, andEduardo Paolozzi, are considered seminal examples in the movement.In New York'sEast Village10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of Pop art.Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and theGreen Gallery on 57th Street began to showTom Wesselmann andJames Rosenquist. There is a connection between the radical works of Duchamp, andMan Ray, the rebellious Dadaists – with a sense of humor; and Pop Artists likeAlex Katz, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and the others.

During the 1950s and 1960s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such asColor Field painting,Post painterly abstraction,Op art,hard-edge painting,Minimal art,shaped canvas painting,Lyrical Abstraction, and the continuation of Abstract expressionism. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction withArt brut,^[68] as seen inCourt les rues, 1962, byJean Dubuffet,Fluxus,Neo-Dada,New Realism,Photorealism, allowing imagery to re-emerge through various new contexts likePop art, theBay Area Figurative Movement (a prime example is Diebenkorn'sCityscape I,(Landscape No. 1) (1963), and later in the 1970sNeo-expressionism. TheBay Area Figurative Movement of whomDavid Park,Elmer Bischoff,Nathan Oliveira andRichard Diebenkorn whose paintingCityscape 1 (1963) is a typical example, were influential members flourished during the 1950s and 1960s in California. Younger painters practiced the use of imagery in new and radical ways.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, andVija Celmins were a few who became prominent between the 1960s and the 1980s.Fairfield 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.

Also during the 1960s and 1970s, there was a reaction against painting. Critics like Douglas Crimp viewed the work of artists likeAd Reinhardt, and declared the "death of painting". Artists began to practice new ways of making art. New movements gained prominence some of which are:Fluxus,Happening,Video art,Installation artMail art, thesituationists,Conceptual art,Postminimalism,Earth art,arte povera,performance art andbody art among others.^[69][70]

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 ofJasper Johns andRobert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg's "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art andInstallation 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, andEdward 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.^[71][72]

• 
  Yves Klein, 1962,New Realism

During the 1960s and 1970s abstract painting continued to develop in America through varied styles.Geometric abstraction, Op art,hard-edge painting, Color Field painting andminimal painting, were some interrelated directions for advanced abstract painting as well as some other new movements.Morris Louis was an important pioneer in advancedColorfield painting, his work can serve as a bridge betweenAbstract expressionism, Colorfield painting, andMinimal Art. Two influential teachers,Josef Albers andHans Hofmann, introduced a new generation of American artists to their advanced theories of color and space. Albers is best remembered for his work as aGeometric abstractionist painter and theorist. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the seriesHomage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically on the canvas. Albers' theories on art and education were formative for the next generation of artists. His own paintings form the foundation of both hard-edge painting and Op art.

Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann,Ilya Bolotowsky,Burgoyne Diller,Victor Vasarely,Bridget Riley,Richard Anuszkiewicz,Frank Stella,Morris Louis,Kenneth Noland,^[73]Ellsworth Kelly,John McLaughlin,Barnett Newman,Larry Poons,Ronald Davis,John Hoyland,Larry Zox,Al Held,Mino Argento^[74] are artists closely associated withGeometric 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 theshaped canvas also during the period beginning in the early 1960s. ManyGeometric 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. In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. TheBykert Gallery, and thePark Place Gallery were important showcases for Minimalism and shaped canvas painting in New York City during the 1960s.

Color Field painting pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away fromabstract expressionism. Related toPost-painterly abstraction,Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism,Hard-edge painting andLyrical Abstraction,^[75] Color Field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists likeClyfford Still,Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann,Morris Louis,Jules Olitski,Kenneth Noland,Helen Frankenthaler,Larry Zox, and others painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. Certain artists made references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction ofmodern art, artists wanted to present each painting as one cohesive, monolithic image.Gene Davis along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and several others was a member of theWashington Color School painters who began to createColor Field paintings in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s and 1960s,Black, Grey, Beat is a large vertical stripe painting and typical of Gene Davis's work.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 theshaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s.

From 1960 Frank Stella produced paintings in aluminum and copper paint and his first works using shaped canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square), often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more elaborate designs, in theIrregular Polygon series (1967), for example. Later he began hisProtractor Series (1971) of paintings, in whicharcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side by side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color.Harran II, 1967, is an example of theProtractor Series.

The Andre Emmerich Gallery, theLeo Castelli Gallery, the Richard Feigen Gallery, and thePark Place Gallery were important showcases for Color Field painting, shaped canvas painting andLyrical Abstraction in New York City during the 1960s. There is a connection withpost-painterly abstraction, which 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. During the 1960s Color Field painting andMinimal art were often closely associated with each other. In actuality by the early 1970s both movements became decidedly diverse.

Lyrical Abstraction (the term being coined by Larry Aldrich, the founder of theAldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield Connecticut), encompassed what Aldrich said he saw in the studios of many artists at that time.^[76] It is also the name of an exhibition that originated in the Aldrich Museum and traveled to theWhitney Museum of American Art and other museums throughout the United States between 1969 and 1971.^[77] Lyrical Abstraction is a type of freewheeling abstract painting that emerged in the mid-1960s when abstract painters returned to various forms of painterly, pictorial, expressionism with a predominate focus on process, gestalt and repetitive compositional strategies in general.^[78][79] In contrast to Action Painting, where emphasis is on brushstrokes and high compositional drama, in Lyrical Abstraction—as exemplified by the 1971Ronnie Landfield paintingGarden of Delight—there is a sense of compositional randomness, relaxed compositional drama and an emphasis on process, repetition, and an all over sensibility. Lyrical Abstraction in the late 1960s is characterized by the paintings ofDan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield,Peter Young and others, and along with theFluxus movement andPostminimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages ofArtforum in 1969)^[80] sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Postminimalism often incorporating industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, and often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures ofEva Hesse.^[80] Lyrical Abstraction,Conceptual Art, Postminimalism,Earth Art, Video,Performance art,Installation art, along with the continuation of Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Hard-edge painting, Minimal Art, Op art, Pop art,Photorealism andNew Realism extended the boundaries ofContemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.^[81]

One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism wasFrank Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York. The widths of the stripes in Stella's stripe paintings 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." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently emotionally charged paintings ofWillem de Kooning orFranz Kline and leaned more toward less gestural coloristic field paintings ofBarnett Newman andMark Rothko.

Artists such asLarry 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 andRobert Ryman had also begun to explore stripes,monochromatic andHard-edge formats from the late 1950s through the 1960s.^[82]

Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal—as demonstrated byRobert Mangold, who understood the concept of the shape of the canvas and its relationship toobjecthood—there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns.Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of 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 ofGeorge Earl Ortman[2], who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.

In a much more general sense, one might find European roots of Minimalism in thegeometric abstractions painters in theBauhaus, in the works ofPiet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, inRussian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptorConstantin Brâncuși. American painters such asBrice Marden andCy Twombly show a clear European influence in theirpure abstraction, minimalist painting of the 1960s. Ronald Davis polyurethane works from the late 1960s pay homage to theBroken Glass ofMarcel 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 criticClement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced byMichael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". InArt and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, particularly Minimalist sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type ofspectacle, in which the artifice of the actobservation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of Minimal art.

Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of theAbstract Expressionist generation, but one whosereductive 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."^[83]

During the 1960s and 1970s artists as powerful and influential asAdolph Gottlieb,Phillip Guston,Lee Krasner,Richard Diebenkorn,Elmer Bischoff,Agnes Martin,Sam Francis,Gene Davis,Joan Mitchell,Friedel Dzubas, and younger artists likeSam 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.

Still other important innovations in abstract painting took place during the 1960s and the 1970s characterized byMonochrome painting andHard-edge painting inspired byAd Reinhardt,Barnett Newman,Milton Resnick, and Ellsworth Kelly. Artists as diversified asAl Held,Larry Zox,Frank Stella,Larry Poons,Brice Marden and others explored the power of simplification. The convergence ofColor 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. TheNeo-expressionism movement is related to earlier developments in Abstract expressionism,Neo-Dada, Lyrical Abstraction and Postminimal painting.

In the late 1960s the abstract expressionist painterPhilip Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism toNeo-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.^[84] His paintingPainting, Smoking, Eating is an example of Guston's return to representation.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was also a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France andBritain. These movements were calledTransavantguardia,Neue Wilde,Figuration Libre,^[85]Neo-expressionism, the school of London, and in the late 80s theStuckists respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. All work in this genre came to be labeledneo-expressionism.

Neo-expressionism was a style ofmodern 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 andminimalistic 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 andGeorg Baselitz, along with the slightly younger artistsDamien Hirst,Anselm Kiefer, the AmericansEric Fischl,Susan Rothenberg,David Salle,Jean-Michel Basquiat,Julian Schnabel, andKeith Haring, the ItaliansFrancesco Clemente,Mimmo Paladino,Sandro Chia, andEnzo 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.^[84]

Anselm Kiefer is a leading figure in European Neo-expressionism.^[86] 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 andcollective memory, but alsooccult symbolism,theology andmysticism.^[87] 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 incontemporary 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.^[88][89][90]

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, with the advent ofModern andPostmodern art forms, distinctions between what is generally regarded as thefine arts and thelow arts have started to fade,^[91] as contemporary high art continues to challenge these concepts by mixing withpopular culture.^[92]

Mainstream painting has been rejected by artists of the postmodern era in favor ofartistic pluralism.^[93] According to art criticArthur Danto there is ananything 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.^[94]

• Art periods
• Hierarchy of genres
• History of art
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• List of painters
• Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
• Self portrait
• Timeline of Italian artists to 1800
• Visual arts of Australia
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• Gothic book illustration

• Clement Greenberg,Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961
• Hendrickson, Janis (1988).Roy Lichtenstein. Cologne, Germany: Benedikt Taschen.ISBN 3-8228-0281-6.
• The Triumph ofModernism: The Art World, 1985–2005,Hilton Kramer, 2006,ISBN 0-15-666370-8
• Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts),Kirk Varnedoe, 2003
• O'Connor, Francis V.Jackson Pollock Exhibition Catalogue, (New York,Museum of Modern Art, [1967]) OCLC 165852
• Lyrical Abstraction, Exhibition Catalogue,Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, 1971.
• David Piper, The Illustrated Library of Art, Portland House, New York, 1986,ISBN 0-517-62336-6
• Agee, William C.; Rose, Barbara, 1979,Patrick Henry Bruce: American Modernist (exhibition catalogue), Houston: Museum of Fine Arts

On the effects of Gutenberg's printing

• Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,Cambridge University Press, September 1980, Paperback, 832 pages,ISBN 0-521-29955-1
• More recent, abridged version: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2Rev ed, 12 September 2005, Paperback,ISBN 0-521-60774-4
• Marshall McLuhan,The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)University of Toronto Press (1st ed.); reissued by Routledge & Kegan PaulISBN 0-7100-1818-5.
• Briggs & Burke,A Social History of the Media: The Print Revolution in Context (2002)

• History of Painting
• History of Art: From Paleolithic Age to Contemporary Art
• Robert Hughes from Artchive
• MNstate.eduArchived 28 May 2010 at theWayback Machine,Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art, accessed online 28 May 2007

• History of art
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