Renaissance

Mathematical perspective and ideal human proportion, reviving classical order after centuries of flat, symbolic medieval imagery.

Mannerism

Elongated, twisting figures pushed past Renaissance balance on purpose, favoring elegant artifice over believable anatomy.

Baroque

Sharp, theatrical contrasts of light and shadow that stage a scene like a spotlight, pulling the eye toward high emotion and movement.

Rococo

Delicate, asymmetrical curls and scrollwork, lighter and more playful than Baroque grandeur, built for intimate salons rather than churches.

Neoclassicism

A return to Greek and Roman restraint, symmetry, and clear lines, reacting against Rococo excess with disciplined, columned calm.

Romanticism

Turbulent skies and untamed nature standing in for raw emotion, prizing awe, imagination, and the individual over cool reason.

Realism

Ordinary people and everyday labor painted plainly, without idealizing or dramatizing, as a deliberate rejection of Romantic fantasy.

Pre-Raphaelite

Jewel-bright color and dense, botanical detail, looking back past the Renaissance to medieval sincerity and craft.

Symbolism

Mysterious, dreamlike imagery standing in for ideas and inner states, valuing suggestion and mood over observed, literal reality.

Impressionism

Loose, visible brushstrokes chase fleeting light rather than fixed detail. Painted outdoors, fast, to catch a moment before it changed.

Pointillism

Thousands of small, distinct dots of pure color, placed so the eye blends them from a distance rather than the hand mixing them on a palette.

Post-Impressionism

Swirling, rhythmic strokes carry feeling as much as light. Color and line bend toward the artist’s inner state, not just the observed scene.

Art Nouveau

Long, whiplash curves borrowed from vines, petals, and flowing hair. Nature’s organic lines applied to buildings, posters, and furniture alike.

Fauvism

Bold, unmixed color laid down for its own sake, wildly free from what the eye actually saw. Named for the “wild beasts” who painted this way.

Expressionism

Jagged, distorted lines and clashing color pushed to convey raw psychological and emotional intensity over accurate appearance.

Cubism

A subject broken into geometric facets and shown from several angles at once, flattening depth into an interlocking, fractured surface.

Futurism

Speed, machinery, and dynamism rendered as repeated, overlapping lines that fracture a moving object into a blur of force.

Suprematism

Pure geometric forms, square, circle, bar, floating free of any object or story. Feeling and form reduced to their most basic shapes.

Dadaism

Cut, pasted, and reassembled fragments that reject logic and polish on purpose, favoring absurdity, chance, and irreverence over tradition.

De Stijl

Strict horizontal and vertical lines, right angles, and flat blocks of primary color, reducing the visual world to essential structure.

Constructivism

Bold diagonals and industrial geometry in service of a message, treating art as a tool for building a new, functional society.

Bauhaus

Primary shapes and primary colors reduced to their functional essentials, uniting art, craft, and industrial design under one clear grammar.

Art Deco

Streamlined, symmetrical, stepped geometry that prizes glamour and order. Machine-age precision dressed up for a skyscraper lobby.

Surrealism

Melting, warping forms borrowed from the logic of dreams. Familiar things behave impossibly, painted with uncanny, careful precision.

Social Realism

Sturdy, plainly rendered working figures, made to dignify ordinary labor during hardship rather than to flatter or idealize.

Abstract Expressionism

Drips, pours, and sweeping gestures made with the whole body. The act of painting itself becomes the subject, with no figure to depict.

Pop Art

Bold outlines, flat color, and the printed halftone dot of mass media, borrowing the look of advertising and comics for fine art.

Minimalism

A single form stripped of gesture, metaphor, and ornament. What remains is only shape, material, and the space around it.

Op Art

Precise, repeating patterns engineered to trick the eye into perceiving movement, vibration, or depth that isn’t physically there.

Conceptual Art

The idea behind the work matters more than its physical form or craftsmanship. Even a plain instruction can stand in as the artwork itself.

Photorealism

Paintings built from a photograph, gridded and reproduced with such exacting precision that brushwork nearly disappears entirely.

Street Art

Stencils, spray, and wheatpaste taken straight to public walls, trading the gallery for a wider, uninvited audience.

Neo-Expressionism

Big, urgent, thickly loaded brushwork returning to raw figuration and emotion, pushing back against Minimalism’s cool restraint.

Digital & Contemporary

Circuitry, generative systems, and glitch aesthetics reflect a world built on screens, treating code and pixels as a native medium.