Pintura occidental

La pintura minoica es el arte producido por la civilización minoica del Egeo de la Edad del Bronce desde aproximadamente el 3000 hasta el 1100 a. C., aunque las conservaciones más extensas y finas provienen de aproximadamente el 2300 hasta el 1400 a. C. Forma parte del grupo más amplio del arte egeo y, en períodos posteriores, llegó a tener durante un tiempo una influencia dominante sobre el arte cicládico . Dado que la madera y los textiles se han descompuesto, los ejemplos mejor conservados (y más instructivos) que sobreviven del arte minoico son su cerámica , la arquitectura palaciega (con frescos que incluyen "los paisajes puros más antiguos del mundo"), ^{[ 12 ]} pequeñas esculturas en diversos materiales, joyería, vasijas de metal y sellos intrincadamente tallados .

Estuvo influenciada por las culturas vecinas del Antiguo Egipto y el antiguo Cercano Oriente , que habían producido arte urbano sofisticado durante mucho más tiempo, pero el carácter de las pequeñas pero ricas ciudades mercantiles minoicas era muy diferente, con escasa evidencia de una religión basada en grandes templos, monarcas o guerras, y «todo el poder imaginativo y la frescura infantil de una cultura muy joven». ^{[ 13 ]} Todos estos aspectos de la cultura minoica siguen siendo bastante misteriosos. Sinclair Hood describió una «cualidad esencial del mejor arte minoico: la capacidad de crear una atmósfera de movimiento y vida a pesar de seguir un conjunto de convenciones altamente formales». ^{[ 14 ]}

La mayor y mejor colección de arte minoico se encuentra en el Museo Arqueológico de Heraklion (AMH), cerca de Knossos , en la costa norte de Creta. El arte minoico y otros vestigios de la cultura material , especialmente la secuencia de estilos cerámicos, han sido utilizados por los arqueólogos para definir las tres fases principales de la cultura minoica (EM, MM, LM) y sus numerosas subfases. Las fechas que se les asignan siguen siendo objeto de debate, aunque dentro de rangos cada vez más estrechos. ^{[ 15 ]}

La relación del arte minoico con el de otras culturas contemporáneas y el posterior arte de la Antigua Grecia ha sido objeto de numerosos debates. Dominó claramente el arte micénico y el arte cicládico de los mismos periodos, ^{[ 16 ]} incluso después de la ocupación de Creta por los micénicos, pero solo algunos aspectos de la tradición sobrevivieron a la Edad Oscura griega tras el colapso de la Grecia micénica . ^{[ 17 ]}

Hacia el año 1100 a. C., tribus del norte de Grecia conquistaron el país, dando un nuevo rumbo a su arte. La cultura de la antigua Grecia destaca por sus extraordinarias contribuciones a las artes visuales. La pintura sobre cerámica ofrece una visión particularmente reveladora del funcionamiento de la sociedad griega antigua. Aún se conservan numerosos ejemplos de pinturas en vasos de figuras negras y rojas .

Algunos pintores griegos famosos que trabajaron sobre tablas de madera y que se mencionan en textos son Apeles , Zeuxis y Parrasio ; sin embargo, con la única excepción de las tablas de Pitsa , no se conservan ejemplos de pintura griega antigua sobre tabla, solo descripciones escritas por sus contemporáneos o por romanos posteriores. Zeuxis vivió en el siglo V a. C. y se dice que fue el primero en utilizar el sfumato . Según Plinio el Viejo , el realismo de sus pinturas era tal que los pájaros intentaban comerse las uvas pintadas. Apeles es considerado el más grande pintor de la Antigüedad y destaca por su técnica perfecta en el dibujo, su brillante colorido y su modelado.

El arte romano estuvo influenciado por Grecia y puede considerarse, en parte, descendiente de la pintura griega antigua. Sin embargo, la pintura romana posee características únicas importantes. Entre las pinturas romanas que se conservan se incluyen pinturas murales y frescos , muchos de ellos procedentes de villas en Campania , en el sur de Italia, en yacimientos como Pompeya y Herculano . Estas pinturas pueden agruparse en cuatro estilos o periodos principales ^{[ 18 ]} y pueden contener los primeros ejemplos de trampantojo , pseudoperspectiva y paisaje puro. ^{[ 19 ]}

Casi los únicos retratos pintados que se conservan del mundo antiguo son numerosos retratos de busto en sarcófagos hallados en el cementerio egipcio de Al-Fayum . Si bien no pertenecen a la mejor época ni son de la más alta calidad, resultan impresionantes en sí mismos y permiten hacerse una idea de la calidad que debían tener las mejores obras antiguas. También se conserva un número muy reducido de miniaturas de libros ilustrados de la Antigüedad tardía, así como un número considerablemente mayor de copias de estos libros de principios de la Edad Media.

• 
  Jan van Eyck , 1434
• 
  Rogier van der Weyden , c. 1435
• 
  Hugo van der Goes , c.  1470
• 
  Dieric Bouts , 1464–1467
• 
  Hans Memling , c.  1466–1473
• 
  Pedro Cristo , c. 1470
• 
  Hieronymus Bosch , c.  1480–1505
• 
  Paolo Uccello , c. 1470
• 
  Masaccio , 1426–1427
• 
  Filippo Lippi , 1440–1445
• 
  Andrea Mantegna , c. 1458–1460
• 
  Piero della Francesca , 1463-1465
• 
  Sandro Botticelli , 1483-1485
• 
  Leonardo da Vinci , 1503-1506
• 
  Rafael , 1505–1506
• 
  Miguel Ángel , c. 1511
• 
  Lucas Cranach el Viejo , c.  1530
• 
  Alberto Durero , 1500
• 
  Matías Grünewald , 1512-1516
• 
  Giovanni Bellini , c. 1480
• 
  Giorgione , c. 1505
• 
  Pontormo , 1526–1528
• 
  Bronzino , 1540–1545
• 
  Pieter Bruegel , 1565
• 
  Hans Holbein el Joven , 1527
• 
  Jacopo Tintoretto , 1582
• 
  Paolo Veronese , 1562–1563
• 
  Joaquín Wtewael , 1595
• 
  El Greco , 1596–1600

El Renacimiento (término francés que significa «renacimiento»), un movimiento cultural que abarcó aproximadamente desde el siglo XIV hasta mediados del siglo XVII, estuvo impulsado por el humanismo renacentista y el estudio de las fuentes clásicas. En la pintura, durante las décadas de 1420 y 1430, destacados pintores de Italia y los Países Bajos desarrollaron por separado nuevas técnicas pictóricas que permitieron que las obras parecieran más realistas que las de los pintores consagrados, cuyo estilo se conoce como gótico internacional o, en algunos casos, como protorrenacimiento (principalmente en Italia). Este período, que duró hasta aproximadamente 1495, se conoció como el Renacimiento temprano .

En la región de Flandes, en los Países Bajos, tras los avances en la iluminación de manuscritos , especialmente los de los hermanos Limbourg (fallecidos en 1416), los artistas se sintieron fascinados por lo tangible del mundo visible y comenzaron a representar los objetos con un naturalismo extremo. ^{[ 21 ]} La adopción de la pintura al óleo, cuyo primer uso en pinturas sobre tabla se atribuye tradicionalmente, aunque erróneamente, a Jan van Eyck , posibilitó una nueva verosimilitud en la representación de este naturalismo. El óleo ya estaba presente en la obra de Melchior Broederlam (fallecido en 1409), pero Robert Campin (conocido anteriormente como el Maestro de Flémalle ) y van Eyck lo llevaron a nuevas cotas y lo emplearon para representar el naturalismo que buscaban. Con este nuevo medio, los pintores de la época fueron capaces de crear colores más ricos con una tonalidad profunda e intensa. La ilusión de luz brillante con un acabado similar a la porcelana caracterizó la pintura flamenca temprana y fue una diferencia importante con respecto a la superficie mate de la pintura al temple utilizada en Italia. ^{[ 21 ]}

A diferencia de los italianos, cuyo trabajo se inspiró en gran medida en el arte de la antigua Roma, los norteños conservaron un residuo estilístico de la escultura y los manuscritos iluminados de la Edad Media (especialmente su naturalismo). Otro importante pintor neerlandés de este período fue Rogier van der Weyden , discípulo de Campin, cuyas composiciones enfatizaban la emoción y el drama humanos, demostrado por ejemplo en su Descendimiento de la Cruz , que figura entre las obras más famosas del siglo XV y fue la pintura neerlandesa más influyente de la crucifixión de Cristo. Otros artistas importantes fueron Hugo van der Goes (cuya obra fue muy influyente en Italia), Dieric Bouts (quien fue uno de los primeros pintores del norte en demostrar el uso de un único punto de fuga), ^{[ 21 ]} Petrus Christus , Hans Memling y Gerard David . En conjunto, los avances en la pintura en Europa al norte de los Alpes se conocen como el Renacimiento del Norte .

En la pintura del Renacimiento italiano , el arte de la Antigüedad clásica inspiró un estilo pictórico que enfatizaba el ideal. A Masaccio se le atribuyen avances en la perspectiva lineal, la representación del volumen en sus figuras y la expresión de las emociones en los rostros de sus figuras en la década de 1420. Luego, artistas como Paolo Uccello , Fra Angelico , Piero della Francesca , Andrea Mantegna , Filippo Lippi y Sandro Botticelli , en el período del Primer Renacimiento que abarcó hasta aproximadamente 1495, y luego Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo Buonarroti y Rafael durante el Alto Renacimiento, desde aproximadamente 1495 hasta 1520, llevaron la pintura a un nivel superior mediante el uso de la perspectiva , el estudio de la anatomía humana y la proporción, y mediante el desarrollo de un refinamiento sin precedentes en las técnicas de dibujo y pintura. Un estilo del Alto Renacimiento algo más naturalista surgió en Venecia . Los pintores de la escuela veneciana , como Giovanni Bellini , Giorgione , Tiziano y Veronese , se preocupaban menos por la precisión en sus dibujos que por la riqueza del color y la unidad de efecto que se podían lograr mediante un enfoque más espontáneo de la pintura.

Los pintores flamencos, holandeses y alemanes del Alto Renacimiento nórdico, como Albrecht Dürer , Lucas Cranach , Matthias Grünewald y Hans Holbein el Joven, tenían un enfoque diferente al de sus homólogos italianos, uno más realista y menos idealizado. Algunos pintores del norte, comenzando con Dürer en la década de 1490, viajaron a Italia para ver obras del Alto Renacimiento italiano e incorporaron características del arte italiano al suyo propio en diversos grados. Una generación más tarde, el inicio de la pintura de género como tema para obras de gran formato comenzó con Peter Aertsen y Pieter Bruegel . Una generación posterior de pintores del Renacimiento nórdico que viajaron a Roma y adoptaron gran parte del enfoque idealizado del Renacimiento italiano fueron conocidos como romanistas .

La pintura renacentista refleja la revolución de ideas y ciencia ( astronomía , geografía ) que tuvo lugar en este periodo, la Reforma y la invención de la imprenta . El grabado adquirió cada vez mayor importancia y fue practicado por muchos pintores. Durero, considerado uno de los más grandes grabadores, afirmaba que los pintores no eran meros artesanos , sino también pensadores . Con el desarrollo de la pintura de caballete en el Renacimiento, la pintura se independizó de la arquitectura. Los cuadros de caballete —cuadros móviles que podían colgarse fácilmente en las paredes— se convirtieron en una alternativa popular a las pinturas fijadas a muebles, paredes u otras estructuras. Tras siglos dominados por la imaginería religiosa, la temática secular regresó lentamente a la pintura occidental. Los artistas incluyeron en sus obras visiones del mundo que los rodeaba o los frutos de su propia imaginación. Quienes podían permitírselo podían convertirse en mecenas y encargar retratos de sí mismos o de sus familiares.

El Alto Renacimiento en Italia dio origen a un arte estilizado conocido como Manierismo después de 1520, aunque algunos pintores, como Tiziano y Paolo Veronese , continuaron pintando en un estilo renacentista hasta bien entrado el siglo. En lugar de las composiciones equilibradas y el enfoque racional de la perspectiva que caracterizaron el arte a principios del siglo XVI, los manieristas buscaron la inestabilidad, el artificio y la duda. Las tranquilas Vírgenes de Rafael y las serenas expresiones de los personajes de Leonardo son reemplazadas por las expresiones atribuladas de Pontormo y la intensidad emocional de El Greco . Las composiciones inquietas e inestables, los efectos de perspectiva a menudo extremos o disyuntivos y las poses estilizadas son característicos de los manieristas italianos como Tintoretto , Pontormo y Bronzino , y aparecieron más tarde en la obra de los manieristas del norte como Hendrick Goltzius , Bartholomeus Spranger y Joachim Wtewael .

• 
  Caravaggio , 1595–1597
• 
  Artemisia Gentileschi , 1614-1620
• 
  Pedro Pablo Rubens , 1632-1635
• 
  Frans Hals , 1624
• 
  Judith Leyster , 1630
• 
  Rembrandt van Rijn , 1642
• 
  Pieter de Hooch , 1658
• 
  Johannes Vermeer , c.  1660
• 
  Jan Steen , c. 1665
• 
  Jacob van Ruisdael , 1670
• 
  Willem Claesz. Heda , 1631
• 
  Diego Velázquez , 1656-1657
• 
  José de Ribera , 1620-1624
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  Nicolás Poussin , c. 1637-1638
• 
  Georges de La Tour , década de 1640
• 
  Guido Reni , 1625
• 
  Salvator Rosa , c. 1645
• 
  Bartolomé Esteban Murillo , c.  1650-1655
• 
  Claude Lorrain , 1648
• 
  Antonio van Dyck , 1635-1636
• 
  Canaletto , 1723
• 
  Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , c.  1752-1753
• 
  Antoine Watteau , c. 1720
• 
  Jean-Honoré Fragonard , c.  1767-1768
• 
  François Boucher , 1751
• 
  Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun , después de  1782
• 
  Maurice Quintín de La Tour , c.  1761
• 
  Thomas Gainsborough , c.  1770
• 
  Joshua Reynolds , 1769
• 
  Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin , c.  1728
• 
  William Hogarth , c. 1757
• 
  Angélica Kauffman , c.  1780

La pintura barroca se asocia con el movimiento cultural barroco , un movimiento a menudo identificado con el absolutismo y la Contrarreforma o el renacimiento católico; ^{[ 22 ] [ 23 ]} la existencia de importantes obras de pintura barroca en estados no absolutistas y protestantes también subraya su popularidad, ya que el estilo se extendió por toda Europa occidental. ^{[ 24 ]}

La pintura barroca se caracteriza por su gran dramatismo, colores ricos e intensos, y un uso magistral de luces y sombras, con el propósito de evocar emoción y pasión, en contraposición a la racionalidad serena que se valoraba durante el Renacimiento. Entre los primeros pintores barrocos se encuentran los hermanos Caracci, Annibale y Agostino , a finales del siglo XVI, y Caravaggio, en la última década del mismo siglo. Caravaggio es reconocido como uno de los más grandes pintores barrocos y heredero de la pintura humanista del Alto Renacimiento . Su enfoque realista de la figura humana, pintada directamente del natural e iluminada dramáticamente sobre un fondo oscuro, impactó a sus contemporáneos y abrió un nuevo capítulo en la historia de la pintura. El barroco fue el estilo dominante a partir de 1600 y se mantuvo durante todo el siglo XVII. Entre los más grandes pintores del Barroco se encuentran Rubens , Velázquez , Rembrandt , Frans Hals , Johannes Vermeer , Le Nain , Jusepe de Ribera , Poussin , Tour y Claude Lorrain , quien se centró en la pintura de paisaje. Poussin, Claude y La Tour, todos franceses, adoptaron un estilo barroco "clásico" con menor énfasis en la emoción y mayor atención al contorno de las figuras en la pintura que al color. La mayoría de estos pintores viajaron a Italia como parte de su formación y luego llevaron el estilo barroco de regreso a sus países de origen, aunque en algunos casos permanecieron en Italia durante gran parte de su carrera (Claude y Poussin). En Italia, el estilo barroco se personifica en las pinturas religiosas y mitológicas de estilo Grand Manner de artistas como los Carracci , Guido Reni y Luca Giordano . Los frescos ilusionistas de los techos de las iglesias de Pietro da Cortona parecían abrirse al cielo.

En la República Holandesa surgió un tipo de Barroco mucho más sosegado , donde las pinturas de caballete de temas cotidianos eran populares entre los coleccionistas de clase media, y muchos pintores se especializaron en género , otros en paisaje, marinas o bodegones. Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch y Pieter de Hooch aportaron un gran refinamiento técnico a la pintura de escenas domésticas, al igual que Willem Claesz. Heda a la naturaleza muerta. En contraste, Rembrandt sobresalió en la pintura de todo tipo de temas y desarrolló un estilo pictórico individual en el que el claroscuro y los fondos oscuros derivados de Caravaggio y los caravaggistas de Utrecht pierden su cualidad teatral. La pintura barroca holandesa se conoce a menudo como la pintura de la Edad de Oro holandesa .

Durante el siglo XVIII, la pintura rococó surgió como una extensión más ligera del barroco, a menudo frívola y erótica, y caracterizada por el uso de colores pastel suaves. El rococó se desarrolló inicialmente en las artes decorativas y el diseño de interiores en Francia. La sucesión de Luis XV trajo consigo un cambio en los artistas de la corte y en la moda artística en general. La década de 1730 representó el apogeo del desarrollo rococó en Francia, ejemplificado por las obras de Antoine Watteau y François Boucher . El rococó aún conservaba el gusto barroco por las formas complejas y los patrones intrincados, pero para entonces ya había comenzado a integrar una variedad de características diversas, incluyendo una predilección por los diseños orientales y las composiciones asimétricas.

El estilo rococó se extendió gracias a los artistas franceses y las publicaciones grabadas. Fue bien recibido en las regiones católicas de Alemania, Bohemia y Austria, donde se fusionó con las vibrantes tradiciones del barroco alemán. El rococó alemán se aplicó con entusiasmo a iglesias y palacios, especialmente en el sur, mientras que el rococó férreo se desarrolló en el Reino de Prusia .

Los maestros franceses Watteau , Boucher y Fragonard representan el estilo, al igual que Giovanni Battista Tiepolo y Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin , considerado por algunos como el mejor pintor francés del siglo XVIII: el Antirrococó . El retrato fue un componente importante de la pintura en todos los países, pero especialmente en Inglaterra, donde los líderes fueron William Hogarth , con un estilo realista directo, y Francis Hayman , Angelica Kauffman (que era suiza), Thomas Gainsborough y Joshua Reynolds con estilos más halagadores influenciados por Anthony van Dyck . En Francia, durante la época rococó, Jean-Baptiste Greuze (el pintor favorito de Denis Diderot ) ^{[ 25 ]} sobresalió en retratos y pinturas históricas , y Maurice Quentin de La Tour y Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun fueron retratistas de gran talento . La Tour se especializó en la pintura al pastel , que se convirtió en un medio popular durante este período.

William Hogarth contribuyó a desarrollar una base teórica para la belleza rococó. Aunque no hacía referencia intencionadamente al movimiento, argumentó en su Análisis de la belleza (1753) que las líneas onduladas y las curvas en S, prominentes en el rococó, constituían la base de la gracia y la belleza en el arte y la naturaleza (a diferencia de la línea recta o el círculo del clasicismo ). El principio del fin del rococó llegó a principios de la década de 1760, cuando figuras como Voltaire y Jacques-François Blondel comenzaron a expresar sus críticas a la superficialidad y la degeneración de este arte. Blondel denunció la «ridícula mezcla de conchas, dragones, juncos, palmeras y plantas» en los interiores de la época. ^{[ 26 ]}

En 1785, el rococó había pasado de moda en Francia, siendo reemplazado por el orden y la seriedad de artistas neoclásicos como Jacques-Louis David , cuyas imponentes pinturas históricas que representaban acontecimientos tanto históricos como contemporáneos encarnaban los ideales de la Revolución Francesa .

• 
  Wassily Kandinsky, Der Blaue Reiter, 1903
• 
  Henri Matisse, The Green Stripe, Fauvism, 1905
• 
  André Derain, Fauvism, 1906
• 
  Maurice de Vlaminck, Fauvism, 1906
• 
  Alexej von Jawlensky, Der Blaue Reiter, 1909

Fauvism was a loose grouping of early 20th-century artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain – friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. Ultimately Matisse became the yang to Picasso's yin in the 20th century. Fauvist painters included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, and Picasso's partner in Cubism, Georges Braque amongst others.^[36]

Fauvism had no concrete theories, and was short lived, beginning in 1905 and ending in 1907. They had only three exhibitions. Matisse was seen as the leader of the movement, due to his seniority in age and prior self-establishment in the academic art world. His 1905 portrait of Mme. Matisse, The Green Stripe, caused a sensation in Paris when it was first exhibited. He said he wanted to create art to delight, and it can be said that his use of bright colors tries to maintain serenity of composition. In 1906 at the suggestion of his dealer Ambroise Vollard, André Derain went to London and produced a series of paintings including Charing Cross Bridge, London in the Fauvist style, paraphrasing the famous series by the Impressionist painter Claude Monet.

By 1907 Fauvism no longer was a shocking new movement, and Appolinaire said of Matisse in an article published in La Falange, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable."^[37]

Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members included Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. This seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism.^[38]

Der Blaue Reiter was a German movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism. Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, whose psychically expressive painting of the Russian dancer Portrait of Alexander Sakharoff (1909) is seen here, Marianne von Werefkin, Lyonel Feininger and others founded the Der Blaue Reiter group in response to the rejection of Kandinsky's painting Last Judgement from an exhibition. Der Blaue Reiter lacked a central artistic manifesto, but was centered around Kandinsky and Marc. Artists Gabriele Münter and Paul Klee were also involved. The name of the movement comes from a 1903 painting by Kandinsky. For Kandinsky, blue is the color of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal.^[39]

• 
  Gustav Klimt, Expressionism, 1907–1908
• 
  Marc Chagall, Expressionism and Surrealism, 1911
• 
  Arthur Dove, early American modernism, 1911
• 
  Egon Schiele, Symbolism and Expressionism, 1912
• 
  Pierre Bonnard, 1913, European modernist Narrative painting
• 
  Amedeo Modigliani, Symbolism and Expressionism, 1917
• 
  Marsden Hartley, American modernism, 1914
• 
  Paul Klee, Bauhaus, 1921
• 
  Stuart Davis, American modernism, 1921
• 
  Patrick Henry Bruce, American modernism, 1929–1930

Expressionism and Symbolism are broad rubrics that involve several related movements in 20th-century painting that dominated much of the avant-garde art being made in Western, Eastern and Northern Europe. Expressionist works were painted largely between World War I and World War II, mostly in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria. Fauvism, Die Brücke, and Der Blaue Reiter are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters. Marc Chagall's painting I and the Village tells an autobiographical story that examines the relationship between the artist and his origins, with a lexicon of artistic Symbolism. Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Chaïm Soutine, James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, Georges Rouault, Amedeo Modigliani, and some Americans abroad such as Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis, were considered influential expressionist painters. Although Alberto Giacometti is primarily thought of as a Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well.

American painters during the period between World War I and World War II tended to go to Europe for recognition. Modernist artists like Marsden Hartley, Patrick Henry Bruce, Gerald Murphy and Stuart Davis created reputations abroad. While Patrick Henry Bruce^[40] created cubist related paintings in Europe, both Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy made paintings that were early inspirations for American pop art^[41][42][43] and Marsden Hartley experimented with expressionism. During the 1920s photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Alfred Henry Maurer, Charles Demuth, John Marin and other artists including European Masters Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Henri Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, and Picasso, at his New York City gallery the 291.^[44] In Europe masters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement.

• 
  Piet Mondrian, 1911, early De Stijl
• 
  Robert Delaunay, 1912, Simultaneous Windows on the City, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Orphism and Dada
• 
  Wassily Kandinsky, 1913, birth of Abstract Art

Wassily Kandinsky is generally considered one of the first important painters of modernabstract art. As an early modernist, he theorized as did contemporary occultists and theosophists, that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music. They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality. His earliest abstractions were generally titled as the example in the Composition VII, making connection to the work of the composers of music. Kandinsky included many of his theories about abstract art in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Other major pioneers of early abstraction include Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, Russian painter Kazimir Malevich, and Swiss painter Paul Klee. Robert Delaunay was a French artist who is associated with Orphism, (reminiscent of a link between pure abstraction and cubism). His key contributions to abstract painting refer to his bold use of color and his experimentation of both depth and tone.

• 
  Francis Picabia, 1916, Dada
• 
  Max Ernst, 1921), Surrealism
• 
  André Masson, 1922, early Surrealism
• 
  Kurt Schwitters, 1919, painted collage, Dada
• 
  Hannah Höch, collage, 1919, Dada
• 
  Max Ernst, 1920, early Surrealism
• 
  Joan Miró, Horse, Pipe and Red Flower, 1920, early Surrealism

Marcel Duchamp came to international prominence in the wake of the New York City Armory Show in 1913 where his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 became a cause célèbre. He subsequently created The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Large Glass. The Large Glass pushed the art of painting to radical new limits being part painting, part collage, part construction. Duchamp (who was soon to renounce artmaking for chess) became closely associated with the Dada movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic design to advance its antiwar politic and rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Other artists associated with the Dada movement include Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Jean Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, the movement that dominated European painting in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1924 André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. The Surrealist movement in painting became synonymous with the avant-garde and featured artists whose works varied from the abstract to the super-realist. With works on paper like Machine Turn Quickly, Francis Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. Yves Tanguy, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí are particularly known for their realistic depictions of dream imagery and fantastic manifestations of the imagination. During the 1920s André Masson's work was decisive in helping the young artist Joan Miró find his roots in Surrealist painting. Miró's The Tilled Field (1923–1924) verges on abstraction while suggesting a complex of objects and figures and arrangements of sexually active characters; it was Miró's first Surrealist masterpiece.^[45] Joan Miró, Jean Arp, André Masson, and Max Ernst were very influential, especially in the United States during the 1940s.

Max Ernst, whose 1920 painting Murdering Airplane is seen here, studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane. His paintings may have been inspired by the psychoanalystSigmund Freud's study of the delusions of a paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber. Freud identified Schreber's fantasy of becoming a woman as a castration complex. The central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber's hermaphroditic desires. Ernst's inscription on the back of the painting reads: The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance one another.^[46]

Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high-water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Surrealist groups in Japan, and especially in Latin America, the Caribbean and in Mexico produced innovative and original works. Other prominent surrealist artists include Giorgio de Chirico, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Leonor Fini.

• 
  George Grosz, 1920, Neue Sachlichkeit
• 
  Thomas Hart Benton, 1920, Regionalism
• 
  George Bellows, 1924, American realism
• 
  Charles DemuthSpring, 1921, American Precisionism (proto Pop Art)
• 
  Charles Demuth, 1931, Precisionism
• 
  Georgia O'Keeffe, 1921, Southwestern modernism
• 
  Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930, Social Realism.
• 
  Diego Rivera, Recreation of Man at the Crossroads (renamed Man, Controller of the Universe), originally created in 1934
• 
  Edward Hopper, 1942, American Scene painting

During the 1920s and the 1930s and the Great Depression, the European art scene was characterized by Surrealism, late Cubism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit, and Expressionism; and was occupied by masterful modernist color painters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard.

In Germany Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") emerged as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz and others politicized their paintings. The work of these artists grew out of expressionism, and was a response to the political tensions of the Weimar Republic, and was often sharply satirical.

During the 1930s radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to Surrealism, including Pablo Picasso.^[47] On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Gernika was the scene of the "Bombing of Gernika" by the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. The Germans were attacking to support the efforts of Francisco Franco to overthrow the Basque Government and the Spanish Republican government. Pablo Picasso painted his mural sized Guernica to commemorate the horrors of the bombing.

Guernica is an immense black-and-white, 3.5-metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8-metre (23 ft) wide mural painted in oil. The mural presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. The choice to paint in black and white invokes the immediacy of a newspaper photograph.^[48] The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1937, then Scandinavia and London, and in 1939 at Picasso's request the painting was sent to the United States in an extended loan (for safekeeping) at MoMA. Finally in accord with Picasso's wish to give the painting to the people of Spain as a gift, it was sent to Spain in 1981.

From the Great Depression of the 1930s through the years of World War II, American art was characterized by Social Realism and American Scene Painting. Regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world in the USA. Artists such as Ben Shahn, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, George Tooker, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh, and others became prominent.

American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood from 1930. Portraying a pitchfork-holding farmer and a younger woman in front of a house of Carpenter Gothic style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art. Art critics assumed it was satirical in intent; it was thought to be part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America exemplified by Sherwood Anderson's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis' 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess in literature.^[49] However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.

A renaissance of the arts in Latin America included the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García, the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, artists of the Mexican muralist movement such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, José Orozco, Pedro Nel Gómez and Santiago Martinez Delgado, and the Symbolist painter Frida Kahlo. The muralists conveyed historic and political messages. Diego Rivera is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural, Man at the Crossroads, in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait of Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff.

Frida Kahlo's works relate to Surrealism and to the Magic Realism movement in literature. Her works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings 55 are self-portraits, which frequently incorporate symbolic portrayals of her physical and psychological wounds.^[50]

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a movement that combined lessons learned from European Modernists via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors.

Post-Second World War American painting called Abstract expressionism included artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Tobey, James Brooks, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Conrad Marca-Relli, Jack Tworkov, Esteban Vicente, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Jimmy Ernst, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Theodoros Stamos, among others. American Abstract expressionism got its name in 1946 from the art critic Robert Coates.^[51][52] Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and Color Field painting are synonymous with the New York School.^[53]

Technically Surrealism was an important predecessor for Abstract expressionism with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all over" look of Pollock's drip paintings.

Additionally, Abstract expressionism has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic "action paintings", with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning. Woman V is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He began the first of these paintings, Woman I, in June 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished. The art historian Meyer Schapiro saw the painting in de Kooning's studio and encouraged the artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; Woman II, Woman III, and Woman IV. During the summer of 1952, spent at East Hampton, de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He finished work on Woman I by November 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time.^[54] The Woman series are decidedly figurative paintings. Another important artist is Franz Kline, as demonstrated by his painting High Street (1950), who was labelled an action painter because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas.

Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in Mark Rothko's work (which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied was abstract), are classified as abstract expressionists, albeit from what Clement Greenberg termed the Color field direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell can be described as practitioners of action painting and Color field painting.

During the 1950s Color Field painting initially referred to a particular type of abstract expressionism, especially the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb. It essentially involved abstract paintings with large, flat expanses of color that expressed the sensual, and visual feelings and properties of large areas of nuanced surface. Art critic Clement Greenberg perceived Color Field painting as related to but different from Action painting. The overall expanse and gestalt of the work of the early color field painters speaks of an almost religious experience, awestruck in the face of an expanding universe of sensuality, color and surface. During the early-to-mid-1960s Color Field painting came to refer to the styles of artists like Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler, whose works were related to second-generation abstract expressionism, and to younger artists like Larry Zox, and Frank Stella – all moving in a new direction.

• 
  George Bellows, 1924, American realism
• 
  Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, Cityscape

During the 1930s through the 1960s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as abstract expressionism, Color Field painting, Post-painterly Abstraction, Op art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, shaped canvas painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction allowing imagery to continue through various new contexts like the Bay Area Figurative Movement in the 1950s and new forms of expressionism from the 1940s through the 1960s. Throughout the 20th century many painters practiced Realism and used expressive imagery in landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects. They include artists as varied as Milton Avery, John D. Graham, Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Balthus, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Philip Pearlstein, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Grace Hartigan, Robert De Niro, Sr., and Elaine de Kooning.

In Italy during this time, Giorgio Morandi was the foremost still-life painter, exploring a wide variety of approaches to depicting everyday bottles and kitchen implements.^[55]

Arshile Gorky's portrait of Willem de Kooning is an example of the evolution of abstract expressionism from the context of figure painting, cubism and surrealism. Along with his friends de Kooning and John D. Graham Gorky created bio-morphically shaped and abstracted figurative compositions that by the 1940s evolved into totally abstract paintings. Gorky's work seems to be a careful analysis of memory, emotion and shape, using line and color to express feeling and nature.^[56][57]

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 is a painting by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon and is an example of Post World War II European Expressionism. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X painted by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in 1650. The work is one of a series of variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, over a total of forty-five works.^[58] When asked why he was compelled to revisit the subject so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against the Popes, that he merely "wanted an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner."^[59] The Pope in this version seethes with anger and aggression, and the dark colors give the image a grotesque and nightmarish appearance.^[60] The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent, and seem to fall through the Pope's face.^[61]

The figurative work of Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud, Andrew Wyeth and others served as a kind of alternative to abstract expressionism. Nighthawks (1942) is a realist painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is not only Hopper's most famous painting, but one of the most recognizable in American art. The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others but instead is lost in their own thoughts. This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work. One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is Wyeth's tempera painting, Christina's World, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It depicts a woman lying on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at and crawling towards a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house.^[62]

After World War II the term School of Paris often referred to Tachisme, the European equivalent of American Abstract expressionism and those artists are also related to Cobra. Important proponents being Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff, and Georges Mathieu, among several others. During the early 1950s Dubuffet (who was always a figurative artist) and de Staël abandoned abstraction, and returned to imagery via figuration and landscape. De Staël's return to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) during the early 1950s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters like Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, Joan Brown and others made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mid-1950s. Much of de Staël's late work – in particular his abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s – predicts Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Milton Avery as well through his use of color and his interest in seascape and landscape paintings connected with the Color field aspect of Abstract expressionism as manifested by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko as well as the lessons American painters took from the work of Henri Matisse.^[63][64]

Pop art in America was to a large degree initially inspired by the works of Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and Robert Rauschenberg, although the paintings of Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth during the 1920s and 1930s foreshadow the style and subject matter of Pop art.

In New York City during the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg and Johns created works of art that at first seemed to be continuations of Abstract expressionist painting. Actually their works, and the work of Larry Rivers, were radical departures from abstract expressionism especially in the use of banal and literal imagery and the inclusion of mundane materials into their work. Johns' use of various images and objects like chairs, numbers, targets, beer cans and the American Flag; Rivers' paintings of subjects drawn from popular culture such as George Washington crossing the Delaware, and his inclusions of images from advertisements like the camel from Camel cigarettes; and Rauschenberg's surprising constructions using inclusions of objects and pictures taken from popular culture, hardware stores, junkyards, the city streets, and taxidermy, gave rise to a radical new movement in American art. Eventually by 1963 the movement came to be known worldwide as Pop art.

Pop art is exemplified by the artists Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Wayne Thiebaud, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein among others. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in works such as Drowning Girl (1963; Museum of Modern Art, New York), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83.^[65]) Thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots reproduce the appearance of commercial printing. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."^[66] Pop art merges popular and mass culture with fine art, while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery and content into the mix. In October 1962 the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted The New Realists, the first major Pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Campbell's Soup Cans (sometimes referred to as 32 Campbell's Soup Cans) is the title of an Andy Warhol work of art that was produced in 1962. It consists of thirty-two canvases of equal size, each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can—one of each canned soup variety the company offered at the time. The individual paintings were produced with a semi-mechanised silkscreen process, using a non-painterly style. They helped usher in Pop art as a major art movement that relied on themes from popular culture.

Earlier in England in 1956 the term Pop Art was used by Lawrence Alloway for paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected Abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age.^[67] The early works of English artist David Hockney, such as A Bigger Splash, and the works of Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, and Eduardo Paolozzi, are considered seminal examples in the movement. In New York's East Village10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of Pop art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. There is a connection between the radical works of Duchamp, and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists – with a sense of humor; and Pop Artists like Alex Katz, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and the others.

During the 1950s and 1960s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as Color Field painting, Post painterly abstraction, Op art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction, and the continuation of Abstract expressionism. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction with Art brut,^[68] as seen in Court les rues, 1962, by Jean Dubuffet, Fluxus, Neo-Dada, New Realism, Photorealism, allowing imagery to re-emerge through various new contexts like Pop art, the Bay Area Figurative Movement (a prime example is Diebenkorn's Cityscape I,(Landscape No. 1) (1963), and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism. The Bay Area Figurative Movement of whom David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira and Richard Diebenkorn whose painting Cityscape 1 (1963) is a typical example, were influential members flourished during the 1950s and 1960s in California. Younger painters practiced the use of imagery in new and radical ways. Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Christo, Niki de Saint Phalle, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl, and Vija Celmins were a few who became prominent between the 1960s and the 1980s. Fairfield Porter was largely self-taught, and produced representational work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists.

Also during the 1960s and 1970s, there was a reaction against painting. Critics like Douglas Crimp viewed the work of artists like Ad Reinhardt, and declared the "death of painting". Artists began to practice new ways of making art. New movements gained prominence some of which are: Fluxus, Happening, Video art, Installation artMail art, the situationists, Conceptual art, Postminimalism, Earth art, arte povera, performance art and body art among others.^[69][70]

Neo-Dada is also a movement that started in the 1950s and 1960s and was related to Abstract expressionism only with imagery. This trend, in which manufactured items are combined with artist materials, is exemplified by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg's "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography. Rauschenberg, Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz among others created new conventions of art-making; they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion of unlikely materials as parts of their works of art.^[71][72]

• 
  Yves Klein, 1962, New Realism

During the 1960s and 1970s abstract painting continued to develop in America through varied styles. Geometric abstraction, Op art, hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimal painting, were some interrelated directions for advanced abstract painting as well as some other new movements. Morris Louis was an important pioneer in advanced Colorfield painting, his work can serve as a bridge between Abstract expressionism, Colorfield painting, and Minimal Art. Two influential teachers, Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, introduced a new generation of American artists to their advanced theories of color and space. Albers is best remembered for his work as a Geometric abstractionist painter and theorist. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically on the canvas. Albers' theories on art and education were formative for the next generation of artists. His own paintings form the foundation of both hard-edge painting and Op art.

Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann, Ilya Bolotowsky, Burgoyne Diller, Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Frank Stella, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland,^[73]Ellsworth Kelly, John McLaughlin, Barnett Newman, Larry Poons, Ronald Davis, John Hoyland, Larry Zox, Al Held, Mino Argento^[74] are artists closely associated with Geometric abstraction, Op art, Color Field painting, and in the case of Hofmann and Newman Abstract expressionism as well. Agnes Martin, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Richard Tuttle, Neil Williams, David Novros, Paul Mogenson, are examples of artists associated with Minimalism and (exceptions of Martin, Baer and Marden) the use of the shaped canvas also during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Many Geometric abstract artists, minimalists, and Hard-edge painters elected to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. The Bykert Gallery, and the Park Place Gallery were important showcases for Minimalism and shaped canvas painting in New York City during the 1960s.

Color Field painting pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away from abstract expressionism. Related to Post-painterly abstraction, Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism, Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction,^[75] Color Field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Zox, and others painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. Certain artists made references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction of modern art, artists wanted to present each painting as one cohesive, monolithic image. Gene Davis along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and several others was a member of the Washington Color School painters who began to create Color Field paintings in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s and 1960s, Black, Grey, Beat is a large vertical stripe painting and typical of Gene Davis's work. Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Ronald Davis, Neil Williams, Robert Mangold, Charles Hinman, Richard Tuttle, David Novros, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s.

From 1960 Frank Stella produced paintings in aluminum and copper paint and his first works using shaped canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square), often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (1967), for example. Later he began his Protractor Series (1971) of paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side by side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color. Harran II, 1967, is an example of the Protractor Series.

The Andre Emmerich Gallery, the Leo Castelli Gallery, the Richard Feigen Gallery, and the Park Place Gallery were important showcases for Color Field painting, shaped canvas painting and Lyrical Abstraction in New York City during the 1960s. There is a connection with post-painterly abstraction, which reacted against abstract expressionisms' mysticism, hyper-subjectivity, and emphasis on making the act of painting itself dramatically visible – as well as the solemn acceptance of the flat rectangle as an almost ritual prerequisite for serious painting. During the 1960s Color Field painting and Minimal art were often closely associated with each other. In actuality by the early 1970s both movements became decidedly diverse.

Lyrical Abstraction (the term being coined by Larry Aldrich, the founder of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield Connecticut), encompassed what Aldrich said he saw in the studios of many artists at that time.^[76] It is also the name of an exhibition that originated in the Aldrich Museum and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art and other museums throughout the United States between 1969 and 1971.^[77] Lyrical Abstraction is a type of freewheeling abstract painting that emerged in the mid-1960s when abstract painters returned to various forms of painterly, pictorial, expressionism with a predominate focus on process, gestalt and repetitive compositional strategies in general.^[78][79] In contrast to Action Painting, where emphasis is on brushstrokes and high compositional drama, in Lyrical Abstraction—as exemplified by the 1971 Ronnie Landfield painting Garden of Delight—there is a sense of compositional randomness, relaxed compositional drama and an emphasis on process, repetition, and an all over sensibility. Lyrical Abstraction in the late 1960s is characterized by the paintings of Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield, Peter Young and others, and along with the Fluxus movement and Postminimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum in 1969)^[80] sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Postminimalism often incorporating industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, and often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse.^[80] Lyrical Abstraction, Conceptual Art, Postminimalism, Earth Art, Video, Performance art, Installation art, along with the continuation of Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Hard-edge painting, Minimal Art, Op art, Pop art, Photorealism and New Realism extended the boundaries of Contemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.^[81]

One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was Frank Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The widths of the stripes in Stella's stripe paintings were not entirely subjective, but were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently emotionally charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and leaned more toward less gestural coloristic field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

Artists such as Larry Poons—whose work related to Op Art with his emphasis on dots, ovals and after-images bouncing across color fields—Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had also begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 1950s through the 1960s.^[82]

Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal—as demonstrated by Robert Mangold, who understood the concept of the shape of the canvas and its relationship to objecthood—there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Earl Ortman, who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.

In a much more general sense, one might find European roots of Minimalism in the geometric abstractions painters in the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, in Russian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. American painters such as Brice Marden and Cy Twombly show a clear European influence in their pure abstraction, minimalist painting of the 1960s. Ronald Davis polyurethane works from the late 1960s pay homage to the Broken Glass of Marcel Duchamp. This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, particularly Minimalist sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of Minimal art.

Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."^[83]

During the 1960s and 1970s artists as powerful and influential as Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Lee Krasner, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Agnes Martin, Sam Francis, Gene Davis, Joan Mitchell, Friedel Dzubas, and younger artists like Sam Gilliam, Sean Scully, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Murray, Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Joan Snyder, Richard Tuttle, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.

Still other important innovations in abstract painting took place during the 1960s and the 1970s characterized by Monochrome painting and Hard-edge painting inspired by Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Milton Resnick, and Ellsworth Kelly. Artists as diversified as Al Held, Larry Zox, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, Brice Marden and others explored the power of simplification. The convergence of Color Field painting, Minimal art, Hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction, and Postminimalism blurred the distinction between movements that became more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s. The Neo-expressionism movement is related to earlier developments in Abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, Lyrical Abstraction and Postminimal painting.

In the late 1960s the abstract expressionist painter Philip Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects. These works were inspirational to a new generation of painters interested in a revival of expressive imagery.^[84] His painting Painting, Smoking, Eating is an example of Guston's return to representation.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was also a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France and Britain. These movements were called Transavantguardia, Neue Wilde, Figuration Libre,^[85]Neo-expressionism, the school of London, and in the late 80s the Stuckists respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism.

Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting that became popular in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. It developed in Europe as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner) in a rough and violently emotional way using vivid colors and banal color harmonies. The veteran painters Philip Guston, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck and Georg Baselitz, along with the slightly younger artists Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, the Americans Eric Fischl, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Keith Haring, the Italians Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi, and many others became known for working in this intense expressionist vein of painting. Critical reaction was divided. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries.^[84]

Anselm Kiefer is a leading figure in European Neo-expressionism.^[86] By the 1980s, Kiefer's themes widened from a focus on Germany's role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involves not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult symbolism, theology and mysticism.^[87] The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life.

Painting still holds a respected position in contemporary art. Art is an open field no longer divided by the objective versus non-objective dichotomy. Artists can achieve critical success whether their images are representational or abstract. What has currency is content, exploring the boundaries of the medium, and a refusal to recapitulate the works of the past as an end goal.^[88][89][90]