All major movements in the history of art are inherently interconnected. Even the most dated styles of art rarely die off without a trace and often make surprising comebacks. The 19th and 20th centuries in the West were filled with ideas, inventions, and styles, resulting in an unprecedented diversity of art. Read on to get familiar with nine essential -isms of art history.
1. Romanticism
Romanticism was a reaction to other -isms that did not make it into this list—Classicism and Academism. Classicism advocated for art that directly copied the Greek and Roman antiquity standards (or rather, the contemporary Western understanding of them). Academism was a branch of it that was promoted and forced upon the art market by the leading European art academies and their professors. Classicism insisted on reason, mathematical precision, and rationality.
Romanticism, on the contrary, addressed more contemporary settings and advocated for emotion and individuality. Instead of solemn antique figures of warriors and kings, Romantic artists painted heroes tormented by their inner struggle, with their emotional natures searching for a place in a soulless world. Partially, Romanticism was a protest against early capitalism and industrialization. At the center of Romantic art and literature was a male hero struggling with the constraints of society. It also promoted the revival of Medieval architecture and the search for the “spirit of the nation” in its pre-modern history.
2. Realism
The history of art is written in oppositions, and, sooner or later, Romanticism had to face an adversary that would challenge its ideas in a new way. Contrary to Romantic heroes and their individual struggles, the heroes of Realism were laymen: stone breakers, beggars, peasants, and penniless workers. Each of these people had a story, but mainstream art and literature did not care for them, too immersed in the culture of privileged classes.
Artists like Gustave Courbet refused to make the lives of the lower classes more visually appealing to sell more works. Moreover, Realism highlighted the tragic divide between classes. When Courbet presented his monumental Burial at Ornans, high-class critics mistook the scene of a provincial funeral for a weird carnival. In its political alliances, Realism was intrinsically connected to the ideas of Socialism and Anarchism. In the second half of the 20th century, the term “realism” began to be applied to other types of art: hyper or photorealistic paintings and sculptures by artists like Audrey Flack and Ron Mueck.
3. Impressionism & Post-Impressionism
Impressionism started as a derogatory term related to a painting by Claude Monet. The work’s title Impression, Sunrise opened the doors for art critics to label other paintings, similarly unfinished and messy, as impressionist. Impressionists aimed to capture the fleeting moment and the ever-changing light. Partially, their experiments were inspired by scientific studies in optics and light perception that were popular at the time. Another propelling force was the invention of portable paint in tubes. This allowed artists to freely paint outside without being confined to their studios, and capture fleeting moments like sunrise or sunset.
Post-Impressionism was the next logical step, that nonetheless radically differed from it visually. While the Impressionists were concerned with capturing accurate and naturalistic light and shadow, Post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin and Van Gogh preferred to use bold colors, lines, and even contours. Less concerned with reality, they preferred to construct new realms in their works.
4. Symbolism
Symbolism was a conservative art movement that started as a trend in poetry that focused on symbols, indirect suggestions, and elaborate aestheticized descriptions that hid some universal truths, often related to morality or Christianity. A significant part of Symbolist art and writing was centered on the idea of decadence: an irreparable moral decay leading to an insatiable need for exotic sensations, physical pleasures, and self-destruction. Symbolist art was related to Romanticism but was much more dark and morbid. There was death, decay, and unhealthy perverse sensuality.
Painting and sculpture frequently relied on archetypes. One of the most famous and popular of them was the femme fatale, a miraculously beautiful but corrupt and perverse woman. Profoundly unhappy, she aims to corrupt men and the whole world around her. Gustave Moreau painted the femme fatale as Salome, and Franz von Stuck relied on the image of Eve. A surprising mixture of Post-Impressionism and Symbolism resulted in the work of the French group Les Nabis (Prophets). Artists like Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard used lines and colors inspired by Gauguin to create mystical compositions filled with ancient symbols and mythological references.
5. Divisionism & Pointillism
Just like with Impressionism, Divisionism and Pointillism originated from the contemporary studies of light, optics, and the human eye. Then, scientists believed that human eyes perceived primary colors separately at first, while the brain connected them into more complex tones. While present-day science states that it was never that simple, painters of the late 19th century decided to apply this concept to art. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac applied primary-colored paint in small dots close to each other. Upon close inspection, the mess of simple hues did not make any sense. However, taking a few steps back, viewers could see complex compositions with varied tones, light, and shadow. Divisionism was slightly more technically complex than Pointillism. From small dots, artists moved to short brushstrokes that created images similar to colorful mosaics.
6. Futurism & Cubism
Cubism was and remains one of the most controversial art movements in history. Inspired by Paul Cezanne and African art, Cubist painters began to simplify their forms into geometric shapes, simultaneously depicting them from several angles. One major flaw of Cubism was that it was completely immobile, with still life as its main art form. Futurism was influenced by Cubism but focused on movement and dynamism of compositions. It started in Italy as a protest against the country’s dominant culture, deeply rooted in its ancient past. Futurist poets and painters called for the complete destruction of outdated visual codes.
Instead of landscapes, still lifes, and images of the human body, they proposed depicting modern machinery. Technology was supposed to become the new principal character of Italian culture and turn it from an outdoor museum into a modern empire. However, the Futurists’ militant nationalism scared many of their possible followers, and the movement did not live long.
Artists from the Russian Empire, who were mostly separated from the theoretical and practical activities of their Western colleagues, developed both movements into Cubo-Futurism: a combination of Cubist forms and collages with Futurists’ love for movement and technology. The most important Cubo-Futurists were Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Alexander Archipenko.
7. Surrealism
Surrealism gained momentum in the 1920s, inspired by the studies of the human psyche and mostly by the writings of Sigmund Freud. Surrealist artists and writers aimed to decode dreams, fantasies, and human urges and turn them into poetry, novels, or artworks. As a creative movement, Surrealism was heavily based on the written word and transformed into a pictorial language only later. Due to the highly personal nature of dreams, each artist had their own set of recurring symbols and their own conceptual preferences.
Curiously, Sigmund Freud was unimpressed by the movement, with the exception of Salvador Dali, whom he treated as a curious psychiatric case rather than an outstanding artist. Modern technology played an important role in Surrealist art. Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, and Marcel Duchamp applied Surrealist principles to cinema, creating complex and sometimes shocking films. Photography and photomontage were particularly popular among the women of the movement like Dora Maar, Lee Miller, and Kati Horna.
8. Expressionism
Once again, from the shared realistic experience of Impressionism, the pendulum swung back to subjective feelings, torments, and worldviews. Expressionist artists aimed to radically express their inner emotion and their perception of the world. To achieve the desired effect, Expressionists often distorted proportions or used unnaturally bright colors for their work. The paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the famous German Expressionist, featured bright neon colors, reflecting his perception of artificial street lights. However, distorting colors and proportions was not entirely new: in the 16th century, Mannerist painters used it to achieve extra expressive impact.
9. Conceptualism
Perhaps the most revolutionary art movement of all, Conceptualism attacked the basis of any artwork created before it—its visual aspect. Conceptual artists regard a creative idea as something inherently more important than the aesthetic qualities of an artwork of the skill of its author. Starting from the 1960s, artists started to use minimal simple materials, experimenting with how much of the physical can be taken away before the work becomes entirely nonsensical. Today, the overwhelming majority of contemporary art is conceptual. Some art historians argue that all art is essentially conceptual and starts with thought rather than action. Others pinpoint the fact that the origins of contemporary art could be found already at the beginning of the 20th century in the works of Dada artists and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.
