Painting Subjects

· Religion In the Middle Ages, religious stories were artists' chief subjects. After 1800, religious commissions and works became rare. One exception to this rule is the work of Matisse, who in the 1950s designed murals and stained glass for the Chapel at Vence in southern France.

· History and myth Scenes of uplifting courage, self-sacrifice or generosity, based on ancient history and myths, were once regarded as the highest art. Some offered a cloak for erotic art, using nude women painted as goddesses. Twentieth-century artists such as Picasso have at times depicted minotaurs and other creatures from their own private mythologies.

· Portraits Individual portraiture emerged in the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci was the first portraitist of genius, but Raphael's portrait of Pope Leo X set new standards of realism, showing the pensive face of his patron in fine detail. The self-portraits of Rembrandt are honest paintings, "warts and all," a style echoed by modern portraitist Lucian Freud.

· Still life The first realistic paintings of inanimate objects appeared in 17th-century Spain, often in kitchen scenes (bodegones). The 18th-century still lifes of Chardin inspired the Impressionists, Cezanne and the Cubists.

· Genre These often small-scale works depict everyday life and surroundings. The Venetian Jacopo Bassano painted animals in this style in the 16th century, but in 17th-century Holland a genre movement arose. Painters often specialized in particular themes - for example, tavern or kitchen scenes or musical parties. In the 18th century, Chardin and Hogarth painted famous genre scenes.

· Landscape Painting landscapes was long regarded as inferior to historical or religious painting. It started to win favor in 17th-century Holland thanks to works by Hobbema, Vermeer and Ruisdael. They influenced English landscapists such as Gainsborough and Constable, who in turn influenced the French Impressionists.

· Abstract art Shape and color are used rather than recognizable forms. The style arose in the 1920s, led by painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, and diversified over the next 30 years, when Ben Nicholson created reliefs from geometric shapes and Jackson Pollock created "action" paintings with drips of color.

Western art 1850-1930 ► Impressionism to Surrealism

The switch from the subjective, atmospheric visions of the Impressionists to the objective, structured compositions of the Postimpressionists signaled the beginnings of modern art. The intense, unrealistic colors of the Expressionists and the distorted forms of Cubism and Surrealism freed art from its traditional restraints.

Impressionism The impressionists rejected Romanticism's exotic subject matter and emotionalism, wanting instead to capture immediate visual "impressions" of their subjects, and suggesting forms through fleeting effects of light. Monet, Pissarro and Sisley painted the same landscapes repeatedly in changing light. Manet and Degas normally painted urban or indoor scenes, as did Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. The official "Salon" rejected the Impressionists' work, so the group organized eight exhibitions of their own from 1874 to 1886, after which they broke up.

Postimpressionism By the 1880s, some artists felt that the Impressionists' faithful rendering of nature restricted their freedom of expression and that form and color could be used in different ways. Seurat placed colors as dots so they would "mix" in the eye of the viewer - a technique known as pointillism; Gauguin used flattened forms and unrealistic colors; van Gogh used bold, vibrant colors and thick paint; and Cezanne created vivid, carefully structured landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings. Rodin restored heroic seriousness to sculpture but with exceptional passion and realism. His life's work, the bronze The Gates of Hell (started 1880), is crowded with nearly 200 dramatic figures.

Fauvism At an exhibition in Paris in 1905, the wild energy, simplified forms and jarring combinations of intense colors in pictures by Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain. Rouault and Dufy led an art critic to dismiss the artists as fauves - "wild beasts." The movement lasted only three years, but it deeply influenced the Expressionists and Abstract Expressionists.

Expressionism Any work that uses distortion to reflect the state of mind of the artist can be labeled "expressionist." The central aim is the communication of subjective emotions through strong colors and dynamic or fantastical forms. The style underwent intense development among artists such as Kirchner, Klee, Macke and Marc in Germany between 1905 and 1930.

Cubism Cubist painters of the early 1900s sought to depict three-dimensional objects without illusory perspective or even distinct colours. In this, Cubism marked a radical break from the idea, dating from the Renaissance, that art should reflect nature. Cubism had two phases, In Analytic Cubism an object's different aspects - sides, top and base - could all be shown at once, and the process was pushed almost to the point of total abstraction. In Synthetic Cubism, elements such as textured materials and lettering were combined (synthesized) with painting - a new technique which became known as collage.

Futurism An Italian movement originating around 1909, Futurism jettisoned as much of Italy's overwhelming artistic past as it could, inspired by contemporary life's speed and machinery. The style copied the repeating geometric planes used by Cubists to portray motion and speed. Painter and sculptor Boccioni was Futurism's outstanding artist, creating paintings blurred with movement and sculptures of dynamic, striding figures. Futurism died with World War I, but it had an important influence on subsequent art in Britain and Russia and on the Dadaists.

Dada and Surrealism In 1915, an art movement was founded that rejected everything in life and in art. Its nihilism, humor and urgent desire to shock appealed to postwar disillusionment. Dada's key tenet, espoused by its most influential figure, Marcel Duchamp, was that art was whatever the artist said it was. After Duchamp, any object in any material was potentially a work of art. Surrealism, the fundamental aim of which was to create art direct from the unconscious, emerged in Paris in the 1920s. Surrealist artists, such as Magritte and Dali, typically used obsessively detailed images or objects in dreamlike and disturbing ways.

Picasso: artist of the 20^th century

No 20th-century artist can rival Spanish-born Picasso for fame, versatility, influence or number of works. His early work is often categorized into the "Blue Period" - paintings of social outcasts in elegiac blue tones - and the "Rose Period," depicting dancers and acrobats in warmer pinks. His studies of Cezanne and African sculpture led to the first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which overturned Western ideas about form and beauty with its distorted bodies and masklike faces, Picasso later turned to sculpture, and was one of the first artists to create three-dimensional works by combining miscellaneous items in ingenious ways, rather than by carving or modeling. He constructed Head of a Bull, Metamorphosis (1943) from bicycle parts. Though many of Picasso's works display emotional force through images of despair, his contrasting playful style and eclecticism opened up the possibilities of modern art.

Western art 1930-present ►Abstract Expressionism to Contemporary Art

As the 20th century progressed, simplicity and minimalism became key elements in painting and sculpture. Definitions of art expanded to include video recordings, staged events and assemblages of natural objects. The act of creation is now as important as the artwork it creates.

Modernism In painting, the term sums up a variety of styles from the 1920s to the 1960s, characterized by abstraction, flat colors and an emphasis on the canvas as an artificial surface. The most purely Modernist painter is Piet Mondrian. In sculpture, Modernism was a distinct movement, experimenting with form and structure. Constantin Brancusi, considered one of the 20th century's greatest sculptors, reduced his forms to near-abstract simplicity. Henry Moore rejected classical ideals of beauty for more vital, rougher forms based on natural shapes such as human figures, shells, bones. Barbara Hepworth also looked to nature but in a wholly abstract way. Anthony Caro's Modernism owes more to the ideas of Pop Art in using standard industrial parts such as steel plates or aluminium tubing welded together and brightly painted.

Abstract Expressionism Dating from the 1940s,Abstract Expressionismis the first Americanmovement not to be influenced by European painting, although it drew on Surrealist ideas of artistic creation. AbstractExpressionists aimed for spontaneous expression at the expense of representational design. Jackson Pollock developed a technique of throwing or dripping paint onto a canvas known as gestural or action painting. Mark Rothkos shimmering expanses of color are known as color-field painting. Other leading exponents include Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman.

Conceptualism Conceptualists assert that the creative act is more important than the object created; at its most extreme, it might consist of no more than an idea for a work of art. The movement includes Performance Art (events staged by the artist), Body Art (the artist's expression of ideas - often confrontational - using his or her body), and Land Art (the creation of artworks through the interaction of the artist and the environment).

Pop Art "Transient, low-cost, mass-produced, young... sexy, gimmicky," said Richard Hamilton of the movement he helped create. Influenced by Dada, Pop Art took emblems of the modern world - such as comics and advertisements - and used their ideas and images to create original art. Chief proponents were Warhol and Lichtenstein in the US and Hamilton, Peter Blake and Allen Jones in Britain.

Figurative painting Despite radical developments in the accepted notions of art and artworks, art representing animal or human figures (figurative art) continues to thrive - though usually in modified forms, Alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney, figurative painting since the 1970s has included the Postmodernist so-called "Neo-Expressionists," such as Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel.

Minimalism Some artists reacted against Abstract Expressionism's emotiveness, believing in letting raw materials set in geometric configurations "speak" directly to observers. This did not always work: In 1976, Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII- 120 bricks arranged in a rectangle - attracted derision and was vandalized while on display at London's Tate Gallery.

Contemporary Art By the late 1980s, art had reached the logical conclusion of Duchamp's Dada philosophy becoming whatever the artist wanted it to be. Rachel Whiteread achieved instant fame in 1992 with Unfitted (House), a cast of the inside of a Victorian terraced house. Much of her work concentrates on the spaces between objects, which she captures by filling them with plaster or wax to reveal something like a photographic negative of the original space. Damien Hirst has displayed dead animals preserved in tanks of formaldehyde to explore the themes of life and death. New technology has also stimulated developments: video recordings, films and computer-generated images have now become acceptable as artistic media.

Land Art

Some Land Art projects involve digging out and rearranging quantities of earth and rock. American Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty was a 457.2 m (1500ft) long spiral of rock and salt crystals on the edge of Great Salt Lake in Utah. British artist Andy Goldsworthy creates patterns and forms from materials such as leaves, pebbles and ice to express the power and transcience of nature.

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