By Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

This painting captures a particular moment in the artist’s studio—and a particular day in European history.

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By Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

Thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire illuminated the world, just as Wright’s paintings shed light on new machinery.

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By Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

Flush with power and wealth, French aristocrats pursued all pleasures. Then came the Enlightenment—and Revolution.

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By Dr. Beth Gersh-Nesic

Rejecting the Rococo, artists valued moderation and favored a clear drawing style more in line with the times.

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By Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

19th-century stylistic developments As is fairly common with stylistic rubrics, the word "Romanticism" was not developed to describe the visual arts but was first used in relation to new literary and musical schools in the beginning of the 19th century. Art came under...

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By Dr. Claire Black McCoy

In the decades following the French Revolution, this new movement began to flourish in France.

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By Dr. Nancy Demerdash

East of who? Europe’s political ideology created the notion of the Orient in order to subjugate and control it.

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By Dr. Rebecca Jeffrey Easby

Photography emerged as a marvel of the modern world, but its early years were marked by technological obstacles.

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By George Eastman Museum

These are sharply defined, highly reflective, one-of-a-kind photographs on silver-coated copper plates.

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By Dr. Beth Gersh-Nesic

Wake up and smell modernity! Realist painters leave the past behind to highlight the concerns of a changing world.

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By The Museum of Modern Art

It's a good thing water and oil don't mix.

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By Dr. Beth Gersh-Nesic

Rebelling against tradition, the Impressionists exhibited their own “unfinished” works to a skeptical audience.

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By Dr. Charles Cramer, Dr. Kim Grant

The distinctive qualities of Japanese art offered striking new approaches to modern artists developing alternatives to the Western tradition of naturalistic representation.

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By Dr. Charles Cramer, Dr. Kim Grant

The Neo-Impressionist desire to conform art-making to universal laws of perception, color, and expression echoes throughout Modernism.

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By Dr. Charles Cramer, Dr. Kim Grant

Art Nouveau artists and designers created a completely new style of decoration.

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By Dr. Virginia B. Spivey

The joyful, vivid, sensual paintings of the “wild beasts” had a dark side.

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By Shawn Roggenkamp

Not a term chosen by the artists, it describes art that emphasized the emotional impact over descriptive accuracy.

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By Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

Braque hated Picasso’s Demoiselles when he saw it. But he couldn’t get it out of his head… or off of his canvas.

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By Dr. Charles Cramer, Dr. Kim Grant

This use of multiple perspectives was a hallmark of the Cubist style, but Braque and Picasso never explained why they employed this technique.

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By Dr. Stephanie Chadwick

If you walked into this art gallery you would likely have been quite surprised.

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By Dr. Stephanie Chadwick

The avant-garde reached new heights by looking to “low” culture; after all, the whole thing started with a urinal!

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By Josh R. Rose

Identifying as agents of change, the Surrealists were interested in Freudian psychology and social revolution.

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By Dr. Charles Cramer, Dr. Kim Grant

The elements of De Stijl are the artist’s equivalent of the physicist’s building blocks: protons, neutrons, and electrons. With a bucket of each of these you could make anything in the universe.

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By Dr. Virginia B. Spivey

This post-WWII movement is characterized by non-objective imagery seemingly charged with personal meaning.

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By Dr. Virginia B. Spivey

Pop seems to glorify popular culture, but a second look reveals a critique of post-war marketing and consumerism.

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By Dr. Leta Y. Ming, Dr. Thomas Folland

Conceptualism questions art’s role as a showcase for the creative genius and technical abilities of the artist.

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