Art movements in order
57 movements and periods in chronological order, from ancient art to today.
This is the complete list of art movements on Art Movements in chronological order, by the date each movement began. Dates are approximate: movements overlap, and many artists moved between them.
Jump to: Ancient world · Middle Ages · 15th–16th centuries · 17th–18th centuries · 19th century · Early 20th century · Post-war and contemporary
Ancient world
Middle Ages
Medieval & Gothic Art
Christian art of the Middle Ages: Byzantine icons, illuminated manuscripts, Romanesque churches and Gothic cathedrals.
Key artists: Giotto, Arnolfo di Cambio, Nicola Pisano, Carlo Crivelli
Gothic Art
The art of the cathedral age: soaring architecture, stained glass and increasingly lifelike sculpture and painting.
Key artists: Giotto, Simone Martini, Arnolfo di Cambio, Nicola Pisano
15th–16th centuries
Renaissance
A revival of classical ideals that began in Italy. Linear perspective, anatomy and oil painting transformed European art.
Key artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian
Flemish School
Painting in Flanders, from the Early Netherlandish masters such as Jan van Eyck to the Baroque of Rubens and Van Dyck.
Key artists: Peter Paul Rubens, Hieronymus Bosch, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden
Classicism
Art that takes ancient Greek and Roman art as its model of perfection, prizing order, balance and restraint.
Key artists: Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Charles Le Brun, Philippe de Champaigne
Mannerism
A late-Renaissance style of elongated figures, complex poses and artificial elegance.
Key artists: El Greco, Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Giuseppe Arcimboldo
17th–18th centuries
Baroque
Drama, movement and strong contrasts of light and dark. The Dutch Golden Age of painting belongs to this period.
Key artists: Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, Johannes Vermeer, Caravaggio
Rococo
A light, playful and ornate style of 18th-century France, full of pastel colour, curves and courtly pleasures.
Key artists: Francisco Goya, Thomas Gainsborough, Giovanni Antonio Canal, Jean-Antoine Watteau
Neoclassicism
A return to the clarity, order and restraint of ancient Greek and Roman art.
Key artists: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacques-Louis David, Joshua Reynolds, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
Romanticism
Emotion, imagination and the overwhelming power of nature, in reaction to the age of reason.
Key artists: Francisco Goya, William Blake, Taras Shevchenko, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
19th century
Hudson River School
American landscape painters who celebrated the wilderness of the Hudson Valley and, later, the American West.
Key artists: Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Asher Brown Durand
Barbizon School
French painters who worked near the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau and painted nature directly.
Key artists: Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Frédéric Bazille, Charles-François Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau
Realism
Ordinary people and everyday life, painted without idealisation.
Key artists: Ilya Repin, Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet
Pre-Raphaelites
A brotherhood founded in London in 1848 that rejected academic convention in favour of sharp detail, bright colour and literary subjects.
Key artists: John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, John William Waterhouse, Edward Burne-Jones
Arts and Crafts Movement
A design reform movement that championed handcraft, honest materials and beauty in everyday objects.
Key artists: William Morris, Carl Larsson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Eric Gill
Modernism
The broad break with tradition that ran from Manet and the Impressionists to Abstract Expressionism and beyond.
Key artists: Auguste Rodin, Jean Cocteau, Amedeo Modigliani, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Impressionism
Light, colour and modern life caught with quick, visible brushwork. The group held its first exhibition in Paris in 1874.
Key artists: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet
Symbolism
Dreams, myth and mood rather than the observed world.
Key artists: Auguste Rodin, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky
Post-Impressionism
Artists who built on Impressionism but pushed towards structure, symbolism and expressive colour.
Key artists: Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin
Naïve Art
Art by artists without formal training, with clear outlines, bright colour and a direct, childlike vision.
Key artists: Maria Prymachenko, Niko Pirosmani, Henri Rousseau, Grandma Moses
Pointillism
Pictures built from small dots or dabs of pure colour, pioneered by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.
Key artists: Henri Matisse, Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac
Les Nabis
A group of young Paris painters, including Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, inspired by Paul Gauguin.
Key artists: Pierre Bonnard, Émile Bernard, Félix Vallotton, Aristide Maillol
Art Nouveau
Flowing, organic lines in painting, posters, design and architecture.
Key artists: Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Victor Horta, Otto Wagner
Early 20th century
Ashcan School
American realist painters who depicted everyday life in New York, especially in its poorer neighbourhoods.
Key artists: George Bellows, Robert Henri, John Sloan, William James Glackens
Fauvism
Bold, non-naturalistic colour. Critics called Matisse, Derain and their circle 'les fauves' (the wild beasts) after the 1905 Salon d'Automne.
Key artists: Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy
Expressionism
Distorted form and intense colour used to express emotion rather than describe the world.
Key artists: Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee
Bloomsbury Group
A circle of English writers, artists and thinkers that included Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
Key artists: Vita Sackville-West, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington
Cubism
Developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism broke objects into geometric facets seen from several viewpoints at once.
Key artists: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia
The Eight
Eight American painters who exhibited together in New York in 1908 in protest against the conservative National Academy of Design.
Key artists: Robert Henri, John Sloan, William James Glackens, Maurice Prendergast
Futurism
Launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's 1909 manifesto, celebrating speed, machines and the modern city.
Key artists: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Umberto Boccioni, Alexander Archipenko, Natalia Goncharova
Der Blaue Reiter
A Munich circle led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc that explored the spiritual power of colour.
Key artists: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Max Ernst
Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich's abstract art of pure geometric forms.
Key artists: Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Nadezhda Udaltsova
Constructivism
Russian avant-garde art and design that served industry and society.
Key artists: El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko
Dada
An anti-art movement born in Zurich during the First World War that mocked logic and tradition.
Key artists: Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Jean Arp
De Stijl
A Dutch movement led by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, reduced to straight lines and primary colours.
Key artists: Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, Gerrit Rietveld, Gino Severini
Harlem Renaissance
A flowering of African American art, music and literature centred on Harlem, New York.
Key artists: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage
Bauhaus
The German art school that united art, craft and industrial design and shaped modern design.
Key artists: Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee
Group of Seven
Canadian landscape painters who created a national style from the northern wilderness.
Key artists: A. Y. Jackson, Franklin Carmichael, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald
Art Deco
Sleek geometry and luxury in design, posters, painting and architecture.
Key artists: Tamara de Lempicka, Victor Horta, Eliel Saarinen, René Lalique
Surrealism
Launched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto, Surrealism explored dreams and the unconscious.
Key artists: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, Joan Miró
Black Mountain College
An experimental college in North Carolina where art was central to education and many artists of the post-war avant-garde taught or studied.
Key artists: Walter Gropius, Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers
Abstract Expressionism
The New York School of large, gestural 'action painting' and meditative colour fields.
Key artists: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning
Post-war and contemporary
Action Painting
Action painting: paint dripped, splashed and swept on to the canvas, making the act of painting itself the subject.
Key artists: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline
Colour Field Painting
Large, flat areas of colour that envelop the viewer.
Key artists: Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Alma Thomas, Frank Bowling
Pop Art
Emerging in Britain and the United States, Pop Art borrowed imagery from advertising, comics and consumer culture.
Key artists: Victor Vasarely, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jeff Koons
Indian River School (Florida Highwaymen)
The Florida Highwaymen: African American landscape painters who sold their work from the roadside.
Key artists: Alfred Hair, Al Black, James Gibson, Roy McLendon
Situationist International
A group of avant-garde artists and thinkers who attacked consumer society through art, writing and political action.
Key artists: Asger Jorn, Guy Debord, J.V. Martin
Op Art
Optical art that uses pattern and colour to make the eye see movement.
Key artists: M. C. Escher, Victor Vasarely, Josef Albers, Bridget Riley
Minimalism
Art pared back to simple geometric forms and industrial materials.
Key artists: Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd
Fluxus
An international network of artists, composers and poets who blurred art and life through events, performances and multiples.
Key artists: Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell
Conceptual Art
Art in which the idea matters more than the finished object.
Key artists: Marina Abramović, Ed Ruscha, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt
Photorealism
Paintings made from photographs with meticulous, camera-like precision.
Key artists: Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Duane Hanson, Ralph Goings
Graffiti Art
Spray-painted lettering and imagery from New York's streets and subways, which entered galleries in the 1980s.
Key artists: Keith Haring, Invader, Panmela Castro, Ememem
Postmodernism
Art after Modernism: irony, quotation, mixed styles and a questioning of 'grand narratives'.
Key artists: Robert Venturi, Robert Rauschenberg, Jeff Koons, Arata Isozaki
Neo-Expressionism
A return to large, expressive and figurative painting after Minimalism and Conceptual art.
Key artists: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff
Massurrealism
A term coined in 1992 by James Seehafer for art combining Surrealism, Pop art and mass-media technology.
Key artists: James Seehafer
Traditions without fixed dates
Frequently asked questions
What is the order of the major art movements?
In broad order: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art.
What was the first art movement?
Art history usually begins with prehistoric and ancient art, but the first self-conscious "movement" in the modern sense is often said to be the Renaissance, or for modern art, Realism and Impressionism in 19th-century France.
What art movement came after Impressionism?
Post-Impressionism, from about 1885 to 1905, followed by Fauvism and Expressionism around 1905 and Cubism from about 1907.