See movement highlights and HQ resources for advanced investigation.

Featured Cover: (including formal analyses, critique and social media connections) At the Moulin Rouge detail, 1892-95, oil on canvas by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901), French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator. Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Neoclassicism  │ ~1770 - 1840 in the arts, historical tradition or aesthetic attitudes based on the art of Greece and Rome in antiquity.   In the context of the tradition, Classicism refers either to the art produced in antiquity or to later art inspired by that of antiquity; Neoclassicism always refers to the art produced later but inspired by antiquity.   Thus the terms Classicism and Neoclassicism are often used interchangeably.   Con't... Encyclopedia Britannica  │  Google Arts & Culture  │  Smarthistory  │  Wikipedia  │  Main Artists  │  Sculpture: Antonio Canova, Painting: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacques-Louis David, Angelica Kauffman

Women in Art Throughout the centuries, women have been involved in making art, whether as creators and innovators of new forms of artistic expression, patrons, collectors, sources of inspiration, or significant contributors as art historians and critics.   Women have been and continue to be integral to the institution of art, but despite being engaged with the art world in every way, many women artists have found opposition in the traditional narrative of art history.  Con't... KhanAcademy  │  Unlock Art: Where are the Women?  │  Smarthistory

Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France  │  Metropolitan Museum of Art

Napoleon Crossing the Alps  │  oil on canvas detail, 1800, by Jacque-Louis David, Belvedere Museum.   This painting depicts the future Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, to be “calm on a fiery horse” as he points to the future and leads his troops over the Alps to defeat the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo.

The Modern Genius: Art and Culture

Modern Art (c. 1860 - 1975) includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophy of the art produced during that era.  The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.  Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art.  A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art.  More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.  Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art.  —Google Arts & Culture

Europe  │  The United States  │  Met Museum  │  Museum of Modern Art  │  Smarthistory

Romanticism  │  Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.   Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular.   It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.  Con't... Britannica  │  Google Arts & Culture  │  Smarthistory  │  Wikipedia  │  Artists  │  Thomas Cole, Francesco Hayez, Ivan Aivazovsky, Theodore Gericault, John Constable, William Blake, Eugene Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, Francisco Goya

Washington Crossing the Delaware  │  oil on canvas detail, 1851, by Emanuel Leutze, Metropolitan Museum, New York.  This artwork glorifies General Washington, the Colonial-American cause and commemorated the military action of a critical turning point in the American Revolutionary War on December 25th, 1776.

Photography  │  is the art, application and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.  │  Examples: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Video: The Daguerreotype - Photographic Processes Series  │  The first commercially successful photographic process was announced in 1839, the result of over a decade of experimentation by Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce.   Unfortunately, Niépce died before the daguerreotype process was realized, and is best known for his invention of the heliograph, the process by which the “first photograph” was made in 1826.   Daguerreotypes are sharply defined, highly reflective, one-of-a-kind photographs on silver-coated copper plates, usually packaged behind glass and kept in protective cases.  │  George Eastman Museum

Realism  │  in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life.   Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favor of a close observation of outward appearances.   As such, realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and decrepit old women.  Con't... Encyclopedia Britannica  │  Google Arts & Culture  │  Wikipedia  │  Artists  │  Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Jean-François Millet, and more

Video: Realism - The Case for Realism  │  The Art Assignment

Impressionism, French Impressionnisme  │  a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.   Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques.   The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism in painting was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour.   In music, it was to convey an idea or affect through a wash of sound rather than a strict formal structure.  Con't... Encyclopedia Britannica │  Smarthistory  │  Google Arts & Culture  │  Wikipedia  │  Artists  │  Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt and more

Video Above: The Case for Impressionism  │  The Art Assignment
Video Below: Pierre-Auguste Renoir Biography  │  Goodbye Art Academy

Video: Post-Impressionism  │  Post-Impressionism, in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style’s inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.   All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art.   Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature.  Con't...

Vincent Van Gogh

Video: What is Symbolism? Art Movements & Styles  │  Symbolism, a loosely organized literary and artistic movement that originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to painting and the theatre, and influenced the European and American literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolist artists sought to express individual emotional experience through the subtle and suggestive use of highly symbolized language. — Britannica