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Painting Techniques

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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...
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...
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...
3 Japanese Art Traditions That Shaped European Modernism
3 Japanese Art Traditions That Shaped European Modernism
In 1856, French printmaker Félix Bracquemond was visiting the Paris workshop of his printer, Auguste Delâtre. While unpacking a fresh shipment of porcelain imported from Japan, Bracquemond noticed the crumpled... Read more...
How Carel Fabritius's Goldfinch Survived the Delft Blast
How Carel Fabritius's Goldfinch Survived the Delft Blast
On the morning of Monday, 12 October 1654, around 10:15, Cornelis Soetens unlocked the subterranean vault of the former Poor Clares convent in the Doelenkwartier district of Delft. The facility,... Read more...
6 Movements Impressionism Directly Created
6 Movements Impressionism Directly Created
When thirty Parisian painters organized their first independent exhibition at 35 Boulevard des Capucines in April 1874, their immediate ambition was modest: bypass the jury of the official Salon and... Read more...
4 Movements That Had to Die So Abstract Art Could Live
4 Movements That Had to Die So Abstract Art Could Live
Galleries often display non-objective paintings as if they materialized out of a sudden collective amnesia. The common myth suggests that around 1910, painters simply grew bored of portraits and rural... Read more...
COBRA, Tachisme, and Art Informel: Europe's Post-War Triad Nobody Can Tell Apart
COBRA, Tachisme, and Art Informel: Europe's Post-War Triad Nobody Can Tell Apart
On November 8, 1948, six artists crowded into the back room of the Café Notre-Dame in Paris. They came from Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Over lukewarm coffee, they drafted... Read more...
Cloisonnism, Synthetism, and Les Nabis: Untangling Pont-Aven's Three-Way Art Tangle
Cloisonnism, Synthetism, and Les Nabis: Untangling Pont-Aven's Three-Way Art Tangle
In October 1888, twenty-four-year-old painter Paul Sérusier walked into the Bois d'Amour forest near the Breton village of Pont-Aven alongside Paul Gauguin. Gauguin pointed at the trees and gave a... Read more...
Abstract Expressionism vs Art Informel vs Tachisme: The Same Revolution on Three Continents
Abstract Expressionism vs Art Informel vs Tachisme: The Same Revolution on Three Continents
In 1943, in a psychiatric asylum at Châtenay-Malabry outside Nazi-occupied Paris, Jean Fautrier painted in total secrecy. Through the trees of the surrounding forest of Vallée-aux-Loups, he could hear the... Read more...
From Ukiyo-e to Superflat: How Japanese Graphic Art Kept Reinventing Spatial Flatness for 340 Years
From Ukiyo-e to Superflat: How Japanese Graphic Art Kept Reinventing Spatial Flatness for 340 Years
In 1856, French printmaker Félix Bracquemond discovered pages from Katsushika Hokusai’s 1814 sketch collection, Hokusai Manga, being used as disposable protective packing paper inside a crate of imported Japanese porcelain... Read more...
Romanticism's Six Children: How One Movement Seeded Everything From Realism to Abstraction
Romanticism's Six Children: How One Movement Seeded Everything From Realism to Abstraction
In his review of the Paris Salon of 1846, Charles Baudelaire attempted to pin down a movement that had already spent half a century escaping definition. He dismissed the idea... Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci's Hidden Ermine: The Three Stages of a Renaissance Masterpiece
Leonardo da Vinci's Hidden Ermine: The Three Stages of a Renaissance Masterpiece
In 2014, French optical engineer Pascal Cotte published the results of a three-year technical investigation into Leonardo da Vinci's Renaissance art portrait Lady with an Ermine. Using a technique he... Read more...
How Cubism Broke Art Into a Thousand Pieces (And the 14 Movements It Spawned)
How Cubism Broke Art Into a Thousand Pieces (And the 14 Movements It Spawned)
In 1907, Pablo Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a massive canvas measuring 243.9 cm by 233.7 cm. Across its surface, female figures were sliced into jagged planes and masked with... Read more...
Futurism vs Vorticism: Italy's Speed Machine vs Britain's Angular Blast
Futurism vs Vorticism: Italy's Speed Machine vs Britain's Angular Blast
In June 1914, the charismatic Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti stood on stage at London's Doré Gallery. Flanked by British painter C.R.W. Nevinson, Marinetti delivered a booming lecture to the... Read more...
Orphism vs Synchromism: The Transatlantic Color Abstraction Race
Orphism vs Synchromism: The Transatlantic Color Abstraction Race
The race to invent pure abstract painting was not a polite academic handshake. In 1913, it was a public shouting match in Parisian galleries between French painter Robert Delaunay and... Read more...
Action Painting vs Color Field: The Two Faces of Abstract Expressionism
Action Painting vs Color Field: The Two Faces of Abstract Expressionism
In December 1952, critic Harold Rosenberg published an essay in ARTnews titled "The American Action Painters" that permanently altered how the world understood modern art. Rosenberg asserted that for a... Read more...
The Secret Stash: How 157 Soviet WWII Posters Were Hidden Inside the Art Institute of Chicago
The Secret Stash: How 157 Soviet WWII Posters Were Hidden Inside the Art Institute of Chicago
In 1997, museum staff at the Art Institute of Chicago were clearing out a deep storage closet in the Department of Prints and Drawings ahead of gallery renovations. High on... Read more...
Cubism vs Futurism: How Paris and Milan Shattered the Canvas
Cubism vs Futurism: How Paris and Milan Shattered the Canvas
In November 1911, three young Italian painters boarded an overnight train from Milan to Paris. Gino Severini, who had been living in Montmartre for five years, insisted his friends Umberto... Read more...
The 128-Year-Old Grasshopper Hidden in Van Gogh's Olive Trees
The 128-Year-Old Grasshopper Hidden in Van Gogh's Olive Trees
In November 2017, paintings conservator Mary Schafer was examining Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 Post-Impressionism canvas Olive Trees under a high-powered surgical binocular microscope at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in... Read more...
The 500-Plant Mystery: Botticelli's Primavera and the Hidden Science of Tuscan Wildflowers
The 500-Plant Mystery: Botticelli's Primavera and the Hidden Science of Tuscan Wildflowers
In 1984, Professor Guido Moggi, director of the Florence Botanical Garden, sat down in front of Sandro Botticelli's massive Renaissance masterpiece Primavera with a magnifying glass. He wasn't looking at... Read more...
Why Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier Isn't Laughing (and Isn't a Cavalier)
Why Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier Isn't Laughing (and Isn't a Cavalier)
One of the most famous artwork titles in Western museum history is a Victorian marketing fabrication. When you look at the iconic 1624 portrait known around the world as The... Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper: The 500-Year Survival Story
Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper: The 500-Year Survival Story
In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci stood on a wooden scaffold inside the dining hall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, hammering a single iron nail into the dry plaster... Read more...
Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère: The Mirror Mystery Explained
Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère: The Mirror Mystery Explained
When Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère debuted at the Paris Salon in May 1882, critics were convinced the 50-year-old artist had lost his grasp of basic geometry. Looking... Read more...