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Art Movements

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Color Field vs Lyrical Abstraction: The Second Generation That Softened the Edges
Color Field vs Lyrical Abstraction: The Second Generation That Softened the Edges
In November 1969, Manhattan fashion designer and art collector Larry Aldrich stepped into the cold daylight of SoHo after visiting a dozen downtown painting studios, convinced that something fundamental in... Read more...
Op Art vs Kinetic Art: Fake Motion vs Real Motion
Op Art vs Kinetic Art: Fake Motion vs Real Motion
In April 1955, visitors walked into Galerie Denise René on the Rue d'Artois in Paris for an exhibition titled Le Mouvement and found two completely different kinds of restlessness. On... Read more...
Art Brut vs Naive Art: Why Dubuffet Kept the Sunday Painters Out
Art Brut vs Naive Art: Why Dubuffet Kept the Sunday Painters Out
If you walk through a contemporary art fair, you will likely see Henri Rousseau's lush jungle scenes and the frantic pencil scrawls of psychiatric patients lumped together under the polite... Read more...
Classical Realism vs Hyperrealism: The Paintbrush vs the Camera
Classical Realism vs Hyperrealism: The Paintbrush vs the Camera
In 1969, inside an unadorned second-floor studio in Minneapolis, Richard Lack taped two strips of black cloth to the floorboards. One marker anchored his easel; the other fixed his boots... Read more...
Les Automatistes vs Les Plasticiens: Quebec's Gesture-vs-Geometry Feud
Les Automatistes vs Les Plasticiens: Quebec's Gesture-vs-Geometry Feud
Art rebellions usually follow a comfortable family script: passionate iconoclasts shatter the old academy, pay a terrifying personal price, and earn a permanent place in the textbooks. The strange part... Read more...
Expressionism vs New Objectivity: Germany's 1920s Cold Shower
Expressionism vs New Objectivity: Germany's 1920s Cold Shower
In May 1923, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, drafted a circular letter to German painters, art critics, and dealers. He wanted to mount an exhibition surveying a... Read more...
Rococo vs Neoclassicism: When Europe Swapped Pink Silk for Roman Virtue
Rococo vs Neoclassicism: When Europe Swapped Pink Silk for Roman Virtue
In 1767, Jean-Honoré Fragonard completed an oil painting measuring 81 by 64.2 centimeters commissioned by the Baron de Saint-Julien. The baron had specified the scene precisely: his young mistress was... Read more...
Minimalism's 8 Rebellious Children: How the Least Art Made the Most Art
Minimalism's 8 Rebellious Children: How the Least Art Made the Most Art
In the mid-1960s, hostile art critics declared that painting and sculpture had hit a dead end. When Frank Stella explained his pinstripe canvases by muttering "what you see is what... Read more...
The Secessionist Wave: How Three Cities Broke Art Out of the Academy
The Secessionist Wave: How Three Cities Broke Art Out of the Academy
On April 4, 1892, ninety-six painters and sculptors gathered in Munich to sign a declaration of independence. Led by Fritz von Uhde, Franz von Stuck, and Wilhelm Trübner, the group... Read more...
RM at SFMOMA: How a K-Pop Icon Brought Mid-Century Korean Abstraction to America
RM at SFMOMA: How a K-Pop Icon Brought Mid-Century Korean Abstraction to America
On a tour night in London or Los Angeles, Kim Nam-joon performs before 70,000 screaming fans under blinding stadium spotlights. By morning, the BTS leader known as RM is often... Read more...
Matisse's The Joy of Life: The Masterpiece That Enraged Paris
Matisse's The Joy of Life: The Masterpiece That Enraged Paris
In March 1906, visitors stepping into the glasshouse pavilions of the Cours-la-Reine for the twenty-second Salon des Indépendants stopped dead in their tracks before an enormous canvas nearly eight feet... Read more...
Northern vs Southern School: China's 1,000-Year Landscape Painting Debate
Northern vs Southern School: China's 1,000-Year Landscape Painting Debate
The fiercest rivalry in Chinese art history had almost nothing to do with geography. When painters and critics argued over the Northern landscape style vs the Southern School, they were... Read more...
Pop Art's 12 Children: How Warhol's Soup Can Conquered the World
Pop Art's 12 Children: How Warhol's Soup Can Conquered the World
On July 9, 1962, gallerist Irving Blum placed thirty-two small canvases along narrow grocery shelves in the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Each canvas bore a single hand-painted variety of... Read more...
Magic Realism vs Surrealism and New Objectivity: The 1920s Reality Distortion
Magic Realism vs Surrealism and New Objectivity: The 1920s Reality Distortion
In October 1924, writer André Breton paced through Paris distributing a pamphlet that declared the waking world a fraud. Eight months later, in June 1925, museum director Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub... Read more...
The Bauhaus Had Three Parents (And They All Disagreed)
The Bauhaus Had Three Parents (And They All Disagreed)
Modern design textbooks love a tidy family tree, but the Bauhaus was never a tidy project. When people picture the school today, they picture tubular steel cantilever chairs, pristine sans-serif... Read more...
How Japonisme Rewired Impressionism and Art Nouveau
How Japonisme Rewired Impressionism and Art Nouveau
In 1856, French printmaker Félix Bracquemond opened a crate of imported Japanese porcelain at Auguste Delâtre's printing shop in Paris. He didn't care about the ceramics. He was mesmerized by... Read more...
The Anish Kapoor Black Paint War and the Long History of Artist Material Rivalries
The Anish Kapoor Black Paint War and the Long History of Artist Material Rivalries
In December 2016, anyone trying to purchase a fifty-gram pot of powdered paint called The World's Pinkest Pink had to pass through a legal gauntlet before entering their credit card... Read more...
De Stijl to Bauhaus to Minimalism: How the Straight Line Conquered Modern Art
De Stijl to Bauhaus to Minimalism: How the Straight Line Conquered Modern Art
Modern reduction did not begin as an interior design trend or a tidy Marie Kondo manual. The clean surfaces, unadorned boxes, and stark geometry in our living spaces are the... Read more...
Land Art, Arte Povera, and Postminimalism: Three Ways Artists Tried to Escape the Gallery
Land Art, Arte Povera, and Postminimalism: Three Ways Artists Tried to Escape the Gallery
Every decade or so, artists decide that the commercial gallery system is an intolerable parasite and vow to make work that no wealthy collector could ever hang above a sofa.... Read more...
Art Deco: The Movement With 4 Parents and Zero Apologies
Art Deco: The Movement With 4 Parents and Zero Apologies
The term "Art Deco" did not exist when Chrysler Building spire went up in Manhattan or when jazz records filled Parisian salons. Art historian Bevis Hillier coined the name in... Read more...
How Impressionism Rebellied Against Academic Art (And Won)
How Impressionism Rebellied Against Academic Art (And Won)
On April 15, 1874, thirty outcasts opened a private art show on the top floor of a vacant photography studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Visitors paid one... Read more...
5 Art Movements Born as Reactions to Destroy Their Predecessors
5 Art Movements Born as Reactions to Destroy Their Predecessors
Most art history textbooks present the progression of styles as a polite relay race. One generation supposedly discovers an insight, packages it neatly, and hands the baton to the next... Read more...
Fluxus: The Movement That Connected Everything to Everything
Fluxus: The Movement That Connected Everything to Everything
In September 1962, at the Städtisches Museum in Wiesbaden, Germany, a group of artists performed Philip Corner's Piano Activities. The score's instructions were open-ended. What the performers chose to do... Read more...
Conceptual Art Movements: How One Radical Idea Birthed 14 Modern Styles
Conceptual Art Movements: How One Radical Idea Birthed 14 Modern Styles
In the summer of 1967, an American sculptor named Sol LeWitt published a manifesto in the pages of Artforum that set off a slow-motion explosion across modern culture. He wrote... Read more...