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  1. Italian Renaissance

The story of modern Western art traditionally begins with the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Botticelli, Cellini – some of the greatest names in Western art emerged from this movement. Distinguishing them from the literally and thematically “flat” Medieval works that came before them, Italian Renaissance painting was characterized by an exploration of humanism alongside religion and breakthroughs in more realistic bodily proportions, lighting, and perspective.

  1. Dutch Golden Age

The greater realism brought by perspective continued with the Dutch Golden Age. Even today, we call natural-looking cinematic lighting “Rembrandt lighting” in honor of the Dutch master’s unparalleled mastery of light and shadow. Painters such as Vermeer and Clara Peeters broke new ground in lighting landscapes and portraiture, with the latter revealing domestic life in never before seen detail.

  1. Neoclassicism

As portraiture became a way for the rich and famous to show off their status, Neoclassical techniques became a way for painters such as Reynolds and Romney to fuse modern sitters with ideals of classical elegance. Others, such as David, used Neoclassical scenes of Greece and Rome to connect contemporary political ideas of republican democracy and nationalism to their imagined ancient roots.

  1. Impressionism

Centuries of focus on “realistic” painting began to be refuted with the legendary First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Before then, French painting fashions at the time were highly centralized via coveted spots of honor in the annual Salon des Refuses. An experimental new group of French painters was rejected from the Salon, with their new ideas about capturing the fleetingness of light and color via looser brush strokes and new theories about color adjacency the subject of ridicule. The name “Impressionism” itself at first came from a detractor of their new style. However, it began to gain traction within the decade, and the names of those first Impressionists now rank among the most celebrated names in Western art – Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Morisot, and more. 

  1. Post-Impressionism

A new band of experimental artists soon followed up the ground broken by the Impressionists. By far, the most famous of these was van Gogh, whose transformative paintings now rank among the most celebrated and recognized in history. Also notable was Seurat, who took Impressionism’s loose brush strokes to a new level with Pointillism. 

  1. Viennese Art Nouveau

While Post-Impressionists were breaking new ground with their color experimentation, artists such as Mucha, Schiele, and Klimt made Central Europe an artistic hotspot. Many of their most famous paintings feature women as idealized muses embodying grand ideals, while Klimt’s “Gold Period” features some of the most resplendently golden yet fiercely independent feminine figures of modern art.

  1. Cubism

Centuries of relying on perspective for realism were shattered by the likes of Picasso and Braque in cafés and studios across Paris, New York, Barcelona, London, Berlin, and beyond. As with Modernist literature and cinema, this refocusing on fragmentation underscored the lack of centrality in modern life and the anxieties as well as the possibilities of presenting several viewpoints at once. 

  1. Surrealism

With Freud’s psychoanalytic revolution in full swing and literary and cinematic explorations of the mind all the rage, painting wasn’t far behind. Artists such as Magritte and Dali presented reality-warping images that deliberately broke the rules of reality to convey impressions of our deepest fears and desires.

  1. Feminist Art

From Women’s Suffrage in the early 20th century to the Women’s Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s, women saw an explosion of access to and interest in their work. The incomparable Frida Kahlo created psychological paintings every bit as surreal as Dali’s, which commented on Latin American rights, worker’s rights, and her own feelings, while artists from Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) to Georgia O’Keefe explored women’s sexuality and role in modern society.

  1. Pop and Street Art

From the dawn of the 1950s through the end of the 20th century and beyond, artists such as Andy Warhol made popular culture the dominant culture within the artistic firmament. His paintings on pop icons such as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, as well as his famed Campbell’s Soup Cans, explored the intersection of celebrity culture, consumerism, and mass production. Later, artists such as Georges Basquiat and later Banksy would take those same rule-breaking pop culture-utilizing ideals and marry them with street art techniques, such as graffiti.