2nd Intermediate Period
Art of Egypt's second age of division: Middle Kingdom conventions carried on under rival dynasties and Hyksos rule.
Every Art Style
An attempt to catalogue every known art style with a citable source — movements, traditions, techniques, aesthetics, and genres.
All 732 entries
3rd Intermediate Period
Art of Egypt's divided Iron Age: lavish Tanite burials, densely inscribed coffins and Book of the Dead papyri.
Abbasid Period
Art of the Abbasid caliphate, 750-1258: lustreware, beveled stucco, arabesque, and the birth of Islamic book painting.
Abstract art
Art without a recognizable subject: color, line and shape carry the meaning, and the painting becomes an object in its own right.
Abstract expressionism
Postwar New York's great eruption: monumental, intensely personal abstraction that made America the centre of the art world.
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Abstract illusionism
1970s abstraction with fake shadows: floating shapes cast trompe-l'oeil shadows, pushing space out toward the viewer.
Abstract impressionism
Abstraction that keeps the Impressionist way of looking: outdoor light, loaded brush, atmosphere without a scene.
Academic art
The polished official style of the 19th-century academies: idealized form, hidden brushwork, and subjects from history and myth.
Action painting
Painting as event: Rosenberg's 'arena' where gesture, drip and physical risk become the subject, from Pollock to de Kooning.
Aestheticism
'Art for art's sake': beauty, tone and design valued above story or moral, from Whistler's nocturnes to the Peacock Room.
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Africanfuturism
Futures rooted in Africa: African culture, myth and point of view fused with technology, without centering the West.
Afrofuturism
Black futures across music, art and sci-fi: diaspora myth, cosmic imagery and technology reclaiming past and future.
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Alcalá de Guadaira school
A circle of Sevillian painters who worked en plein air on the banks of the Guadaíra in the late 19th century.
Aleppo school
An Ottoman-era school of Christian icon painting in Aleppo, fusing Cretan tradition with local devotion, active 1645-1777.
Algorithmic art
Art generated by rules: the artist writes the algorithm, the machine executes it - from plotter drawings to generative systems.
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All-over painting
No centre, no top: the whole surface treated equally - the compositional device behind Pollock's drips and Tobey's webs.
Allianz
Swiss modernists banded in 1937 to promote concrete art with colour at its core - the hinge of Swiss abstraction.
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Altermodern
Bourriaud's post-postmodern bet: art as translation, travel and hybridisation, launched as Tate Triennial 2009.
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Amarna
Akhenaten's revolutionary art: elongated bodies, intimate royal scenes and sun-drenched naturalism from Egypt's Amarna age.
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Amazonian pop art
Self-taught mural pop from Iquitos: Amazonian color, ayahuasca visions and MTV-era imagery, glowing in phosphorescent night pieces.
American Abstract Artists
Founded 1937 to defend abstraction when America scorned it: exhibitions, lithograph portfolios and geometric rigor in Depression-era New York.
American art pottery
Hand-made American ceramics, 1870s-1950s: experimental glazes and original design from Rookwood to Grueby, between craft and industry.
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American Barbizon school
American painters who took the Barbizon pledge: pastoral landscape painted directly from nature, quiet, rural and tonal.
American Empire style
Napoleonic grandeur in American mahogany: classical columns, sphinx feet and gilt brass on heavy early-19th-century furniture.
American Figurative Expressionism
Postwar American painting that kept the human figure alive with expressionist force against the tide of abstraction.
American modernism
America's entry into modern art: European experiments remade for skyscrapers, prairies, and a new national identity.
American Pre-Raphaelites
Ruskin-inspired Americans who painted landscape and still life outdoors with exacting, unidealized detail.
American realism
Unvarnished American life - city streets, boxing rings, diners - painted without academic polish or sentiment.
American Renaissance
Gilded Age classicism: Beaux-Arts buildings, murals, and sculpture that gave the young republic a grand civic face.
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American Scene Painting
Interwar America painted itself: small-town rituals, city crowds, and heartland landscapes, straight and unsentimental.
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American Studio Woodturning Movement
Lathe-turned vessels raised from craft to art: thin-walled bowls and hollow forms with a designer's eye for form.
Amsterdam Impressionism
Dutch second-generation impressionism: fast, gray-toned brushwork catching Amsterdam's streets, harbors, and crowds.
Amsterdamse Joffers
A circle of Amsterdam women painters - still lifes, portraits, dolls - who made professional careers stick.
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Analytical art
Filonov's analytical realism: images grown atom by atom from tiny brushstrokes to reveal a thing's inner essence.
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Analytical Cubism
Cubism's first phase: objects taken apart into faceted, near-monochrome planes seen from several sides at once.
Andachtsbilder
Late-medieval devotional images - Man of Sorrows, Pietà, Veronica - stripped of narrative to hit the viewer with grief.
Ángel arcabucero
Colonial Andean angels in 17th-century military dress, armed with arquebuses - heavenly guards of the Cuzco and Calamarca traditions.
Anglo-Japanese style
Victorian Britain's Japan craze made design: ebonized furniture, sparse asymmetry, and nature motifs distilled from ukiyo-e.
Angry Penguins
Australia's surreal-leaning avant-garde, named for its bombshell magazine - and undone by the Ern Malley hoax.
Aniconism
The avoidance or destruction of figurative images across cultures - from iconoclasm to geometric ornament.
Aniconism in Judaism
The Jewish tradition of limiting figurative images - artistic energy poured into script, symbol, and pattern instead.
Animalier school
The 19th-century specialists in animals - bronze hunting groups and sporting canvases with anatomical bite.
Animation
The art of moving the still: drawings, models, or pixels photographed frame by frame into the illusion of life.
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Annandale Imitation Realists
Sydney junk-art trio whose exuberant collages - tins, toys, doodles - skewered a conservative art world.
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Antipodeans
Eight Melbourne painters and one art historian who signed a manifesto against abstraction in 1959.
Antwerp Mannerism
Antwerp's ornate early-16th-century nativities: crowded, jewel-like panels stuffed with fantastic detail.
Antwerp school
Two golden centuries of Antwerp painting, from Massys' money-changers to Rubens' thundering altarpieces.
Appropriation
Art made from other people's art: rephotography, quotation, and the readymade that question who owns an image.
Arabesque
Endless scrolling plant and line ornament - Islamic art's infinite garden, later borrowed by Europe.
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Arbeitsrat für Kunst
Berlin 1918: artists and architects organized like workers' councils to rebuild society in glass and color.
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Archaic
The Archaic period of Greek art: kouros statues with their fixed smile and black-figure vases, between Geometric and Classical.
Art & Language
The conceptual group (and journal) that treated art as a matter of language - texts, indexes, and endless argument, from 1968.
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Art Brut
Raw art made outside official culture: visionary, obsessive, self-taught work collected and named by Jean Dubuffet.
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Art Club 2000
A New York collective whose slick, Gap-parodying projects satirized the 1990s art market from inside its own gallery.
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Art dans Tout
French designers of the late 1890s who tried to put art into everything - furniture, fittings, whole interiors - as one craft.
Art Deco
Jazz-age geometry: zigzags, sunbursts, and chrome glamour that made the machine age decorative.
Art Deco architecture
Jazz-age geometry in steel and stone: stepped towers, zigzags, and lavish sunburst ornament from the 1920s to the 1940s.
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Art Informel
Europe's postwar answer to Abstract Expressionism: raw gesture, scarred matter, and form abandoned to the artist's impulse.
Art Nouveau
Whiplash curves and organic ornament: the total-art style that tried to modernize every object in sight.
Art Nouveau furniture
Handmade furniture of the 1890s-1910s: whiplash curves, inlaid woods, and forms drawn from vines, flowers, and dragonflies.
Art of the late 16th century in Milan
Mannerism, Counter-Reformation, and classicism in Spanish-ruled Milan, where church decrees reshaped art and architecture.
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Art photography
Photography made as fine art: the camera used to express an idea or emotion, not to document or sell.
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Art Singulier
France's 1970s category for self-taught, margin-crossing makers - wider than art brut, from Chaissac to Robert Tatin.
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Arte Informale
Italy's postwar informal art: Fontana, Burri, and Vedova trading rational geometry for gesture, matter, and the punctured plane.
Arte Povera
Poor materials, rich ideas: Italian art of the late 1960s putting earth, twigs, rags, and live animals into the gallery.
Artist's multiple
Art produced in editions: identical, affordable objects - Duchamp's discs to Warhol's boxes - made to escape the unique masterpiece.
Artivism
Art plus activism: protest made aesthetic - culture jamming, street art, and performance in the service of a cause.
Arts and Crafts movement
Handcraft against the machine age: honest materials, medieval workshop ideals, and beautiful everyday objects, from Morris & Co.
ASCII art
Pictures built from typewriter and computer characters - from Bell Labs mosaics to BBS banners and Usenet doodles.
Ashcan School
America's turn to the gritty city: saloons, boxing rings, and slum streets painted with dark, vigorous brushwork.
Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención
Buenos Aires concrete art of the 1940s: objective geometric 'inventions' born with the magazine Arturo and its 1946 manifesto.
Ateliers d'Art Sacré
Paris workshops (1919-1947) that trained artists to make modern Catholic art for churches - frescoes, glass, whole interiors.
Auricular style
Melting, ear-shaped ornament in 17th-century northern silverwork - lobes, shells, and mask-faces that flow like soft wax.
Australian Aboriginal fibre sculpture
From Arnhem Land ceremony to gallery floor: woven and bound fibre forms - spirits, animals, nets - made mostly by women.
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Australian Tonalism
Meldrum's 'science of appearances' in 1910s Melbourne: misty, tone-by-tone scenes of suburbs, beaches, and fog.
Auto-destructive art
Art that destroys itself: acid, fire, and machine decay, launched by Gustav Metzger in 1959 against war and consumerism.
Automatic Painting
Drawing without thinking: the hand let loose to record the unconscious, from Surrealist automatism to mediumistic scribble.
Avant-garde
The advance guard of art: deliberate rupture with tradition, manifesto culture, and the endless hunt for the new.
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Bacone school
Native American flatstyle easel painting from Bacone College, Oklahoma - bright color, movement, and intertribal modernism.
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Bad Painting
Marcia Tucker's 1978 label for irreverent American figurative painting that deliberately discards good taste and classical drawing.
Baghdad School
The Abbasid Baghdad school of book illustration: lively, expressive figures in bright color, painted between the lines of the text.
Bande noire
French painters of the 1890s who fused Impressionist light with Courbet's sombre realism - a darker, richer palette than their contemporaries.
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Barbizon school
French landscape realists at the edge of Fontainebleau forest - direct study of nature, loose brushwork, quiet tonal painting.
Baroque
Dramatic, emotionally intense art of grandeur and contrast, born in Counter-Reformation Rome.
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Baroque Art and Architecture
Rome's grand Counter-Reformation style of drama, contrast, and illusion, c. 1600-1750, across Europe and the Americas.
Baroque Revival architecture
19th-century architecture in Baroque dress - imperial, exuberant, and steeped in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts curriculum.
Batignolles group
Manet's circle in the Batignolles district of Paris - the avant-garde cradle of Impressionism.
Bauhaus
Germany's landmark school of modern design (1919-1933), uniting art, craft, and industry in clean, functional form.
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Bay Area Figurative Movement
San Francisco painters who left Abstract Expressionism for the figure, keeping its loose brushwork and bravura paint.
Beaux-Arts architecture
Grand French academic classicism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts - symmetry, monumental staircases, and sculpted splendor.
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Beaver Hall Group
Montreal's Jazz Age modernists - women and men painting portraits, city life, and landscape with equal footing.
Belarusian icon-painting school of the 16th–18th centuries
Byzantine-rooted icon painting of the Belarusian lands, absorbing Renaissance and Baroque form while keeping the canon.
Bengal School of Art
India's nationalist school of painting - spiritual, Mughal-rooted, and a deliberate alternative to Western academic art.
Bergen school
Dutch expressionism around the artists' village of Bergen, 1915-1925 - cubist-tinged figures in dark, earthy color.
Berlin Secession
Germany's defiant modernist breakaway: independent exhibitions of Impressionism and early Expressionism, founded in Berlin in 1898.
Beuron school
Benedictine art school at Beuron Abbey: geometrically proportioned, hieratic sacred art in muted, mysterious colour.
Bezalel school
Zionist 'Hebrew style' born in Jerusalem in 1906: biblical themes fused with Art Nouveau and Oriental craft.
Bikaner style of painting
Rajput court painting of Bikaner: Mughal finesse and Deccani colour on Hindu epics and royal portraits.
Biomorphism
Art and design shaped on life itself: abstract, organic forms that evoke living organisms without depicting them.
Birmingham Group
Birmingham's Arts and Crafts painters' circle: late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite-flavoured art from the School of Art, c. 1890-1940.
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Birmingham School
Birmingham's line engravers, dominant in the art by mid-century, who put Turner's landscapes into thousands of prints and books.
Black Arts Movement
The aesthetic arm of Black Power: a mid-1960s flowering of Black poetry, theatre and visual art built for and by the community.
Black House
Solingen's postwar artists' colony around the 'Black House': three figurative painters working against abstraction.
Blue Rose
Moscow's misty Symbolist circle (1906-08): vaporous, tonal painting where colour dissolves contour and mood rules.
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Bokujinkai
Postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphy: bold few-character brushworks that made ink a modern art.
Bombay furniture
Colonial Indian furniture in dark shisham: European shapes carved with lace-like Indian ornament and geometric inlay.
Bombay Progressive Artists' Group
Modern India's founding avant-garde: six painters and sculptors in Bombay, 1947, painting with absolute freedom after Partition.
Bosom of Abraham Trinity
Rare English medieval alabaster iconography: the Trinity cradling a cloth of saved souls - only twelve examples survive.
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Boston Expressionism
Emotional, painterly figuration from 1930s Boston: dark humor, spiritual themes, and old-master craft.
Boston school
Boston's genteel American Impressionists: refined figures in sunlit interiors, academic draftsmanship under broken color.
Box Hill artists' camp
The 1880s open-air camp near Melbourne where Tom Roberts and friends painted the Australian Impressionist vision.
Brandywine School
Howard Pyle's school of American illustration: dramatic, richly painted scenes of adventure, history, and romance.
Brazilian academic art
19th-century Brazilian history painting in the European academic tradition, from the French Artistic Mission to Modernism.
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British Constructivists
Post-war British abstract artists who built non-figurative art from geometric units, integrated with architecture.
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Brown County Art Colony
Indiana's hill-country art colony: Impressionist painters of wooded landscapes, founded in 1907.
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Brushmen of the Bush
Five self-taught Broken Hill painters whose touring outback shows raised over a million dollars for charity.
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Brutalism
Monumental architecture of raw exposed concrete, massive forms, and uncompromising civic scale.
Burnham Baroque
Daniel Burnham's monumental ceremonial classicism: grand railway stations and commercial palaces in ornate dress.
California Clay Movement
The California clay revolution: the vessel abandoned for expressive, monumental, and funk sculpture.
California Impressionism
French Impressionist light turned on California: plein-air canvases of coast, canyon, and poppy fields.
California Scene Painting
Watercolor reportage of everyday California: beaches, rail yards, citrus towns, and city streets.
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California Tonalism
Mood-soaked California landscapes of twilight and mist, painted in the Tonalist spirit of Whistler.
Canadian Impressionism
French-trained Canadian painters bring Impressionist light home to snow, harbors, and Quebec villages.
Caravaggisti
Caravaggio's followers across Europe: tenebrist light, street-level naturalism, and drama painted mid-gesture.
Cartilage Baroque
Northern Baroque ornament of swollen, cartilage-like scrollwork - carved church furnishings and silver of Denmark-Norway.
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Cartographic Art
Art that takes the map as image and structure - Boetti's embroidered world maps, Fahlström's malleable geopolitics.
Catalan Gothic
The luminous Gothic of the Crown of Aragon: clear-span churches and serene painting alive to Mediterranean light.
Cave painting
The first painters: animals and hand stencils in deep caves, made with earth pigments tens of thousands of years ago.
Cel Shading
Making 3D look hand-drawn: hard-edged shadow bands and ink-like outlines that mimic cel animation.
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Centre Five
Melbourne's modernist sculptors' group, engineering public acceptance of abstract sculpture and its marriage to architecture.
Charleston Renaissance
Charleston's 1920s cultural revival: marshes, steeples, and old streets rendered by a circle of southern artists.
Chasse
The house-shaped reliquary casket of medieval Europe - Limoges champlevé enamel, its sides alive with saints' legends.
Cheriyal scroll painting
Telangana's painted narrative scrolls: red grounds, bold figures, and story panels unrolled by village bards.
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Chernihiv school of icon painting
Regional school of Ukrainian Orthodox icon painting centered on Chernihiv; core facts remain to verify.
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Chicago Imagists
Chicago's cartoon-bright figurative underground of the 1960s-70s: grotesque, funny, and fiercely independent of New York.
Chicanafuturism
Chicana/o speculative art imagining Chicano futures - science fiction, borderlands, and indigenous memory fused with technology.
Chicano art movement
The visual wing of El Movimiento: barrio murals, prints, and symbols of Aztlán, made for community and civil rights.
Chinese furniture
Hardwood furniture of Ming and Qing China: joinery without nails, elegant lines, and quiet ornament.
Chitari art
Goan folk painting in red, green, yellow and white, hand-brushed on ritual wooden objects - a family craft of Cuncolim.
Chłopomania
The 19th-century 'peasant-mania' that sent Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals to the village - and folk art into modernism.
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Chosŏnhwa
North Korea's state style: traditional brush-and-ink painting modernized with bright color, realism, and Juche ideology.
Church frescos in Denmark
Medieval lime-plaster paintings inside Danish parish churches - Bible stories and strange beasts, hidden for centuries under whitewash.
Classical
The art of ancient Greece and Rome: ideal bodies, calm proportion, and the standards later ages called classical.
Classical Realism
The twentieth-century return of atelier craft: naturalistic figure painting built on cast drawing, anatomy, and sight-size.
Classicism
Art that returns to Greek and Roman models: ideal form, clear line, balanced composition, and restraint.
Cloisonnism
Flat planes of pure color ringed by dark outlines, like cloisonné enamel - Gauguin and the Pont-Aven circle.
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COBRA
Post-war European avant-garde of wild color and childlike monsters - Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, 1948-51.
Collage
Pasting the real world onto the picture plane: paper, photos, and found scraps assembled into new wholes.
Cologne Progressives
Cologne's radical interwar artists: workers' art, Dada roots, and lean figurative painting in the service of the left.
Cologne school of painting
Late medieval painting of Cologne: soft, radiant devotional panels in gold and rose, from the 1300s to Lochner.
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Color Field
Vast washes and stains of color that envelop the viewer - Rothko, Newman, Still, and the soak-stain painters.
Colourist painting
Painting where intense color rules: from Fauvist blaze to Scottish light, color outranks line and subject.
Combine painting
Rauschenberg's hybrids of paint and real objects - a bed, a goat, a tire - that blur painting and the everyday.
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Communication aesthetics
Art through the networks: Costa and Forest's 1983 theory turning communications technology into the medium and subject of art.
Company style
Mughal precision meets European naturalism: Indian painting made for patrons of the East India Company.
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Computer art
Art made with algorithms and machines: plotter drawings of the 1960s to today's generative and AI-driven work.
Conceptual art
Art where the idea is the machine: dematerialized, linguistic, and institutional - art's definition as its raw material.
Concrete art
Geometry with no symbol behind it: exact, mind-conceived abstraction that means nothing but itself.
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Confessional Art
Art that confesses: private trauma, the body, and the artist's own life put on show without disguise.
Constructivist architecture
Soviet architecture of exposed structure and social purpose: towers, clubs, and communal housing, 1919-32.
Contemporary art
Art of the present tense: global, pluralist, and made in every medium - from land art to the internet.
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Contemporary Arts Society
Montreal society (1939-1948) that championed modern art in Canada against academic tradition.
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art
Acrylic dot painting and contemporary Indigenous art from Australia: Dreaming stories mapped in vivid, layered color.
Contemporary Palestinian art
Art from Palestine and its diaspora: exile, occupation, and return told through symbols, text, and everyday materials.
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Context art
1990s art that folds social context into the work: institutional critique and the artist as social agent.
Coptic art
Christian art of Egypt: flat, wide-eyed saints and rich ornament woven from Pharaonic, Greek, and Byzantine strands.
Corporate Memphis
Big Tech's house illustration style: flat colors, impossibly long limbs, and unthreatening diversity.
Cos Cob art colony
American Impressionists summering at Cos Cob, Connecticut, painting clapboard houses and harbors, c. 1890-1920.
Costumbrismo
Nineteenth-century scenes of local customs: regional dress, manners, and everyday life recorded with affection and satire.
Cracking Art
Giant, garishly colored plastic animals invade city squares: Italian collective art about recycling and the artificial.
Cranbrook Colony
Victorian genre painters in Cranbrook, Kent (from 1853), painting nostalgic rural scenes after Dutch models.
Cretan school
Venetian-era Crete's icon painters fused Byzantine tradition with Renaissance light and modeling.
Crozant School
Some 500 landscape painters drawn to the Creuse valleys, 1830-1950 — a French 'school without a master'.
Crusader workshop
Byzantine-Western hybrid icons, manuscripts, and ivories from the workshops of the Crusader states, c. 1100-1291.
Crystal Cubism
Cubism distilled: flat overlapping planes, ordered grids, and frank color - the crystal clarity of Cubism's second phase, c. 1915-1920.
Cubism
Shattering the single viewpoint: objects rebuilt from many angles as fractured, overlapping planes.
Cubist sculpture
Cubism in three dimensions: faceted volumes, shifting viewpoints, and the carved void, from Picasso's 1909 Head into the 1920s.
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Cubo-Expressionism
Cubist structure meets Expressionist feeling: angular facets, saturated color, and emotional charge across interwar modernism.
Cubo-Futurism
Russian avant-garde fusion of Cubist fragmentation with Futurist speed and machine energy.
Cusco school
Peruvian colonial painting school fusing Spanish Baroque iconography with Andean ornament and faces.
Cynical realism
Chinese contemporary art of grinning, deadpan figures mocking ideology after 1989.
Czech Cubism
Prague's crystalline avant-garde: Cubist fragmentation applied to painting, sculpture, furniture, and architecture.
Dada
Anti-art as art: nonsense, chance, and the readymade used to attack the logic and taste that made the war.
Dakar School
Senegal's post-independence art movement: Négritude and African motifs fused with Western modernism under Senghor.
Danish design
Functionalism made warm and human: clean-lined furniture, lamps, and buildings crafted for everyday use.
Dansaekhwa
Korean monochrome painting: neutral fields, repeated gestures, and the slow material process of making a mark.
Danube school
Nature as protagonist: among the first European painters to make wild forests, rivers, and glowing skies the subject.
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Dau-al-Set
Barcelona's postwar surrealist circle: magic, monsters, and dreams smuggled into print under Franco.
De Stijl
Dutch abstraction reduced to straight lines, right angles, and primary colors - art, design, and architecture in one universal harmony.
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De'VIA
Deaf View/Image Art: a genre deliberately representing the Deaf experience, born in a 1989 manifesto at Gallaudet University.
Decadent movement
Late-19th-century revolt of the artificial against nature: sensation, artifice, and exquisite perversity in word and image.
Deconstructivism
Architecture of deliberate instability: fractured forms, distorted geometry, and controlled chaos that unsettle the eye.
Decorative Impressionism
American expatriates at Giverny who fused academic figure painting with Impressionist light and decorative pattern.
Degenerate art
The Nazi label for modern art — Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity — banned, exhibited, and purged.
Depictions of Muhammad
The long, varied artistic tradition around representing the Prophet Muhammad — from calligraphic honorifics to Persian manuscript scenes.
Der Blaue Reiter
Munich Expressionists led by Kandinsky and Marc, chasing spiritual truth through color, music, and abstraction.
Die Brücke
Germany's first Expressionist group: raw woodcuts, jarring color, and modern life stripped bare.
Digital art
Art made with digital technology at its core - from 1960s plotter drawings to AI-generated images.
Digital painting
Painting with pixels: brushes, layers, and undo replace canvas and turpentine - from MacPaint to the iPad.
Directoire style
Revolutionary France's austere neoclassical look: grained veneers, minimal carving, and Greco-Roman motifs bridging Louis XVI and Empire.
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Disumbrationism
A one-man hoax 'movement' of 1924 that spoofed modern-art critics - clumsy parodies of abstraction that won real praise before the confession.
Divisionism
Painting in separated strokes of pure color that mix in the viewer's eye - the scientific face of Neo-Impressionism.
Donkey's Tail
Short-lived Russian avant-garde group (Larionov, Goncharova, Malevich) and its single 1912 Moscow show: neo-primitive, folk-rooted, anti-Western.
Düsseldorf School of painting
The 19th-century Düsseldorf Academy painters: finely detailed Romantic landscapes with literary or religious stories, influential on American art.
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Eaismo
Italy's 1948 'atomic era' avant-garde: Voltolino Fontani and fellow Livorno painters answer the Atomic Age with wary optimism.
Early Byzantine (c. 330–750)
The first golden age of Byzantine art: gold-ground imperial mosaics, sacred icons, and Hagia Sophia, from Constantine's capital to Iconoclasm.
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Early Christian
Art of the first Christian centuries: catacomb frescoes, carved sarcophagi, and gold-ground basilica mosaics made in Rome's image.
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Early Dynastic
Art of Egypt's first pharaohs: carved victory palettes and ivory labels, tomb painting, and the birth of the pharaonic canon.
Early Netherlandish painting
The 15th-century Flemish masters - van Eyck, van der Weyden - and their luminous oil panels of microscopic detail and hidden meaning.
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Ecofeminist art
Environmental art through a feminist lens: practices linking the exploitation of nature and of women, from the 1970s on.
École de Nancy
Lorraine's Art Nouveau school: Gallé, Majorelle, and Daum turning local flora - lilies, orchids, dragonflies - into furniture and glass for everyday homes.
Ecological Art
Art that heals ecosystems: remediation, restoration, and activist interventions made with scientists, planners, and communities.
Effets de soir
Evening light as subject: sunset, twilight and dusk painted for their own atmospheric effects.
Electronic art
Art made with electronic technology - video, sound, circuits and code - as the medium itself.
Electronic Disturbance Theater
Hacktivist artist collective staging virtual sit-ins with its FloodNet tool as electronic civil disobedience.
Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture
The Renaissance in English furniture: carved oak, heraldic strapwork and joined construction under Elizabeth I and James I.
Empire style
Napoleon's neoclassical style: gilded bronze on dark mahogany, Roman emblems and imperial grandeur in interiors.
En plein air
Painting outdoors, directly from the motif, to catch light and weather before they change.
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English furniture
The English furniture tradition: regional workshops reworking continental styles in oak, walnut and mahogany.
Environmental art
Art that engages the environment itself - land, water, weather and ecology - as material, site and subject.
Environmental sculpture
Sculpture that shapes the space around it - works you enter, walk through or are surrounded by.
Ero guro
Japan's erotic-grotesque aesthetic: sensuality, decadence and the macabre braided into one transgressive image.
Etching revival
The nineteenth-century revival of original etching: artists biting their own plates for a free, personal line.
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Ethnofuturism
An Estonian-born movement fusing Finno-Ugric folklore and identity with avant-garde and futurist forms.
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Excessivism
Contemporary movement embracing overabundance and imbalance in art - an ironic 'new Rococo' of surplus.
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Existential Art
Postwar art of alienation and the human condition: isolated figures, bare spaces and anxious surfaces.
Expressionism
Distorted form and violent color in the service of inner feeling - the art of modern anxiety.
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Fantastic realism
The Vienna school painting dream and myth with old-master precision: fantastic vision in naturalistic detail.
Fauvism
Wild, arbitrary color laid on in flat patches - the short-lived shock of the 'wild beasts' of 1905.
Feminist art movement
International second-wave movement recentering women's experience and dismantling art's craft hierarchies.
Feminist art movement in the United States
The US feminist art movement: women's art and experience placed at the center of a changed art world.
Fête Galante
Aristocrats at play in dreamy parklands - a genre the Academy literally invented because no category fit.
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Fiber art
Textile materials and techniques raised to fine art: weaving, knotting and soft form off the wall.
Fictive art
Art that fabricates evidence - archives, photos and data - to make an invented narrative look real.
Figura serpentinata
The Mannerist spiral pose: figures twisting upward in a corkscrew that invites the eye around them.
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Figuration Libre
Early-1980s French return to bold, comic-street figuration painted with slapdash energy and flat color.
Figurative art
Art that shows the world: the human figure and visible things represented, from likeness to stylization.
Figurative Constructivism
German movement fusing constructivist structure with human content: the figure reduced to social sign.
Fin de siècle
The 'end of the century' mood: decadence, beauty and dread braided through European art around 1900.
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Finish Fetish
Los Angeles' glossy 1960s look: resin, fiberglass, and automotive lacquer finished to a seamless, candy-bright sheen.
Flat Design
The digital interface look that stripped away shadows, gradients, and texture for pure, bold simplicity.
Flemish Expressionism
Flanders' interwar expressionism: monumental peasant life in earthy color and vigorous brushwork, born at Sint-Martens-Latem.
Flemish painting
The painting tradition of Flanders: oil-glazed realism from the van Eyck generation to the Rubens-era Baroque.
Fluxus
Anti-art, chance, and event scores: a 1960s network that dissolved the border between art, music, and everyday life.
Folk art
Handmade art rooted in folk culture - quilts, carvings, painted furniture - utilitarian in origin, bold and patterned in look.
Forma 1
Rome, 1947: young Italian artists arguing that abstract form itself could be Marxist - a school of non-figurative art.
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Formalesque
Bernard Smith's 1994 name for modernist art c. 1890-1960: a period style of form and flatness, now that 'modern' no longer fits.
Formalism
Judging art by its form - color, line, composition, making - and treating subject, story, and history as secondary.
Formizm
Poland's home-grown avant-garde: Cubist, Expressionist and folk-art energy in Kraków, 1917-1922.
Formline art
The Pacific Northwest Coast design system: flowing formlines, ovoids and U-forms in black and red, carved, painted and printed.
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Found footage
Re-editing existing film into new work: montage and appropriation from Cornell's Rose Hobart to Marclay's The Clock.
Found object
Objet trouvé: the artist's choice turns an ordinary object - a rack, a urinal, a bus ticket - into art.
Fourth dimension in art
When the fourth dimension became a modern obsession: Cubist simultaneity, Duchamp's motion studies and Dalí's hypercube crucifixion.
Free Secession
Berlin's 1914 breakaway: some 50 modernists led by Max Liebermann left the Berlin Secession to exhibit freely until 1924.
French Gothic architecture
Gothic's birthplace: pointed arches, rib vaults, and flying buttresses raising stone and colored light to unprecedented heights.
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Fronte Nuovo delle Arti
Italy's postwar front of realists and abstractionists, 1946-1950: art beyond Novecento, undone by the abstraction-versus-realism debate.
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Frutiger Aero
Glossy mid-2000s design aesthetic of glass, bubbles, and green hills: skeuomorphic interfaces promising technology in harmony with nature.
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Frutiger Metro
The flat, colorful bridge of 2010-2015: Metro-style tiles, vivid gradients, and abstract vector shapes linking glossy Aero to minimal flat design.
Fumism
Parisian absurdist current of the 1880s-1910s: satirical hoaxes, monochrome jokes, and deadpan wit that anticipated Dada forty years early.
Funk art
Bay Area clay-and-junk art of the 1960s-70s: bawdy, figurative, deliberately ungainly - hot where Minimalism was cool.
Futurism
The machine-age avant-garde: speed, violence, and movement rendered as force lines, simultaneity, and noise.
Futurist architecture
Sant'Elia's machine-age metropolis: dynamic megastructures of concrete and steel, drawn but almost never built.
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Galicia-Volyn school
Medieval Rus' school of Galicia-Volhynia: white-stone churches with carved facades, icons and book miniatures blending Byzantine and Western forms.
Gekiga
Japan's 'dramatic pictures': cinematic, gritty, adult manga that broke away from children's comics from 1957.
Generación de la Ruptura
Mexico's breakaway generation: postwar artists who defied muralist nationalism for personal, international art.
Generative art
Art made with an autonomous system - rules or algorithms that make some of the decisions - from 1960s plotter drawings to living software.
Geometric abstraction
Abstract art organized around geometric form - shapes and lines combined into non-objective compositions with no reference to the visible world.
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Geometry of Fear
Postwar British sculpture of spiky welded and bronze figures - an 'iconography of despair' named by critic Herbert Read in 1952.
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Gestes esthétiques
A Symbolist ideal of art as a mystical synthesis of painting, literature, and music, born in the Rosicrucian salons of 1890s Paris.
Ghent–Bruges school
Flemish manuscript illumination of Ghent and Bruges - realist miniatures framed by trompe-l'oeil borders of flowers, insects, and jewels.
Glitch art
Art made from technological error: corrupted data, broken media, and hardware failure turned into aesthetic material.
Global Village Coffeehouse
1990s coffee-shop branding aesthetic: hand-drawn line art, earth tones, and tribal-nature motifs promising handmade warmth.
Golconda painting
Deccani miniature painting of the Golconda Sultanate: Persian elegance, local pigment, and a tense, opulent courtly world.
Gongbi
Meticulous Chinese realist painting: fine contour lines, layered color washes, and exquisitely finished detail.
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Good Design
Postwar design ethos: honest materials, clean functional form, and everyday objects elevated by good design.
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Gorgona Group
Zagreb's anti-art collective (1959-1966): conceptual gestures, endless meanders, and a free anti-magazine.
Gothic architecture
Medieval Europe's soaring style: pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses opening walls into colored light.
Gothic art
The art of the age of cathedrals: pointed-arch architecture, luminous stained glass, and growing naturalism, born near Paris around 1140.
Gothic art and architecture in Monza
Lombard Gothic in the Lombard kings' old capital: marble facades, the Zavattari's Theodelinda frescoes, and the Visconti-era Arengario.
Gothic art and architecture in Pavia
Visconti Pavia: Gothic churches in terracotta, the Ark of Saint Augustine, and the manuscript atelier famous across Europe as the Ouvrage de Lombardie.
Gothic art in Milan
Lombard Gothic of the Visconti age: Cistercian abbeys, terracotta-and-marble churches, and the great marble building site of Milan Cathedral.
Gothic sculpture
Saints that step out of the columns: Gothic sculpture grows from rigid portal figures to the painted realism of Sluter and the Naumburg Master.
Graffiti
Marks on walls from Pompeii's scribbles to spray-painted tags: writing and drawing on public surfaces, unsanctioned and omnipresent.
Greek Revival architecture
The last phase of Neoclassicism: ancient Greek temple forms - Doric columns, pediments, plain white stone - reborn as the civic voice of the early 1800s.
Greek Revival architecture in North America
The American take on Greek Revival: columned temple fronts on banks, churches, and farmhouses, dominant across the US and Canada from about 1800 to 1860.
Group X
A short-lived 1920 group of ex-Vorticists - Lewis, Wadsworth, Kauffer, Dobson - who broke from the London Group and staged one defiant modernist show.
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Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel
Paris collective that traded the lone genius for anonymous, playful optical environments the public walks through and transforms.
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Groupe Espace
Post-war French collective uniting painting, sculpture and architecture into one constructed environment for modern life.
Grupo Montparnasse
Chilean modernists who met in Montparnasse-era Paris and brought Cézanne, cubism and expressionism home to Santiago.
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Gruppo del Cenobio
Milanese group that answered Informel and Pop with the disciplined mark: the sign as painting's fresh start.
Gruppo Labronico
Livorno artists' association founded in 1920, carrying the Macchiaioli inheritance of Fattori and Puccini into modern Italian art.
Gustavian
Sweden's pale, candlelit neoclassicism: soft grey-white rooms and restrained ornament for long northern winters.
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Gutai group
Japan's post-war avant-garde where spirit and matter 'shake hands': bodies, paint and materials made to do what has never been done before.
Hague School
Dutch realists of mood and weather: warm grey tonalities, polders, dunes and fishing beaches painted from Barbizon's example.
Haitian Vodou art
Sacred art of Haitian Vodou: sequinned spirit flags, vèvè drawings and altar assemblages fusing Africa, Catholicism and the Americas.
Hakuba-kai
Meiji-era society of Western-style painters whose Tokyo exhibitions made plein-air oil painting modern Japan's own art.
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Happening
One-off participatory events - invented by Allan Kaprow in 1959 - that collapse the boundary between art and life.
Hard-edge painting
Geometric abstraction with razor-sharp edges and flat unmodulated color - cool, crisp, and impersonal.
Harlem Renaissance
The 1920s-30s flowering of Black art, writing, and music centered in Harlem that transformed American culture.
Hasegawa school
Small Kyoto school of Momoyama-Edo painting founded by Hasegawa Tōhaku: misty ink screens and sliding doors in a softened Kanō manner.
Heidelberg School
Australia's first major art movement: plein-air painters of the bush around Melbourne in gold and glare, named by a critic in 1891.
Heisei retro
Nostalgic Japanese aesthetic reviving late-1990s/2000s pop culture - flip phones, Tamagotchi, purikura, loose socks - a hit with Gen Z.
Hellenism
Neoclassical taste that turned to ancient Greece as beauty's ideal - Winckelmann's 'noble simplicity' in sculpture, painting, and Greek Revival architecture.
Henry II style
French Renaissance classicism fused with Northern Mannerism: the architecture, sculpture and carved furniture of the Fontainebleau court, c. 1530-1590.
Hermannsburg School
Watercolour landscapes of the Central Australian outback painted by Arrernte artists from the Hermannsburg Mission from the 1930s, led by Albert Namatjira.
High Renaissance
The peak of Italian Renaissance classicism, c. 1495-1527: Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael achieving ideal form, harmony and monumental calm.
Hispagnolisme
The 19th-century French craze for Spanish culture and subjects - Velázquez-inspired painting, bullfight themes, majo costume - that reshaped French art.
Historicism
Art and architecture that revives past styles: 19th-century historicism looked to Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque models for modern monuments.
Holography art
Art made with holograms: laser-recorded interference patterns reconstructed as floating three-dimensional images, from Dalí's 1972 show to contemporary light art.
Hudson River School
America's first home-grown art movement: grand 19th-century landscapes of the Hudson Valley and the American wilderness, luminous, vast and allegorical.
Hurufiyya movement
Post-colonial artists fuse Islamic calligraphy with modern art, making the Arabic letter a national and cultural sign in abstract form.
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Hyper-Mannerism (Anachronism)
Deliberately anachronistic painting that revives Mannerist artifice and classical technique - chiefly the work of Carlo Maria Mariani.
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Hyperrealism
Photographic illusion pushed past the photograph: hyper-detailed paintings and sculptures with narrative, mood and uncanny presence.
Idyllic school
Victorian British painters who turned humble town and country life into quiet, twilight pictorial idylls - Walker, North and Pinwell's circle.
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Ilkhanid
Mongol-era Persian art of the 13th-14th centuries, fusing Chinese motifs with Islamic book arts at the Tabriz workshops.
Immersion
Art experienced from inside: enveloping, multi-sensory environments - from video installation to VR - that surround the viewer.
Impressionism
Painting the fleeting moment: broken brushwork, light as subject, and modern life seen outdoors.
Impressionist photography
Soft-focus, painterly photography of the 1890s that let mood and atmosphere stand in for sharp detail.
Incoherents
Parisian absurdist movement whose jokes - monochromes, defaced classics - prefigured Dada by three decades.
Inconnu Independent Art Group
Hungarian dissident artist collective whose banned exhibitions made it part of the democratic opposition.
Indian Radical Painters' and Sculptors' Association
Marxist Kerala-Baroda artist collective that used cheap materials and hard politics against the art market.
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Indian Space painting
1940s New York abstraction that built totemic, interlocking forms out of Indigenous American design.
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Information art
Data as pigment: art built from datasets, archives and network signals, from MoMA's 1970 Information show to climate stripes.
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Interactive Art
Art completed by its audience: works that sense the viewer and change in response, from cybernetic sculpture to networked public installation.
International Gothic
The elegant courtly style of c. 1370-1450 shared across Europe: flowing figures, jewelled detail and gold grounds over spatial depth.
International Typographic Style
Postwar Swiss design: mathematical grids, sans-serif type and objective photography, making information clarity itself the aesthetic.
Intimism
Quiet domestic interiors where patterned wallpaper, family, and private life fuse into one intimate surface.
Ionian school
Greece's first modern painting school: Byzantine tradition meeting Italian Baroque and Western realism on the free Ionian Islands.
IPhone art
Art that lives on the iPhone and iPad screen as interactive apps - distinct from pictures painted with mobile paint tools.
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Irrealism
Art and writing that estranges us from accepted reality - the unreal in an unusual, unsettling key rather than pure fantasy.
Italian Baroque
The Counter-Reformation's stylistic period in Italy - grand churches, illusionistic ceilings, and interiors of stucco, marble, and motion.
Italian Baroque art
Italy's Baroque of tenebrist altarpieces, illusionistic ceilings, and dramatic marble - Counter-Reformation art engineered to move the viewer.
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Italian Futurism
Speed, machines, and violence celebrated as beauty: the 1909 avant-garde that taught art to show motion.
Italian modern and contemporary art
A century of Italian art from Futurism to Arte Povera and beyond - no single style, but a love of material and drama.
Italo-Byzantine
Medieval Italian painting in the Byzantine manner - gold-ground icons of the maniera greca that preceded Giotto.
Japandi
Japanese minimalism meets Scandinavian simplicity: calm, clutter-free interiors of natural materials and muted tones.
Japonisme
The late-19th-century vogue for Japanese art that reshaped Western composition: flat color, radical crops, empty space.
Jodi
Net art's Dutch-Belgian pioneers, turning code, glitches, and disassembled video games into deliberately chaotic art.
Jugendstil
The German and Austrian Art Nouveau: flowing ornament and geometric modernism, from Jugend posters to the Vienna Secession.
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Junge Wilde
Germany's young wild ones of the late 1970s: loud, fast, figurative painting revived against minimal and conceptual art.
Junk Art
Sculpture from the scrap heap: crushed cars, scrap metal, and discarded junk assembled into art that glorifies the throwaway.
Kaavi art
Red laterite incised into white lime plaster: the two-tone mural art of the Konkan coast, cut rather than painted.
Kalamkari
Ancient Indian textile art: pen-drawn and block-printed cotton in natural dyes, from Srikalahasti and Machilipatnam.
Kalighat painting
Bold, swift Kalighat pats: deity and babu caricatures in sweeping brushwork, painted cheap and fast for colonial Calcutta.
Kamangiri art
Mural painting of Kutch: whole Ramayana cycles and royal processions by the Muslim bow-maker painters called Kamangars.
Kanō school
The official painting school of Japan's shoguns for four centuries, marrying Chinese ink line to Japanese gold-leaf colour.
Kei school
The Kamakura-era Japanese lineage of Buddhist sculptors that fused Nara-period tradition with unflinching new realism.
Kerala mural painting
Temple and palace frescoes of Hindu mythology from Kerala, painted in five mineral colours by a centuries-old workshop tradition.
Kinetic art
Art that moves: balanced mobiles, motors and light effects that make motion itself the medium.
Kitchen sink realism
Britain's angry, unglamorous realism: unwashed dishes, cramped flats and working-class life shown without varnish.
Kitsch movement
Classical painters worldwide who reclaimed 'kitsch' as a virtue after Odd Nerdrum's 1998 manifesto: Old Master craft, narrative, and raw emotion.
Knave of Diamonds
Moscow's provocative 1910-1917 exhibition society: Cézanne's structure fused with Russian folk art, lubok prints, and painted shop signs.
Komnenian style (1081-1185)
Middle Byzantine painting and mosaic under the Komnenos emperors: elongated figures, sorrowful tenderness, and gold-ground splendor.
Kyiv school of icon painting
The medieval icon-painting tradition of Kyivan Rus', rooted in Byzantine models and centered on the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra workshop.
L'art pompier
The derisive French name for official Salon history painting: fireman-helmet heroes, glossy mythological nudes, and the bourgeois grand manner.
Land art
Monumental earthworks of the 1960s-70s: art made of soil, rock, and the site itself, beyond the reach of the gallery and the market.
Laren School
Dutch artists' colony at Laren in the Gooi: Hague School heirs painting sunlit heathland and peasant genre scenes.
Late modernism
Modernism after 1945: abstract expressionism, color field, minimalism and pop push formal purity to its limits, before postmodernism redraws the map.
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Late Period
Egypt's last pharaonic age (664-332 BC): a polished archaizing revival of Old and Middle Kingdom models in stone, bronze, and temple relief.
Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-1261)
Art of the Crusader state that ruled Constantinople and the Aegean, 1204-1261: Byzantine conventions carrying French Gothic forms under Latin patrons.
Latte art
Patterns poured or etched in milk microfoam on espresso crema - hearts, tulips, rosettas - a barista's craft perfected in Seattle in the 1980s-90s.
LED art
Light art built from light-emitting diodes: programmed grids and scrolling text in the gallery, throwies and blinkies in the street.
Ledger art
Plains Indian narrative drawing on ledger-book paper, 1860s-1920s: battles, hunts, and ceremony in flat color and hard outline, revived since the 1960s.
Les Automatistes
Quebec's radical 1940s avant-garde: automatist abstraction, the Refus global manifesto, and a claim for expressive freedom.
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Les Nabis
Post-Impressionist 'prophets' of flat, decorative painting - symbols and pattern over naturalism, bridging Gauguin and modernism.
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Les Plasticiens
Montreal's hard-edge geometric abstraction from 1955: pure form and color, in deliberate reaction to Automatiste spontaneity.
Les XX
Brussels' jury-free avant-garde society, 1883-1893, whose exhibitions introduced Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh to Belgium.
Lettrism
French avant-garde founded by Isidore Isou in 1945: letters as raw material for poetry, hypergraphics, film, and sound.
Levantine Gothic
The wide, austere Gothic of Spain's Mediterranean coast: hall-like naves, chapels between buttresses, dim geometric interiors.
Light and Space
Southern California's 1960s movement that makes perception itself the artwork - glass, resin, neon and shaped natural light.
Light in painting
Not a style but painting's oldest craft: how light is staged - source, direction, contrast - to model form, mark time and carry meaning.
Light painting
Long-exposure photography that draws with moving light: torches, LEDs and the camera itself trace glowing calligraphy through the dark.
Lingnan School
China's 20th-century modernizers of ink painting: the Three Masters of Lingnan fused Japanese-mediated Western realism with Cantonese tradition.
Little Masters
German engravers of Dürer's generation who shrank whole mythologies onto postage-stamp plates, made for collectors' albums.
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Littoral art
Bruce Barber's term for art made outside the artworld's institutions: public, community-based, and built on exchange between artists and spectators.
Live painting
Painting made as public performance - a canvas finished before an audience at a club, concert or event, often to live music.
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Ljubljana School of Graphic Arts
Slovenia's mid-century printmaking movement: technically brilliant intaglio prints that made Ljubljana a world graphics capital after 1955.
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London Regionalism
London, Ontario's defiant 1960s scene: artists who made their own city the subject and center of their art.
Louis XIV furniture
Massive, gilt-bronze-laden royal furniture that turned delicate after 1690 with Boulle's ebony and tortoiseshell marquetry.
Louis XV furniture
Curved, comfortable, asymmetric Rococo furniture for intimate salons - rocaille shells, C-scrolls and flowered marquetry.
Louis XVI furniture
Straight-lined neoclassical furniture: fluted tapered legs, classical motifs and plaques of Sèvres porcelain.
Lowbrow Art
Underground visual movement from Los Angeles, mixing comix, punk, tiki and hot-rod culture into humorous, technically slick painting.
Lumino kinetic art
Kinetic art's glowing branch: works whose materials are light and movement, from Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space Modulator to Schöffer's light towers.
Lyon School
Lyon's poetic nineteenth-century school: moral, religious and philosophical painting with quiet finish, cousin to the Pre-Raphaelites.
Lyrical abstraction
Postwar painterly abstraction: the improvised mark against cold geometry - Abstraction lyrique in Paris, its American echo a generation later.
Macchiaioli
Italy's proto-Impressionists: Tuscan paintings built from patches (macchie) of light and shade, painted outdoors a generation before Monet.
Macedonian Renaissance (867–1056)
Byzantium's classical revival under the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056): natural figures, great manuscripts, ivories and icons.
Macedonian school of icon painting
Thessaloniki's late Byzantine fresco painters of the Palaeologan age, from Ohrid to Prizren: signed workshops, heavy drapery, dramatic light.
Madhubani art
Mithila's women's painting tradition: flat, pattern-packed ritual art from the mud walls of Bihar to paper and canvas.
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Madí
Buenos Aires-born movement of playful geometric invention: shaped canvases, flat colour, and art objects that refuse the frame.
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Magic realism
Exacting, luminous realism that makes the everyday look uncanny - Franz Roh's 1925 coinage, since spread to fiction and beyond.
Mail art
A global network movement making art by post - postcards, artistamps, and collage exchanged freely, with no jury and no market.
Mannerism
The elegant, artificial art of the Late Renaissance: elongated bodies, unstable space, and virtuoso style pursued for its own sake.
Mannerism in Brazil
Mannerism's colonial Brazilian chapter: austere Jesuit plain-style churches and their carved, painted Counter-Reformation interiors.
Marwar painting
Bold-line Rajput miniature school of Jodhpur, blending Mughal refinement with desert vividness across manuscripts, ragamalas, and murals.
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Massurrealism
Surrealism retooled for the media age: dreamlike imagery built from advertising, pop art, and digital collage.
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Matter painting
Postwar painting that treats paint itself as physical matter - thick impasto and gritted surfaces carrying raw emotional weight.
Mavo
Tokyo's radical 1920s avant-garde: Dada-infused collage, performance and print that threw art back into everyday life.
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Maximalism
The 'more is more' aesthetic of deliberate excess - layered pattern, color and clutter piled up in answer to minimalism.
Medieval Art
A thousand years of European art - early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic - from gold-ground manuscripts to carved cathedrals.
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Medium specificity
The doctrine that each art should exploit what only it can do - painting its flatness, sculpture its thingness.
Merz
Kurt Schwitters' art of salvage - collages, magazines and walk-in grottos built from the everyday fragments of a broken world.
Metacosa Movement
Italian figurative painters united in 1979 by a shared poetics of light and careful craft - not a shared style.
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Metaphysical painting
De Chirico's silent Italian squares: mannequins, long shadows and enigma - painting 'that which cannot be seen'.
Mexican muralism
State-patroned murals after the Mexican Revolution: history painted huge on public walls by Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros.
Middle Kingdom
Classical age of Egyptian art: calm, refined, psychologically deep - royal sculpture, tomb painting and jeweller's craft.
Mingei
Japan's folk-craft movement: beauty in humble, useful, hand-made things - bowls, cloth and trays - by unknown craftspeople.
Minhwa
Korean folk painting by anonymous artisans: tigers, magpies, and flowers rendered flat, bold, and joyful.
Minimalism
Art stripped to essentials: industrial forms in series, no illusion, no touch - the object and your experience of it.
Mir iskusstva
Russia's World of Art: retrospective elegance, theatre and book design - a magazine and the movement it fostered from 1898.
Miserablism
French postwar figurative painting of bleak, elongated despair, begun by Francis Gruber and epitomized by Bernard Buffet.
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Mission muralismo
Grassroots mural movement of San Francisco's Mission District, fusing Mexican muralism with Latin American solidarity politics.
Mixed media
Artworks that combine more than one medium or material - paint with paper, cloth, wood, or found objects - in a single work.
Mochizuki school
Kyoto painting dynasty founded by Mochizuki Gyokusen I around 1700, blending Tosa, Kanō, and Shijō currents across six generations.
Modern art
Umbrella term for the art of c. 1860-1970: experimentation, abstraction, and the traditions of the past thrown aside.
Modern European ink painting
Ink painting reimagined through Western modernism: minimalist brush-and-ink work fusing East Asian practice with European art.
Modern Indian painting
Indian painting's modern turn: European academic technique, Bengal School revivalism, and a new national aesthetic.
Modern Style
Britain's home-grown Art Nouveau: sinuous plant forms, the Glasgow rose, and design from furniture to metalware.
Modernism
The great early-20th-century break with tradition: experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience across the arts.
Modernism in Brazil
Brazil's 1920s-40s avant-garde: European modernism swallowed and digested into national subject, color, and manifesto.
Modernisme
Catalan Art Nouveau: Gaudí's curves, trencadís mosaics, and a new visual language for a rising Catalonia.
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Modular constructivism
Sculpture of endlessly repeating modules: saddle-surface units fused into seamless, light-filtering screens and walls.
Molse School
A painters' colony around Mol in the Belgian Campine, painting its heath, sand flats, and farms en plein air.
Monjas coronadas
Ceremonial portraits of newly professed nuns in New Spain, crowned with flowers and jewels at their mystical marriage to Christ.
Mono-ha
The 'school of things': Japanese and Korean artists placing raw stone, steel, glass, and wood in unaltered encounters.
Monochrome painting
Painting reduced to one color, where tone, texture, and surface replace the image as the subject.
Moresque
Renaissance ornament of many-branched tendrils and half-leaves - Europe's decorative echo of the Islamic arabesque.
Mosan art
The goldsmiths' art of the Meuse valley: champlevé enamel, cast bronze, carved stone, and manuscripts at their Romanesque peak.
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Moscow Conceptualists
The unofficial Soviet movement that turned conceptual and appropriation tactics against socialist ideology - the artistic counterpoint to Socialist Realism.
Moscow school
The Russian architectural and painting school of the rising Muscovite principality, 14th-16th centuries, fusing Byzantine and Romanesque precedent.
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Moscow school of icon painting
The great flowering of Russian icon painting in Muscovy, from Theophanes the Greek to Dionysius - luminous hieratic images in pure colour and gold.
Mozarabic
Art of the Arabized Christians of al-Andalus: blazing Apocalyptic manuscripts and horseshoe-arched churches fusing Islamic ornament with Christian devotion.
Mughal
The painting tradition of the Mughal courts - refined miniatures in watercolour and gold blending Persian, Indian and European modes.
Mughal Miniature Painting
Jewel-like Indo-Islamic paintings fusing Persian delicacy with Indian naturalism and European realism.
Mughal painting
The imperial painting tradition of Mughal India: jewel-bright miniatures fusing Persian refinement, Indian colour and European naturalism.
Multidimensional art
Dimensional art that refuses the flat picture plane - paper sculpture, layered photos, relief and found-object assemblage that read differently as you move.
Munich school
The dark, painterly realism of the Munich Academy in the later 19th century, which trained generations of German and Greek painters.
Munich Secession
Munich's progressive breakaway of 1892: a cooperative of artists whose exhibitions showed impressionism and symbolism side by side.
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Musicalism
French abstract movement that composes colour and form like music — colour as vibration, arranged for emotional resonance.
Mysore painting
Classical South Indian painting of Mysore: muted colours, delicate lines and low-relief gold gesso on devotional Hindu themes.
Nabis
A Parisian brotherhood of 'prophets' who turned Gauguin's lessons into flat colour, ornamental pattern and symbolic suggestion.
Naïve art
Self-taught painting of disarming clarity: flat space, bright colour and meticulous detail, made outside the academies.
Nanga (Bunjinga)
Japanese literati painting: monochrome ink landscapes in the Chinese Southern School spirit, painted by Edo-period poet-scholars.
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Nas-Taliq
The Persianate 'hanging' calligraphic hand: sloping, thick-thin scripts carrying Persian and Urdu poetry from Herat's scriptoria to today.
Nathdwara painting
Rajasthani devotional school of Shrinathji: pichhwai cloth paintings and miniatures offered as seva to Krishna at the Nathdwara temple.
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Neo-Attic
A Roman-age classicizing sculptural style: crisp reliefs and vases copying refined Classical and Archaic models for connoisseurs.
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Neo-Byzantine
19th-century revival of Byzantine form: domed churches, gold mosaics, and icon-like painting, from Paris and Vienna to Sofia and Belgrade.
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Neo-Concretism
Brazil's sensual answer to Concrete art: poetic, phenomenological abstraction where colour, form, and the viewer meet as living bodies.
Neo-Dada
Junk, jokes, and deadpan signs: Dada's tactics revived against Abstract Expressionism, opening the road to Pop Art.
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Neo-Dada Organizers
Tokyo anti-art collective (1960-62): destructive performances and happenings that turned garbage, smashing, and spectacle into art.
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Neo-expressionism
Late-1970s return to raw, emotional figuration - rough paint, vivid color, mythic subjects - against Conceptual and Minimal art.
Neo-Fauvism
Mid-1920s French poetic painting, championed by Cahiers d'Art as traditional artistry answering Surrealist automatism.
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Neo-figurative
Latin America's return to the figure: raw, expressionistic bodies surfacing from abstraction to confront politics and everyday life.
Neo-futurism
Technology-driven design of sweeping curves and exposed structure, from 1960s structural expressionism to today's smart cities.
Neo-Grec
Second Empire classicism made legible: polychrome Pompeian ornament and charming scenes of antique daily life.
Neo-Impressionism
Seurat's scientific method: dots of pure color mixed by the eye, turning painting into deliberate, luminous construction.
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Neo-minimalism
Minimalism revived and questioned: reductive geometry, serial form, and cool abstraction in late-20th-century art.
Neo-pop
Pop Art rebooted for the age of brands: glossy, kitsch-laden works celebrating celebrities, cartoons, and consumer goods.
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Neo-primitivism
The Russian avant-garde looking home: Cézanne, Cubism, and Futurism fused with icons and lubok folk prints.
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Neo-Rococo
Rococo's 19th-century revival: scrolling ornament, floral carving, and courtly elegance in furniture, silver, and paint.
Neo-romanticism
Romantic vision reborn against realism: haunted landscape, visionary nature, and national myth, peaking in 1930s-40s Britain.
Neoclassical architecture
Greek and Roman forms at their source: columned porticos, pediments, and calm symmetry for modern public buildings.
Neoclassicism
Return to Greek and Roman ideals of clarity, restraint, and civic virtue, born in Rome and carried across Europe by Enlightenment taste.
Neogeo
1980s New York movement using slick geometric abstraction to critique consumer society, simulation, and the commodity image.
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Neoism
Parodistic avant-garde network born in Montreal in 1979: shared identities, mail art, prank, and deliberate self-contradiction.
Neomodern
Late twentieth-century return to modernist simplicity - rational, functional, unornamented - against postmodern complexity.
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Neorealism
Painting of everyday life without idealization, from Camden Town's WWI-era neo-realism to the social vision of Latin America.
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Net art
Art made on and for the network: websites, code, and online actions that sidestep the gallery and turn the browser itself into material.
Neue Künstlervereinigung München
Munich's secessionist artists' association of 1909: Expressionist founders whose splits seeded Der Blaue Reiter.
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New Casualism
Provisional painting for anxious times: loose, tentative, deliberately unfinished work that mistrusts polish.
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New Figuration
Post-war art's return to the figure: bodies distorted, truncated, or left as traces against pure abstraction.
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New Genres
Art that starts with an idea and picks its medium: video, performance, sound, installation, and whatever comes next.
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New Ink Painting
East Asian ink painting recast through modernism: abstract, gestural brush-and-ink art from 1960s Hong Kong.
New Kingdom
Egypt's imperial golden age: monumental temple relief and polychrome tomb painting at the peak of pharaonic power.
New materials in 20th-century art
Collage, found objects, plastics, neon, and industrial debris: a century of artists expanding what art is made of.
New media art
Art made with electronic media technologies - video, digital, internet, interactive, and robotic art - from 1960s experiments onward.
New Objectivity
Germany's unsentimental 1920s realism - cool, sharp-edged, and ruthlessly critical of Weimar society.
New Sculpture
Late Victorian British sculpture: naturalistic bronze figures from poetry and myth, alive with spiritual feeling.
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New Tendencies
Zagreb's 1961-1973 exhibition series fusing neo-constructivism, kinetic and programmed art, and early computer aesthetics.
New Urbanism
Walkable, mixed-use neighborhood design that revives traditional town planning as an answer to suburban sprawl.
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New Visions
A Palestinian art group that turned boycott into aesthetics, making work from mud, clay, leather and natural dyes.
New York Figurative Expressionism
1950s painters who kept the figure alive inside Abstract Expressionism's New York, with expressionist force and painterly freedom.
New York School
New York's postwar circle of painters, poets and makers - visually the Abstract Expressionists documented at the 9th Street shows.
Nihonga
Japanese-style painting: mineral pigments on silk or paper, reinvented in the Meiji era as the counterweight to Western-style art.
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Nirmal furniture
Hand-painted handmade wooden furniture from Nirmal, Telangana - a Geographical Indication craft known for its smooth lacquered finish.
Nirmal paintings
Lacquer-panel painting from Nirmal, Telangana: mineral and plant colors, golden light against dark grounds, drawn from Ajanta and Mughal art.
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NO!art
New York anti-art of shock and refusal: raw assemblage and collage attacking the market, consumerism, fascism and the Holocaust.
Nordic Classicism
The brief classical moment of Nordic architecture, 1910-1930: stripped antique calm wedded to emerging modernism, from Stockholm libraries to Helsinki housing.
Northern landscape style
Monumental northern Chinese landscape tradition: towering peaks, angular ink texture strokes and the Song imperial canon of landscape painting.
Northern Mannerism
Mannerism north of the Alps: courtly elegance, elongated nudes and intricate ornament, from Fontainebleau to Rudolf II's Prague and Haarlem.
Norwich school of painters
Britain's first provincial art movement: self-taught Norwich painters rendering the Norfolk landscape after Dutch Golden Age masters.
Nottingham alabaster
England's medieval alabaster industry: painted devotional panels and figures carved for churches at home and across Europe.
Nouveau réalisme
French movement of the 1960s that made art from reality itself - torn posters, crushed cars, and accumulated objects.
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Nouvelle tendance
Zagreb-born network of systematic visual research - repetition, optics, kinetics, and computers - across five shows, 1961-1973.
Novecento Italiano
Milanese 'return to order' movement of the 1920s-30s reviving classical Italian art under early fascist patronage.
November Group
Revolution-born Berlin artists' collective, 1918-1935: radical, socialist, and stylistically everything at once.
Novgorod school
Byzantine-rooted Russian icon and mural tradition of Novgorod: flatter form, brighter color, rhythmic line.
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Nuagisme
French 'Cloudism' of the 1950s-70s: transparent, weather-filled abstraction against the flatness of geometry.
Nuclear art
Art of the Atomic Age: from Hiroshima survivors' records to nuclear movements, apocalyptic imagery, and anti-nuclear work.
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Nueva Figuración
A 1960s Latin American return to the figure: expressive, politicized painting rejecting both geometric abstraction and academic realism.
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Nut Art
Northern California art of the late 1960s built on humor, fantasy worlds, and artist alter egos - deliberately, gloriously weird.
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Objective abstraction
A short-lived British abstract experiment (1933-36): loosely brushed canvases moving from observed objects toward abstraction.
Ofakim Hadashim
Israel's founding modernist movement (New Horizons): lyrical abstraction rooted in local landscape and Mediterranean light.
Old Kingdom
The Age of the Pyramids: monumental, idealized, eternal art of Egypt's first golden age (c. 2686-2181 BC).
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Op Art
Optical art: hard-edged patterns that make flat surfaces shimmer, warp, and pulse as the eye moves.
Organic Abstraction
Rounded, wavy abstraction drawn from nature's forms - shells, bones, growths - mid-century's humane counter to geometry.
Orotone
Gold-tone photography: prints on glass backed with gold pigment or gold leaf, glowing with unusual depth and warmth.
Orphism
Cubism set free in pure color - prismatic disks and rhythmic light, named by Apollinaire in 1912.
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Otra Figuración
Four Argentine painters answering abstraction with explosive figuration: bold color, thick paint, raw emotional charge.
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Ottoman Period
Courtly art of the Ottoman Empire: luminous miniatures, refined portraiture and decorative arts from Istanbul outward.
Pahari painting
Miniature painting of the Himalayan hill courts - lyrical Radha-Krishna romance in soft, glowing color.
Painters Eleven
Eleven Ontario painters who broke English Canada's resistance to abstraction and established Abstract Expressionism there.
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Painting in Space
Kochar's 1930s invention: painted metal reliefs in slow mechanical motion, fusing picture, sculpture and time.
Panel painting
Painting on wooden panels: the standard support for European painting from antiquity until canvas displaced it in the 16th century.
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Paris School
The loose community of French and émigré artists who made Paris the centre of Western art, 1900-1940.
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Parisian Atticism
A restrained neo-classical current in 1640s-1650s Paris painting: sobriety, luminous light, and Greco-Roman order.
Pattachitra
Traditional cloth-based scroll painting of Odisha and Bengal: dense, natural-colored mythological narrative made for ritual and song.
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Pattern and Decoration
The 1970s American movement that made ornament its subject, celebrating pattern from quilts to Islamic tilework.
Pennsylvania Impressionism
Rugged American Impressionism of the New Hope colony: bold winter landscapes painted along the Delaware.
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Perceptism
Argentine concrete art of flat, frameless colored forms by Raúl Lozza, composed to continue into the wall that holds them.
Peredvizhniki
Russia's realist wanderers: independent painters who took touring exhibitions of everyday life to the provinces.
Performance Art
Art made of live action: the artist's body, time and presence before an audience replace the fixed object.
Phad painting
Rajasthani cloth scrolls painted with folk-deity epics, carried by Bhopa singer-priests as travelling temples.
Photo-Secession
Stieglitz's 1902 secession of American art photographers, fighting to have photography judged as fine art.
Photorealism
Painting from photographs with camera-cold precision: reflections, chrome and diners rebuilt in exacting detail.
Pictorialism
Photography as painting: soft focus, hand-worked prints and atmospheric tone in pursuit of beauty, not records.
Piling School
Chinese genre-painting school from Piling (Changzhou), known for 'boneless' wash technique and flower-and-bird subjects preserved in Japan.
Pixel Art
Images built pixel by pixel on a visible grid: limitation as style, from arcade sprites to modern galleries.
Plains hide painting
Painting on buffalo and elk hides by Plains artists: geometric robes and parfleches, pictographic exploits, winter counts, and visionary shield designs.
Plakatstil
Germany's early modern poster style: flat color, bold lettering, and a single simplified object carrying the whole advertisement.
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Plasticien
Quebec's 1955 non-figurative movement: geometric, hard-edge abstraction in pure colour and form, reacting against the Automatistes.
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Plein Air
Painting outdoors and on the spot, chasing natural light and weather before they change.
Pointillism
Painting with dots: pure color placed side by side to mix in the viewer's eye, not on the palette.
Pont-Aven School
The Pont-Aven circle around Gauguin: bold pure colour, flat cloisonnist forms and Symbolist subjects, breaking with Impressionism.
Pop art
Adverts, comics, packaging and celebrities lifted into fine art in postwar Britain and America.
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Porn Art Movement
Brazilian avant-garde (1980-82) weaponizing pornographic provocation as political resistance under the military dictatorship.
Portuguese Plain Style architecture
Austere, undecorated 16th-century Portuguese architecture - Estilo Chão - built to take decoration later.
Post-classic (c.900-1580)
Aztec and Maya art after the Classic collapse: stone deities, painted screenfold codices, turquoise mosaic and featherwork.
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Post-expressionism
The cool, dreamlike clarity of European painting after Expressionism - Franz Roh's 'magic realism' of the 1920s.
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Post-impressionism
After Impressionism: structure, symbol and personal vision - Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin.
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Post-surrealism
Deliberately planned American answer to Surrealism: conscious, staged dream-images from 1930s Los Angeles.
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Post-YBAs
Loose critical label for British artists after the YBAs: modest materials, political edge, less spectacle.
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Posthumanist art
Art made with digital technology and machine agency, rooted in posthumanist thought.
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Postminimalism
Minimalism loosened: soft materials, visible process, and irregular forms - the turn to matter.
Postmodernism
Pastiche, irony and pluralism after modernism - from Venturi's architecture to appropriation art.
Potosi School
Baroque painting of colonial Potosí: rigid figures, crowded narrative scenes, and dark Spanish tonal richness, cousin to the Cusco School.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The 1848 circle of Hunt, Millais and Rossetti: truth to nature, medieval spirit, and jewel-like detail against academic slosh.
Precisionism
American industry rendered clean: factories, bridges, and skyscrapers in crisp geometry and immaculate light.
Primitivism
Modern art looking outward and backward: African, Oceanian, and folk forms borrowed to break with academic refinement.
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Private press movement
The book as a work of art: hand-set type, fine paper, and total design from the Kelmscott Press onward.
Process art
Art where making matters most: gravity, chance, and material behavior recorded in the finished work, not composed away.
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Progressive Art Movement
Adelaide political art movement (founded 1974) making cheap silkscreen protest posters against art-world elitism, foreign bases, and capitalism.
Proletkult
Soviet workers' cultural movement (1917-1920) building a new proletarian art in studios, journals, and theaters before being absorbed by the state.
Prostitution in Impressionist painting
A central Impressionist subject: Parisian sex work depicted candidly by Manet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec, scandalizing polite society.
Proto-Cubism
The experimental bridge into Cubism, 1906-1910: nature cut into cubes and cones, colour pared back after Cézanne.
Proto-Surrealism
Surrealism before the name: centuries of dreamlike, illogical art that the Surrealists later claimed as their ancestry.
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Pskov school of icon painting
The icon-painting school of medieval Pskov: hand-roughened grounds, warm dark colour and expressive feeling beside Novgorod's brightness.
Psychedelic art
Kaleidoscopic, color-saturated art of the 1960s counterculture: concert posters, album art and light shows inspired by psychedelic experience.
Ptolemaic
Art of Ptolemaic Egypt (332-30 BC): pharaonic conventions fused with Hellenistic faces, from painted coffins to temple reliefs.
Pulp noir
Hard-boiled crime genre with classic noir techniques and gritty urban grit, from pulp magazines to comics and games.
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Purism
Post-Cubist French movement of Ozenfant and Le Corbusier reducing objects to clean, machine-age essential forms.
Purismo
Italian revivalist current of the 1820s-60s returning to the purity of Giotto and early Raphael in art and language.
Qajar art
Art of Qajar Iran (1781-1925): life-size royal portraits, jewel-bright lacquerwork and palaces fusing Persian and European motifs.
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Qinglü shanshui
Chinese blue-green landscape: mineral azurite and malachite over ink on silk, formulated in the Tang and revived for centuries.
Queen Anne style furniture
Early-18th-century British furniture of curving cabriole legs, walnut, and restrained ornament that prizes line and form over decoration.
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Quito School
Colonial Andean tradition fusing Spanish Baroque with Indigenous craft in polychrome wood sculpture and religious painting.
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Radio art
Art made for and with radio: acoustic compositions, transmission experiments, and works staged live on air.
Ragamala paintings
Painted garlands of ragas: Indian musical modes personified as lovers, seasons and gods in miniature albums.
Rajput painting
Bright, poetic Hindu court painting of Rajasthan and the Himalayan hills, from Mewar boldness to Kangra refinement.
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Rasquache
The Chicano aesthetic of making the most from the least: discarded and everyday materials assembled with survivalist, ornamental inventiveness.
Rayonism
Russia's first abstract movement: canvases of intersecting light rays painted by Larionov and Goncharova in 1910-1914.
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Reductive art
An aesthetic of radical simplification - clarity, primary shapes and restricted color unifying minimal, hard-edge and cool art.
Remodernism
A 2000 Stuckist call to revive modernist painting with sincerity and spirituality against postmodern irony.
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Renaissance
The rebirth of classical form in European art, c. 1400-1600: perspective, naturalism and human dignity spreading from Italy.
Renewable energy sculpture
Artworks that generate renewable power - wind, solar, tidal - while functioning as sculpture: engineering worn as form.
Restoration style
The opulent decorative and literary art of Charles II's restored court, 1660-c. 1690: walnut, marquetry and magnificence.
Retrofuturism
Depictions of the future as earlier eras imagined it - period style fused with dreamed-of technology, from ray-guns to flying cars.
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Return to order
After World War I, European modernists turned from avant-garde extremes to classical order, clear line, and representational painting.
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Rivington School
Raw 1980s East Village art group welding scrap metal into junk sculpture and building guerilla sculpture gardens on the Lower East Side.
Rococo
Light, intimate elegance: fluid curves, rocaille ornament, pastel color, and playful aristocratic leisure, born in 18th-century France.
Rolling ball sculpture
Kinetic sculpture in which balls roll through tracks, spirals, and funnels by gravity - from marble runs to monumental public ball machines.
Romanesque
Europe's first pan-regional medieval style: round arches, carved church portals, and visionary sculpture from c. 1000 to the rise of Gothic.
Romanticism
Art of emotion, imagination and the sublime, exalting wild nature and the individual over Enlightenment reason and Neoclassical order.
Romanticism in France
French Romanticism: theatrical drama, tragic emotion, and color over line - from Géricault's shipwreck to Delacroix's barricades.
Romanticism in Italy
Italian Romanticism fused European feeling with national identity, driving the Risorgimento through poetry, opera, and history painting.
Rondocubism
Czech post-Cubist style of rounded forms and folk ornament - the national style of the young Czechoslovakia, c. 1918-1925.
Rouen School
Normandy's Post-Impressionist school around Delattre's Rouen academy - pointillism, Fauvism and Cubism painted along the Seine.
Russian avant-garde
The concentrated burst of abstraction, Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia, fusing radical art with the revolutionary project.
Russian Futurism
Russia's machine-age revolt in art and poetry, from the 1912 Hylaea manifesto to Cubo-Futurist painting and hand-printed books.
Russian symbolism
Dreamlike, mystical art of the Russian fin de siècle, suffusing myth and music with spiritual longing.
Salon de la Rose + Croix
Péladan's six Paris salons of 1892-1897: mystic Symbolism in art and music, rejecting naturalism for myth, allegory and the esoteric.
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Samikshavad
India's first indigenous modern art movement (1974): socially critical, satirical painting rooted in Indian soil, refusing Western imitation.
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San Ildefonso school
First Native American easel-painting group: flat-color watercolor scenes of Pueblo dances and daily life, 1900-1935.
Saura painting
Idital ikon murals of the Sora people of Odisha: ochre grounds, stick figures, and fish-net layouts painted border-inward.
Saz style
16th-century Ottoman court style of feathery saz leaves, composite blossoms, and mythical creatures, flowing from illumination into decorative arts.
Scandinavian design
Nordic modern design: simplicity, minimalism and function in furniture, textiles and glass, from 1930s craft-industry fusion to 1950s global brand.
Scapigliatura
Post-Risorgimento Italian bohème of poets, painters and musicians: vaporous, melancholic art against academic convention.
School of Fontainebleau
French Renaissance court style at Fontainebleau: Mannerist fresco-and-stucco ensembles of elegant figures and intricate ornament.
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School of London
Postwar British painters who kept faith with the figure when abstraction and conceptual art ruled London.
School of Paris
Paris as the world's art capital, 1900-1940: the French and émigré painters of Montparnasse and La Ruche.
School of Posillipo
Sunlit open-air views of the Bay of Naples, painted for Grand Tour travellers by Pitloo, Gigante, and their circle.
School of Resina
Neapolitan realists who left the academy to paint everyday life outdoors, bridging the Macchiaioli and Italian Verism.
Scuola Romana
Rome's 1928-1945 expressionist school: feverish color and sacred-grotesque visions, painted around via Cavour.
Seapunk
Tumblr's 2011 aquatic microculture: dolphins, 1990s 3D net art, turquoise gradients, and a music microgenre that broke through in 2012.
Second Empire architecture in Europe
Napoleon III's official style: mansard roofs, heavy stonework, and Baroque-Renaissance splendour dressing Europe's grandest buildings.
Second Empire architecture in the United States and Canada
The mansard-roofed Second Empire style after the Civil War: North America's grandest public buildings, 1865-1900.
Second Empire style
Napoleon III's eclectic Second Empire style: mansard roofs and historicist splendor over iron-framed Paris.
Seicento
Italian art and culture of the 1600s - the Seicento saw the Renaissance end and the Baroque rise.
Seiz Breur
Modern Breton art movement (1923-48) renewing Celtic craft traditions across wood, glass, metal, and print.
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Serbian Baroque
18th-century Serbian Baroque painting of the Habsburg lands: Orthodox iconostases lit by Western drama and rocaille ornament.
Serial art
Conceptual art of repetition: uniform, often machine-made elements assembled in systematic, nonhierarchical sequences.
Severe style
Early Classical Greek sculpture, c. 490-450 BCE: archaic stiffness dissolving into grave, natural restraint.
Shan Shui
Chinese ink landscape painting where mountains and water embody a philosophy, not just scenery.
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Shanghai School
Late-Qing Shanghai school of Chinese painting: literati brushwork loosened into bold color and popular urban appeal.
Shaped canvas
Paintings that break the rectangle: the canvas outline itself becomes the composition, from Renaissance tondos to 1960s New York.
Shekhawati painting
Painted havelis and temples of Rajasthan's Shekhawati region, where returning merchant wealth turned whole towns into open-air galleries.
Sheraton style
Late-Georgian neoclassical furniture: tapered legs, satinwood inlay, and calm symmetry, named for designer Thomas Sheraton.
Shibui
A Japanese aesthetic of quiet beauty: subdued color, simple form, and subtle detail that rewards long acquaintance.
Shijō school
Kyoto's Maruyama-Shijō school: observed naturalism tempered with literati lyricism, humor, and bird-and-flower subjects.
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Shin hanga
The early-20th-century 'new prints' revival: ukiyo-e craft with Western light and mood, driven by publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō.
Shock art
Contemporary art built on deliberate provocation: taboo imagery and bodily material staged to disturb complacency and force a reaction.
Sienese school
Siena's great medieval painting school: Byzantine formality wedded to Gothic lyricism, gold ground, and elegant line.
Signalism
Neo-avant-garde movement from Belgrade fusing scientific language, visual poetry, and mail art into experimental text and performance.
Sikh painting
Miniature painting of the 18th-19th century Sikh courts, blending Pahari grace with Mughal portraiture across the Punjab.
Site-specific art
Art made for one place: the site is part of the work, from Land art earthworks to public installations that cannot be moved.
Skeuomorph
New things wearing cues of older ones: plastic wood-grain, fake stitching, concrete columns dressed as stone.
Sky Art
Otto Piene's genre of giant inflatable sculptures, laser drawings, and communal events staged against the open sky.
Social realism
Art that lays bare the conditions of the working class - from Courbet's laborers to Depression-era reportage - as a critique of power.
Socialist realism
The Soviet Union's official art doctrine: idealized, heroic realism glorifying workers, the party, and the socialist future.
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Sociological art
French movement that turned art into social inquiry - surveys, media actions, and community interventions in place of collectible objects.
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Sōsaku hanga
Japan's creative-print movement: one artist drawing, carving and printing each woodblock, making the print an act of self-expression.
Sots art
Soviet Pop Art: sly parody of socialist realism and state propaganda, recasting official iconography with Western consumer kitsch.
Sound art
Art in which sound itself is the primary material — time-based installations, sculptures and performances that make listening the work.
Southern French Gothic
Austere, fortress-like Gothic of southern France — single-nave brick churches with narrow openings, built as the Church reclaimed Cathar country.
Soviet nonconformist art
Unofficial Soviet art made outside state control — from apartment shows to the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition — a stylistic free-for-all united by dissent.
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Space & Time Group
Korean avant-garde group (1969-1980) whose 'logical events' — precise, repetitive body actions — slipped past the Yusin dictatorship in the language of theory.
Space art
Astronomical art: painting the universe as science sees it — planets, spacecraft and alien landscapes rendered with accuracy and real awe.
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Spanish Eclecticism
Spanish painting of 1845-1890 that picked freely among established styles — grand anecdotal history scenes rendered with academic skill.
Spatialism
Fontana's Spatialism: puncture the canvas and project art into real space — colour, light, movement and time synthesized beyond illusionistic painting.
Spiritualist art
Mediumistic spirit drawings, automatic painting and precipitated canvases made in seance and trance - an occult undercurrent of modern abstraction.
Street art
Unsanctioned art in public space - graffiti, stencils, murals and paste-ups - grown from 1970s New York writing into a global movement.
Stroganov school
The last major Russian icon-painting school - small, minutely finished panels with gold-lit half-tints, rich vestments and fantasy landscapes.
Structural art
Engineering works - bridges, towers and thin shells - that achieve efficiency, economy and elegance, defined as art by David P. Billington.
Stuckism
International pro-figurative painting movement founded in London in 1999, against conceptual art and for emotional authenticity.
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Studio style
The flat, outlined Native American painting style taught at Dorothy Dunn's Studio, Santa Fe Indian School, 1932-1962.
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Subversive affirmation
A tactic of over-identifying with power's own clichés until they collapse - over-affirmation - used by Laibach, NSK and The Yes Men.
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Superfiction
Artworks that fake institutions, archives, and lives - fiction presented as fact to blur the line between the two.
Superflat
Murakami's flat, anime-inflected art collapsing fine art and pop culture into pure surface.
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Supports/Surfaces
French movement that took painting apart - bare stretchers, dyed canvas, found materials - in the wake of May 1968.
Suprematism
Pure geometric abstraction - squares, circles, floating color - as the supremacy of pure artistic feeling, founded by Malevich.
Surrealism
Dream logic and the unconscious unleashed: shocking juxtapositions and hallucinatory realism born in post-WWI Paris.
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Surrealism in Nagoya
Japan's liveliest 1930s surrealist hub: Nagoya's photographers, poets, and little magazines pressed by wartime censorship.
Surrealist automatism
Art made by letting go: techniques that hand the brush to the unconscious and suppress conscious control.
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Surrealist photography
Photography bent toward the uncanny: rayographs, solarized portraits, and found images made strange.
Synchromism
Color built like music: overlapping planes of pure hue arranged as scales and chords.
Synthetic impressionism
Impressionist color with cubist space: carefully observed light and expressive paint under multiple exaggerated viewpoints.
Synthetism
Gauguin's synthesis: flat planes of bold color and dark outlines fusing observed appearance with the artist's feeling.
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Systems art
Art built from rules and feedback: cybernetics and systems theory replace the artist's personal touch.
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Systems Group
British constructivists building balanced, rule-governed geometry - syntactic art, 1970-1976.
Tableau
Life-size polychrome sculptural groups staging sacred scenes - the terracotta tableaux of 15th-16th-century Europe.
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Tachisme
French tache (blot) painting of the 1940s-50s: spontaneous drips, blobs, and calligraphic gesture - Europe's answer to Abstract Expressionism.
Tape art
Art made of adhesive tape: peel-away wall murals, vinyl floor labyrinths, tape-cast bodies, and backlit packing-tape 'paintings'.
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Technoromanticism
A romantic faith in technology's power to redeem and reunite - coined in French by artist Stéphan Barron, named in English by Richard Coyne's 1999 book.
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Temporary art
Art made to end: melting ice, burning sculptures and staged events that exist for their moment, then vanish.
Thanjavur painting
Classical South Indian devotional panel painting from Tamil Nadu: gold leaf, raised gesso and gem-set icons in vivid colour.
The Blockhouse of Boston
Boston artist-run textile cooperative (1947-1955) whose hand-blockprinted fabrics mixed New England motifs with modernist and world-art designs.
The Clique
London sketching club of young Victorian painters (late 1830s-1843) who rejected academic high art in favor of lively genre scenes judged by the public.
The Eight
Hungary's pre-war avant-garde: eight Budapest painters (A Nyolcak) who brought Cézanne, Matisse, and Fauvism home, 1909-1918.
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The Four Arts
Moscow-Leningrad art society (1924-1931) of painters, sculptors, and architects defending painterly craft and form in the early Soviet decades.
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The Romantic Anonymous Fellowship
Greek Stuckist group founded in Athens in 2004 by Odysseus Yakoumakis - figurative, symbol-laden painting as an antidote to postmodernist art.
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The West Coast Photographic Movement
American straight photography - sharp focus, rich silver-print tonality (Adams, Weston, Cunningham) - that freed the medium from imitating painting.
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Timurid Period
Persian and Chinese traditions fused in Timurid book arts, nasta'liq calligraphy, and tile-shrouded architecture (1370-1507).
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Tonal Impressionism
Tonalist mood with Impressionist color: simplified scenes in limited, chromatic palettes, named for a 1937 California exhibition.
Tonalism
Misty, mood-saturated landscapes in a narrow tonal key - and a name that collides with two other styles.
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Torii school
Edo's kabuki poster dynasty: bold, thick-lined actor prints and signboards that anchored mainstream ukiyo-e.
Toyism
Dutch collective of masked, pseudonymous artists making joyful, story-driven figurative art in pure, unmixed color.
Tramp art
Chip-carved, layered woodwork whittled from cigar boxes and crates with pocket knives - the great American folk carving tradition.
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Transautomatism
Hundertwasser's theory of art, born 1954: the picture grows unplanned, and meaning completes itself in the viewer's experience.
Transgressive art
Art that crosses lines - art-world convention, audience taboo, or the law - from Duchamp's urinal to Actionist body rites.
Trash polka
Black-and-red tattoo style slamming photorealism into graphic 'trash' - brush strokes, geometry, lettering - invented in Würzburg in 1998.
Trecento
Italy's fourteenth century: Giotto and the Sienese masters break from Byzantine formality and set the Renaissance in motion.
Troubadour style
French Romantic painting of intimate medieval scenes - cabinet pictures of kings, knights, and artists, painted with Dutch-miniature precision.
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Tubism
Léger's machine-age Cubism of glowing pipes and cylinders - a critic's jeer of 1911 that stuck to some of modern art's boldest paintings.
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Tunisian collaborative painting
Painters working one canvas at once, with no plan and no talk - a Tunisian collective practice founded in 1988 as quiet dissent.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, and landscapes in flat, brilliant color.
Ukrainian avant-garde
Ukraine's modernist explosion of the 1910s-1930s: Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, and constructivist design from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.
Ukrainian underground
Soviet Ukraine's banned nonconformist art: apartment shows, dissident circles, and a 'second wave of the avant-garde'.
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Underground comix
Counterculture comics of the 1960s-70s: self-published, hand-lettered, and frank about sex, drugs, and politics beyond the Comics Code.
Universal Constructivism
Torres-García's grid-and-sign doctrine: Constructivist structure filled with universal pictographs, a signature of Latin American modernism.
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Urban interventionism
Art that edits the city itself: interventions in streets and public space that interrupt daily life and expose social issues.
Utagawa school
The largest ukiyo-e workshop of Edo Japan: actor prints, beauties, and warriors from Hiroshige, Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, and Yoshitoshi.
Utrecht Caravaggism
Dutch painters who brought Caravaggio's hard light and shadow home from Rome to Utrecht, 1620-1630.
Valencian Gothic
Mediterranean-flavored Gothic architecture of the Kingdom of Valencia, 13th-15th centuries — wide, calm proportions with Flamboyant and Mudéjar touches.
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Vancouver School
Vancouver's photoconceptualist circle — staged, cinematic images probing the social force of media, from Jeff Wall's lightboxes to Stan Douglas's video loops.
Vanitas
Still-life genre of memento mori — skulls, guttering candles and worldly goods staged as emblems of life's brevity, prized by Dutch Baroque painters.
Vaporwave
Haunting nostalgia for a 1990s consumer dream: glitch, marble busts, neon sunsets, and dead mall ambience.
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Vedutism
Highly detailed, large-scale paintings and prints of real cityscapes, perfected by 18th-century Venetian vedutisti like Canaletto.
Venetian painting
The color-first painting tradition of the Republic of Venice, from Bellini and Giorgione to Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and an 18th-century revival.
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Verdadism
Soraida Martinez's 1992 style pairing figurative-abstract paintings with handwritten social commentary on truth, tolerance, and identity.
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Verism
Unflinching realism - truth over beauty: Italian verismo's humble subjects and the Weimar verists' merciless precision.
Victorian decorative arts
Britain's Victorian-era decorative arts: factory-made abundance answered with dense ornament and a riot of revivals, Gothic to Anglo-Japanese.
Video art
Art made with video technology: monitors, projections and feedback loops turn television's own material against it.
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Video game art
Art that uses video games as its medium: cartridge hacks, in-game performances, machinima and art games built from pure mechanics.
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Vienna School of Fantastic Realism
Viennese painters of dream and myth who fused Old Master technique with fantastic imagery, founded 1946 and a catalyst for visionary art.
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Viennese Actionism
A short-lived, ferocious Viennese movement that turned the painted canvas into the living body, forerunner of performance and body art.
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Viking art
Anonymous Norse animal ornament of the Viking Age - interlacing ribbon beasts in metal, stone and wood, evolving through six named styles.
Visionary art
Art that aims to transcend the physical world - spiritual, mystical or born of such experience - from Bosch and Blake to the contemporary scene.
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Vladimir school of icon painting
The tender, Byzantine-rooted icon painting of pre-Mongol Vladimir-Suzdal, whose anonymous masters made luminous devotional images before 1238.
Vodun art
Ritual art of West African Vodun - empowered bocio figures, spirit-receiving asen irons and assimilative temple murals, revived since Ouidah '92.
Volcano school
19th-century Hawaiian painters' dramatic nocturnal visions of erupting Kilauea and Mauna Loa, fusing the Sublime with Romantic landscape.
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Vologda school of icon painting
A northern Russian school of Orthodox icon painting centered on Vologda, known for canonical icons with decorative plant ornament.
Vorticism
Britain's hard-edged machine-age avant-garde: geometric abstraction and violent energy, launched with BLAST in 1914.
Wabi-Sabi
The Japanese aesthetic of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness - beauty in the worn, modest, and unfinished.
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Washington Color School
Washington D.C.'s color field painters: soak-stained canvases and pure bands of color, from Morris Louis to Gene Davis.
Western American Art
Cowboys, Native Americans and big-sky landscapes: the narrative art of the Old West, from Catlin and Moran to Remington and Russell.
White Mountain art
19th-century American landscape painters of New Hampshire's White Mountains: romantic views that doubled as tourism advertising.
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William and Mary style
Dutch-inflected late Stuart furniture: oyster veneer, japanning and turned legs, c. 1700-1725.
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Women's Art Movement
Australian feminist art movement: women-only collectives, consciousness-raising workshops, and slide registers, born in 1974.
Woodcut
Carve away the white, print the black: the oldest relief-print technique and its unmistakable graphic look.
Woodlands style
Anishinaabe visionary painting of bold outlines, X-ray views, and spirit lines, founded by Norval Morrisseau.
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Word art
Text as image: words and phrases become the main visual component, borrowed from advertising, politics, and media.
Wu School
Ming-dynasty Suzhou literati painters who joined poetry, calligraphy, and painting as personal expression.
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Wuming Painting Collective
China's first self-organized art collective: clandestine plein-air painting of everyday life during the Cultural Revolution.
Y2K aesthetic
Turn-of-the-millennium retro-futurism: chrome, translucent plastics, blobjects, and dotcom-era interfaces.
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Yamato-e
The classical Japanese painting style: oblique cutaway views, stylized landscapes, and narrative handscrolls.
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Yaroslavl school of icon painting
The 17th-century Volga merchant city's school of icon and fresco painting: gilded, ornate, and teeming with everyday life.
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Yoruba art
West Africa's Yoruba tradition: naturalistic Ife heads, beaded crowns, carved veranda posts, and living masquerade arts.
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Young British Artists
Goldsmiths graduates turned media-savvy provocateurs: shock tactics, throwaway materials, and the 1990s British art boom.
Young Estonia
Noor-Eesti: Estonia's neo-romantic modernism of 1905-1915, marrying European Symbolism to a national cultural awakening.
Young Poland
Poland's Young Poland: a neo-romantic, symbolist and Art Nouveau flowering centered on Kraków, c. 1890-1918.
Zenga
Zen painting: bold monochrome ink and rough calligraphy by Japanese Zen masters, image and teaching brushed as one.
Zero
Postwar reset to zero: monochrome fields, light as material, and nail- and smoke-textured surfaces.