ART-ISMS

Before writing, people painted animals and handprints deep inside caves and carved small figures from stone, bone and ivory. Nobody knows exactly why: ritual, hunting magic, storytelling and teaching are all proposed. What is certain is that image-making is far older than cities, farming or the alphabet.

For three thousand years Egyptian artists worked to strict rules. Figures combine a profile head, a frontal eye and frontal shoulders so every part is shown in its most recognisable view. Size signals rank, not distance. Most of it was made for tombs and temples, to keep the dead and the gods supplied forever.

“Indigenous art” is not a style but thousands of living traditions, each rooted in a particular land, language and ceremony. The three examples here come from the Haida of the Pacific Northwest Coast, the Hopi of the American Southwest and the Western Desert of Central Australia. Their forms carry kinship, law and stories, and artists continue to practise and renew them today.

Greek sculptors moved from stiff, frontal figures to bodies that shift their weight and seem to breathe. They chased ideal proportions and wrote them down as rules. Rome copied, spread and engineered this language across an empire. Many “Greek” statues we know are Roman marble copies of lost bronzes, and most were once brightly painted.

Africa has thousands of distinct cultures, not one style. For well over two thousand years, from Nok terracottas to the cast heads of Ife and the brass plaques of Benin, sculpture has served kings, ancestors, healing, law and celebration. Many objects were made to be used, worn or activated in performance, not looked at in a museum. In the early 1900s, African works seen in Paris helped reshape European modernism.

When the Roman capital moved to Constantinople, art turned from describing the body to revealing the divine. Figures became flat, frontal and weightless, set against shimmering gold. Mosaics and icons were meant as windows to heaven, which is why arguments over images (Iconoclasm, 726–843) could become state crises.

“Islamic art” is a broad label for the art of many regions and centuries, not one style. Across that range, artists developed a shared language of geometry, vegetal arabesque and calligraphy. Religious spaces avoid figurative images, so pattern itself carries meaning; courtly manuscripts, by contrast, are full of figures and stories. Early mosaics drew on Byzantine craftsmen.

From the 10th century Chinese painters made mountains and rivers the main subject, centuries before Europe treated landscape as more than background. Instead of one fixed viewpoint, the eye travels through the scroll. From the Yuan dynasty on, scholar-painters valued brushwork, poetry and personal expression over likeness, joining painting, calligraphy and verse into one practice.

As pilgrimage routes and monasteries spread across Europe, churches grew massive, with thick walls, round arches and small windows. Over their doors sculptors carved the Last Judgment for a largely illiterate public, using exaggerated, expressive figures. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the same storytelling drive in embroidery.

Pointed arches and flying buttresses let church walls become thin frames for stained glass. Sculpture and painting grew more graceful and human; by 1300 painters such as Giotto were giving figures real weight and emotion. The name began as a Renaissance insult that linked the style to the “barbarian” Goths.

Florentine artists rediscovered Greek and Roman models and paired them with mathematics. Linear perspective, demonstrated by Brunelleschi and described by Alberti in 1435, made a flat wall look like a window. Painters studied anatomy and light, and artists rose from craftsmen to celebrated individuals.

North of the Alps, painters perfected oil glazes that could render velvet, metal and reflections with uncanny precision. They cared less about classical theory and more about close observation, hidden symbolism and everyday life. Printmaking spread their images across Europe.

Small, intensely detailed paintings made for albums and manuscripts at Indian courts. Mughal workshops blended Persian, Indian and European ideas into vivid histories and portraits, often with several artists working on one page. Rajput and Pahari painters turned to Krishna, poetry and music, with bold flat colour and lyrical landscapes.

Once Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael had seemed to “solve” painting, younger artists exaggerated instead. Necks and limbs stretched, poses twisted, colours turned cool and acidic, and space became crowded and unclear. Long dismissed as decadent, Mannerism is now read as a deliberately sophisticated style.

The Catholic Church, answering the Reformation, wanted art that would grip ordinary viewers. Baroque artists used violent contrasts of light and dark, diagonal motion and theatrical moments, and fused painting, sculpture and architecture into total spectacles. In the Protestant Dutch Republic the same skills went into portraits, everyday scenes and still lifes for a new middle-class market.

Ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world”, were affordable colour woodblock prints of actors, courtesans, travel and legends for the townspeople of Edo. Each print needed a designer, a carver and a printer. When they reached Europe in the mid-1800s their flat colour, bold outlines and cropped views changed the course of Western art.

After Louis XIV’s heavy grandeur, French aristocrats wanted intimacy and fun. Rococo brought pastel colour, curling asymmetrical ornament and scenes of love in parks. Enlightenment critics soon attacked it as frivolous, which helped open the door to Neoclassicism.

Excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii and the ideas of the Enlightenment made ancient Greece and Rome fashionable again. Neoclassical artists rejected Rococo frivolity for sharp outlines, calm surfaces and stories of sacrifice and duty. The style served revolutionaries and then Napoleon.

Against Neoclassical reason, Romantic artists valued emotion, imagination and the overwhelming power of nature. They painted shipwrecks, revolutions, mountains and solitary figures before vast landscapes. Colour and loose brushwork returned as tools of feeling.

Realists refused both classical ideals and Romantic drama. They painted peasants, workers and village funerals at the size once reserved for kings and gods. Courbet said he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one. Photography, announced in 1839, sharpened the question of what painting is for.

Rejected by the official Salon, a group of painters held their own exhibition in 1874. A critic mocked Monet’s Impression, Sunrise and the name stuck. Using portable tube paint, they worked outdoors in quick broken strokes to catch changing light, and painted modern Paris: cafés, boulevards, railways and leisure.

Not a group but a label, coined by Roger Fry in 1910, for painters who pushed past Impressionism in very different directions. Seurat systematised colour into dots, Cézanne rebuilt nature from solid planes, Van Gogh and Gauguin made colour carry feeling and symbol. Almost every 20th-century movement starts here.

Art Nouveau tried to erase the line between fine art and design. Flowing plant-like curves appeared on posters, jewellery, metro entrances and whole buildings. Inspired by nature and Japanese prints, it was the first international style aimed at modern mass production, and it faded quickly after 1910.

At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, critic Louis Vauxcelles called the painters “fauves”, wild beasts. Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and others used pure, unmixed colour that had nothing to do with what things really looked like. The movement lasted only a few years but opened the way to abstraction.

Expressionists distorted shape and colour to show what life felt like, not what it looked like. Germany’s Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911) pushed raw colour, jagged forms and anxiety about the modern city. The Nazis later branded much of this work “degenerate”.

Picasso and Braque, building on Cézanne and on African and Iberian sculpture, broke objects into faceted planes and showed them from several angles at once. Analytic Cubism (about 1909–1912) reduced colour to browns and greys; Synthetic Cubism (from 1912) brought in collage and bright flat shapes. Gris, Gleizes and Metzinger spread the language. It ended five centuries of single-point perspective as the default.

Launched by F. T. Marinetti’s manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909, Futurism worshipped speed, cars, factories and the city, and called for museums to be destroyed. Painters borrowed Cubist fragmentation to show motion over time. Its glorification of war and later ties to Fascism remain part of its story.

Kazimir Malevich wanted painting reduced to pure feeling through basic shapes, starting with a black square. Constructivists such as Tatlin and Rodchenko took geometry out of the studio and into engineering, posters, typography and architecture for the new Soviet state. Stalin’s Socialist Realism shut both down in the early 1930s.

Born at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1916, Dada answered the slaughter of the First World War with absurdity. If reason had produced the trenches, Dadaists would trust chance, nonsense and provocation instead. Readymades, photomontage and sound poems questioned what art is, and that question has driven art ever since.

Founded around Theo van Doesburg’s magazine De Stijl in 1917, the movement sought a universal visual language. Piet Mondrian called his version Neoplasticism: only horizontal and vertical lines, the three primaries, and black, white and grey. The same rules shaped furniture and houses. Van Doesburg’s embrace of the diagonal split the two men in the mid-1920s.

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 to unite art, craft and industry. Students passed through a shared foundation course, then workshops in metal, weaving, furniture, typography, theatre and architecture. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 and closed under Nazi pressure in 1933; its teachers carried its ideas to the United States and beyond.

Named after the 1925 Paris exhibition of decorative arts, Art Deco mixed Cubist geometry, ancient Egyptian motifs (Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened in 1922) and the streamlined look of cars and ocean liners. It was luxurious, commercial and global, from New York skyscrapers to the Shanghai Bund.

Artists who had absorbed Cubism and Surrealism in Europe came home to build their own modern art. Mexican muralists put revolution and labour on public walls; Brazilian modernists proclaimed “cultural cannibalism”, devouring European ideas to make something Brazilian; Frida Kahlo turned her body and heritage into a personal mythology. The muralists’ scale and politics later influenced painters in the United States.

André Breton’s 1924 manifesto, drawing on Freud, set out to free the unconscious. Some Surrealists used automatic drawing and chance; others painted impossible dreams in hyper-precise detail. Its uncanny combinations of ordinary things spread into film, fashion and advertising. The movement is usually dated to Breton’s death in 1966.

After the Second World War the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. Action painters such as Pollock and de Kooning made the act of painting itself the subject; Colour Field painters such as Rothko used vast areas of colour to envelop the viewer. Pollock drew partly on Navajo sand painting and on the Mexican muralists. It was the first American movement with worldwide influence.

Pop artists took their images from advertising, comics, packaging and film stars. Against the private angst of Abstract Expressionism, they offered cool, ironic, mass-produced looking pictures, often made with commercial methods such as silkscreen. It began in Britain in the mid-1950s and exploded in New York in the early 1960s.

Minimalists stripped art of gesture, emotion and illusion. Their works are often industrially made boxes, bricks or light tubes, arranged in simple repeating orders. Frank Stella summed it up in 1964: “What you see is what you see.” The viewer’s body and the room became part of the work.

Conceptual artists took Duchamp’s question to its limit: if an idea makes something art, the idea itself can be the work. Instructions, texts, photographs, performances and systems replaced the crafted object. Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967 that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Postmodern artists doubted that art could be original or pure. They borrowed, quoted and re-photographed images from film, advertising and art history, and asked who gets represented, and by whom. Irony, spectacle and questions of identity replaced the modernist search for an essential form.

Since around 1990 there has been no dominant movement. Artists move freely between installation, painting, video, performance, participation and digital media, and the art world has become truly global, with biennales and fairs on every continent. Shared concerns include identity, history, labour, technology, the environment and the market itself.