تاريخ الرسم

تعود أقدم الأمثلة الباقية للفن الصيني المرسوم إلى فترة الممالك المتحاربة (481-221 قبل الميلاد)، وتشمل لوحات على الحرير أو جداريات مقابر على الصخور أو الطوب أو الحجر. كانت هذه الأعمال الفنية غالبًا ذات طابع بسيط ومنمق، وأنماط هندسية بدائية إلى حد ما. وكثيرًا ما صورت مخلوقات أسطورية، ومشاهد منزلية، ومشاهد عمل، أو مشاهد قصور تعج بالمسؤولين في البلاط. لم يُصنع الفن خلال هذه الفترة، وفترة أسرة تشين اللاحقة (221-207 قبل الميلاد) وأسرة هان اللاحقة (202 قبل الميلاد - 220 ميلادي)، كوسيلة في حد ذاتها أو للتعبير الشخصي الراقي؛ بل كان يُصنع لترمز إلى طقوس الجنازة وتكرمها، أو لتمثيل الآلهة الأسطورية أو أرواح الأجداد، وما إلى ذلك. ويمكن العثور على لوحات على الحرير لمسؤولي البلاط ومشاهد منزلية خلال عهد أسرة هان، إلى جانب مشاهد لرجال يصطادون على ظهور الخيل أو يشاركون في استعراض عسكري. كما شاع الرسم على الأعمال الفنية ثلاثية الأبعاد كالتماثيل والمنحوتات، مثل الألوان الأصلية التي غطت تماثيل الجنود والخيول في جيش التيراكوتا . خلال المناخ الاجتماعي والثقافي لسلالة جين الشرقية القديمة (316-420 ميلادي) التي اتخذت من نانجينغ جنوبًا مقرًا لها، أصبح الرسم أحد الهوايات الرسمية للموظفين الحكوميين والأرستقراطيين الذين تلقوا تعاليم الكونفوشيوسية ( إلى جانب الموسيقى التي تُعزف على آلة الغوتشين ، وكتابة الخط العربي ، وكتابة الشعر وإلقائه). وأصبح الرسم شكلًا شائعًا من أشكال التعبير الفني عن الذات، وخلال هذه الفترة، كان الرسامون في البلاط أو بين النخب الاجتماعية يُقيّمون ويُصنّفون من قِبل أقرانهم.

يُعزى الفضل في تأسيس فن الرسم الكلاسيكي للمناظر الطبيعية الصينية إلى حد كبير إلى الفنان غو كاي تشي (344-406 م)، أحد أشهر فناني التاريخ الصيني، من أسرة جين الشرقية . وكما في مشاهد اللفائف الطويلة لكاي تشي، رسم فنانون صينيون من أسرة تانغ (618-907 م)، مثل وو داوزي، أعمالًا فنية نابضة بالحياة وغنية بالتفاصيل على لفائف أفقية طويلة (كانت شائعة جدًا خلال عهد تانغ)، مثل لوحته " السبعة والثمانون من الآلهة السماوية" . تميزت الأعمال الفنية المرسومة خلال عهد تانغ بتأثيرات بيئة طبيعية مثالية، مع عدد قليل من الأشياء أو الأشخاص أو النشاط، بالإضافة إلى طابعها أحادي اللون (مثال: جداريات قبر الأمير ييدي في ضريح تشيانلينغ). كما برزت شخصيات أخرى، مثل الرسام تشان زي تشيان ، من أوائل فناني عصر تانغ ، الذي رسم لوحات مناظر طبيعية رائعة سبقت عصره في تصوير الواقعية. مع ذلك، لم يبلغ فن المناظر الطبيعية مستوىً أعلى من النضج والواقعية عمومًا إلا في عهد الممالك الخمس والعشر (907-960 ميلادي). خلال هذه الفترة، برز رسامون استثنائيون للمناظر الطبيعية مثل دونغ يوان (راجع هذه المقالة للاطلاع على مثال من أعماله)، وآخرون رسموا مشاهد منزلية أكثر حيوية وواقعية، مثل غو هونغ تشونغ ولوحته " سهرات هان شي زاي الليلية" .

خلال عهد أسرة سونغ الصينية (960-1279 م)، لم يقتصر التطور على فن المناظر الطبيعية فحسب، بل شهد فن رسم البورتريه تطورًا ملحوظًا، حيث أصبح أكثر دقةً وتطورًا من ذي قبل (انظر على سبيل المثال الإمبراطور هويزونغ من أسرة سونغ )، وبلغ ذروة نضجه الفني خلال عهد أسرة مينغ (1368-1644 م). وفي أواخر القرن الثالث عشر والنصف الأول من القرن الرابع عشر، مُنع الصينيون الخاضعون لحكم أسرة يوان المغولية من تولي مناصب حكومية عليا (كانت حكرًا على المغول أو غيرهم من الجماعات العرقية في آسيا الوسطى)، كما توقف الامتحان الإمبراطوري مؤقتًا. واتجه العديد من الصينيين المتعلمين على المذهب الكونفوشيوسي، والذين لم يعد لديهم وظائف، إلى فنون الرسم والمسرح، إذ أصبح عهد يوان من أكثر العصور ازدهارًا وثراءً في تاريخ الفن الصيني. من الأمثلة على ذلك تشيان شوان (1235-1305م)، الذي كان مسؤولاً في عهد أسرة سونغ، لكنه رفض، بدافع وطني، خدمة بلاط يوان وكرّس نفسه للرسم. ومن الأمثلة على الفنون الرائعة من هذه الفترة اللوحات الجدارية الغنية والمفصلة في قصر يونغلي، ^{[ 26 ] [ 27 ]} أو "قصر داتشونيانغ لطول العمر"، الذي يعود تاريخه إلى عام 1262م، وهو موقع مدرج ضمن قائمة اليونسكو للتراث العالمي. داخل القصر، تغطي اللوحات مساحة تزيد عن 1000 متر مربع، وتحمل في معظمها مواضيع طاوية. خلال عهد أسرة سونغ، كان الرسامون يجتمعون في نوادٍ أو اجتماعات اجتماعية لمناقشة فنهم أو أعمال الآخرين، وغالبًا ما كان الثناء يؤدي إلى إقناعهم بتبادل وبيع الأعمال الفنية الثمينة. ومع ذلك، كان هناك أيضًا العديد من النقاد اللاذعين لفن الآخرين، مما يدل على اختلاف الأسلوب والذوق بين الرسامين. في عام 1088 ميلادي، كتب العالم الموسوعي ورجل الدولة شين كو ذات مرة عن أعمال الفنان لي تشنغ ، الذي انتقده على النحو التالي:

ثم كان هناك لي تشنغ، الذي كان عندما يرسم الأجنحة والنُزُل وسط الجبال، والمباني متعددة الطوابق، والمعابد البوذية وما شابهها، يرسم دائمًا حواف الأسطح كما تُرى من الأسفل. كانت فكرته أنه "ينبغي للمرء أن ينظر إلى الأعلى من الأسفل، تمامًا كما يستطيع الرجل الواقف على أرض مستوية والناظر إلى حواف معبد بوذي أن يرى عوارضه وعوارضه الناتئة". هذا كله خطأ. بشكل عام، الطريقة الصحيحة لرسم المناظر الطبيعية هي رؤية الصغير من منظور الكبير... تمامًا كما ينظر المرء إلى الجبال الاصطناعية في الحدائق (أثناء تجوله). إذا طبقنا (طريقة لي) على رسم الجبال الحقيقية، ناظرين إليها من الأسفل، فلن نرى سوى جانب واحد في كل مرة، وليس ثراء منحدراتها وجوانبها المتعددة، ناهيك عن كل ما يحدث في الوديان والأخاديد ، وفي الأزقة والساحات بمساكنها ومنازلها. إذا وقفنا شرق جبل، لوجدنا أجزاءه الغربية على حدود التلاشي البعيدة، والعكس صحيح. أليس من الممكن وصف هذه اللوحة بالناجحة؟ لم يفهم السيد لي مبدأ "رؤية الصغير من منظور الكبير". صحيح أنه كان بارعًا في تقليص الارتفاعات والمسافات بدقة، ولكن هل ينبغي إيلاء كل هذه الأهمية لزوايا المباني؟ ^{[ 28 ]}

على الرغم من أن الأسلوبية العالية والجاذبية الصوفية والأناقة السريالية كانت تُفضّل غالبًا على الواقعية (كما هو الحال في أسلوب شان شوي )، فقد ظهر العديد من الرسامين الصينيين، بدءًا من عهد أسرة سونغ في العصور الوسطى، والذين صوروا مشاهد طبيعية نابضة بالحياة. وقد حذا فنانو أسرة مينغ اللاحقة حذو أسرة سونغ في التركيز على التفاصيل الدقيقة والواقعية في تصوير عناصر الطبيعة، لا سيما الحيوانات (مثل البط والبجع والعصافير والنمور، وما إلى ذلك) وسط بقع من الزهور ذات الألوان الزاهية وأحراش الأشجار (ومن الأمثلة الجيدة على ذلك لوحة " الطيور وأزهار البرقوق" المجهولة من عهد أسرة مينغ ، ^{[ 29 ]} والموجودة في معرض فرير بمتحف سميثسونيان في واشنطن العاصمة). وقد برز العديد من فناني أسرة مينغ المشهورين. يُعدّ تشيو يينغ مثالاً بارزاً على رسامي عصر مينغ البارزين (الذين اشتهروا حتى في عصرهم)، حيث وظّف في أعماله مشاهدَ منزلية، ومشاهدَ قصورٍ نابضةٍ بالحياة، ومشاهدَ طبيعيةً لوديان الأنهار والجبال الشاهقة التي يلفّها الضباب والسحب المتصاعدة. وخلال عهد أسرة مينغ، ظهرت أيضاً مدارس فنية مختلفة ومتنافسة في مجال الرسم، مثل مدرسة وو ومدرسة تشي .

استمر فن الرسم الصيني الكلاسيكي حتى أوائل العصر الحديث في عهد أسرة تشينغ ، حيث برزت لوحات بورتريه واقعية للغاية، كما هو الحال في أواخر عهد أسرة مينغ في أوائل القرن السابع عشر. وتُعدّ بورتريهات الأباطرة كانغشي ويونغ تشنغ وتشيان لونغ أمثلةً رائعةً على فن البورتريه الصيني الواقعي. خلال فترة حكم تشيان لونغ وما بعدها في القرن التاسع عشر، كان لأسلوب الباروك الأوروبي تأثيرٌ ملحوظٌ على لوحات البورتريه الصينية، لا سيما في المؤثرات البصرية للإضاءة والظلال. وبالمثل، حظيت لوحات شرق آسيا وغيرها من الأعمال الفنية (مثل الخزف والأواني المطلية بالورنيش) بتقديرٍ كبيرٍ في أوروبا منذ أول اتصالٍ بها في القرن السادس عشر.

الرسم الياباني (絵画) من أقدم الفنون اليابانية وأكثرها رقيًا، ويشمل طيفًا واسعًا من الأنواع والأساليب. وكما هو الحال مع الفنون اليابانية عمومًا، فقد تطور الرسم الياباني عبر تاريخ طويل من التوليف والتنافس بين الجماليات اليابانية الأصيلة واستيعاب الأفكار المستوردة. يُعدّ فن أوكيو-إي ، أو "صور العالم العائم"، نوعًا من المطبوعات الخشبية اليابانية (أو " النقوش الخشبية ") واللوحات التي أُنتجت بين القرنين السابع عشر والعشرين، وتتميز بزخارف المناظر الطبيعية والمسرح وأحياء المحظيات. وهو النوع الفني الرئيسي للطباعة الخشبية اليابانية . وقد مارست الطباعة اليابانية، وخاصةً منذ عصر إيدو ، تأثيرًا هائلًا على الرسم الفرنسي خلال القرن التاسع عشر. وفي حين طوّر الرسامون اليابانيون في القرن التاسع عشر أسلوبًا جديدًا في الرسم يُسمى يوغا ، استعار بشكل كبير من تقنيات ومواد الرسم الغربية، ومن أبرز هؤلاء الفنانين هارادا ناوجيرو ، وفوجيشيما تاكيجي ، وكورودا سيكي .

بدأ الرسم الكوري، كشكل فني مستقل، حوالي عام 108 قبل الميلاد، مع سقوط مملكة جوجوسون ، مما يجعله من أقدم الفنون في العالم. تطورت أعمال تلك الحقبة الفنية إلى أنماط متنوعة ميزت فترة الممالك الثلاث في كوريا ، ولا سيما اللوحات الجدارية التي تزين مقابر ملوك جوجوريو . خلال فترة الممالك الثلاث وطوال عهد مملكة جوريو ، تميز الرسم الكوري بشكل أساسي بمزيج من المناظر الطبيعية الكورية، وملامح الوجه، والمواضيع البوذية، والتركيز على رصد الأجرام السماوية الذي ساهم فيه التطور السريع لعلم الفلك الكوري. لم تبدأ المواضيع الكونفوشيوسية بالظهور في اللوحات الكورية إلا في عهد مملكة جوسون ، حيث استُخدمت بتناغم مع العناصر المحلية.

يتميز تاريخ الرسم الكوري باستخدام أعمال أحادية اللون بضربات فرشاة سوداء، غالباً على ورق التوت أو الحرير. ويتجلى هذا الأسلوب في فن "مين هوا" (الفن الشعبي الملون)، ورسومات المقابر، وفنون الطقوس والاحتفالات، والتي تضمنت جميعها استخداماً مكثفاً للألوان.

لطالما تمحورت اللوحات الهندية تاريخيًا حول الآلهة والملوك. والفن الهندي مصطلح جامع لعدة مدارس فنية مختلفة ازدهرت في شبه القارة الهندية . وتنوعت هذه اللوحات من جداريات أجانتا الضخمة إلى المنمنمات المغولية المتقنة، وصولًا إلى الأعمال المعدنية المزخرفة من مدرسة تانجوري . أما لوحات غاندهار - تاكسيلا ، فقد تأثرت بالأعمال الفارسية الغربية. وتطور أسلوب الرسم الشرقي في معظمه حول مدرسة نالاندا الفنية، حيث استُلهمت أعماله في الغالب من مشاهد متنوعة من الأساطير الهندية .

تاريخ

كانت أقدم اللوحات الهندية هي الرسومات الصخرية التي تعود إلى عصور ما قبل التاريخ ، والنقوش الصخرية الموجودة في أماكن مثل ملاجئ بهيمبيتكا الصخرية ، وبعضها أقدم من 5500 قبل الميلاد. استمرت هذه الأعمال، وبعد عدة آلاف من السنين، في القرن السابع الميلادي، تقدم الأعمدة المنحوتة في أجانتا بولاية ماهاراشترا مثالاً رائعاً على اللوحات الهندية، وقد استُخرجت الألوان، ومعظمها درجات مختلفة من الأحمر والبرتقالي، من المعادن.

تُعد كهوف أجانتا في ولاية ماهاراشترا بالهند آثاراً منحوتة في الصخر يعود تاريخها إلى القرن الثاني قبل الميلاد، وتحتوي على لوحات ومنحوتات تُعتبر روائع فنية دينية بوذية ^{[ 31 ]} وفن تصويري عالمي. ^{[ 32 ]}

لوحة مادوباني

فن مادوباني هو أسلوب من أساليب الرسم الهندي، يُمارس في منطقة ميثيلا بولاية بيهار في الهند. وتكتنف أصول فن مادوباني غموضٌ يعود إلى العصور القديمة.

الإغريق

الرسم المغولي هو أسلوب معين من الرسم الهندي ، يقتصر عمومًا على الرسوم التوضيحية في الكتب ويتم تنفيذه في المنمنمات، والذي ظهر وتطور وتشكل خلال فترة الإمبراطورية المغولية من القرن السادس عشر إلى القرن التاسع عشر.

راجبوت

تطورت فنون الرسم الراجبوتية وازدهرت خلال القرن الثامن عشر في البلاط الملكي لراجبوتانا بالهند. وقد طورت كل مملكة راجبوتية أسلوبًا مميزًا، مع وجود بعض السمات المشتركة. تُصوّر لوحات الراجبوت مواضيع متنوعة، منها أحداث الملاحم مثل رامايانا وماهابهاراتا، وحياة كريشنا، والمناظر الطبيعية الخلابة، والبشر. كانت المنمنمات الوسيلة المفضلة للرسم الراجبوتي، ولكن العديد من المخطوطات تحتوي أيضًا على لوحات راجبوتية، بل ورُسمت اللوحات على جدران القصور، والغرف الداخلية للحصون، والبيوت الهافيلية، وخاصة بيوت شيخاوات.

استُخدمت ألوانٌ مُستخلصة من معادن مُعينة، ومصادر نباتية، وأصداف بحرية، بل وحتى من معالجة الأحجار الكريمة والذهب والفضة. وكان تحضير الألوان المطلوبة عمليةً طويلة، تستغرق أحيانًا أسابيع. وكانت الفُرش المُستخدمة دقيقةً للغاية.

مدرسة البنغال

كانت مدرسة البنغال للفنون أسلوباً فنياً مؤثراً ازدهر في الهند خلال فترة الحكم البريطاني في أوائل القرن العشرين. وقد ارتبطت هذه المدرسة بالقومية الهندية، ولكنها حظيت أيضاً بدعم وترويج العديد من المسؤولين البريطانيين عن الفنون.

نشأت مدرسة البنغال كحركة طليعية وقومية، كرد فعل على الأساليب الفنية الأكاديمية التي كانت رائجة في الهند، سواء من قبل فنانين هنود مثل راجا رافي فارما أو في مدارس الفنون البريطانية. وبعد الانتشار الواسع للأفكار الروحية الهندية في الغرب، حاول مدرس الفنون البريطاني إرنست بينفيلد هافيل إصلاح أساليب التدريس في مدرسة كلكتا للفنون، وذلك بتشجيع الطلاب على محاكاة المنمنمات المغولية . أثار هذا الأمر جدلاً واسعاً، ما أدى إلى إضراب الطلاب وانتقادات من الصحافة المحلية، بما في ذلك من القوميين الذين اعتبروه خطوة رجعية. حظي هافيل بدعم الفنان أبانيندراناث طاغور ، ابن شقيق الشاعر رابيندراناث طاغور . رسم طاغور عدداً من الأعمال المتأثرة بالفن المغولي، وهو أسلوب اعتقد هو وهافيل أنه يعبر عن الصفات الروحية المميزة للهند، في مقابل "المادية" الغربية. تُصوّر لوحة طاغور الأشهر، "بهارات ماتا" (أم الهند)، امرأة شابة بأربعة أذرع على غرار الآلهة الهندوسية، تحمل رموزًا تُعبّر عن تطلعات الهند الوطنية. وفي وقت لاحق، سعى طاغور إلى بناء علاقات مع فنانين يابانيين في إطار طموحه لإنشاء نموذج فني آسيوي شامل .

تراجع نفوذ مدرسة البنغال في الهند مع انتشار الأفكار الحداثية في عشرينيات القرن العشرين. وفي فترة ما بعد الاستقلال، أظهر الفنانون الهنود قدرة أكبر على التكيف، إذ استلهموا بحرية من الأساليب الأوروبية ودمجوها بسلاسة مع الزخارف الهندية لابتكار أشكال فنية جديدة. وبينما كان فنانون مثل فرانسيس نيوتن سوزا وتايب ميهتا أكثر ميلاً إلى النهج الغربي، برز آخرون مثل غانيش باين ومقبول فدا حسين الذين طوروا أساليب فنية محلية أصيلة. واليوم، وبعد تحرير السوق في الهند، بات الفنانون أكثر انفتاحاً على الساحة الفنية العالمية، مما ساعدهم على ابتكار أشكال فنية جديدة لم تكن معروفة في الهند من قبل. وقد حقق جيتيش كالات شهرة واسعة في أواخر التسعينيات بلوحاته التي جمعت بين الحداثة وتجاوزت التصنيفات الفنية التقليدية. ومع ذلك، فبينما يجرب الفنانون في الهند في القرن الجديد أساليب ومواضيع واستعارات جديدة، لم يكن من الممكن الحصول على مثل هذا التقدير السريع لولا مساعدة الشركات التجارية التي تدخل الآن مجال الفن كما لم تفعل من قبل.

يعود تاريخ أقدم الرسومات الكهفية المعروفة إلى ما بين 44000 و50000 عام، وقد عُثر عليها في كهوف منطقة ماروس ( سولاويزي ، إندونيسيا). وتُعدّ رسومات اليد والأشكال الهندسية البسيطة أقدم أنواع هذه الرسومات، بينما تُعتبر أقدم الأمثلة المؤكدة للرسومات الكهفية التصويرية أحدث عهداً، إذ يبلغ عمرها حوالي 35000 عام. ^{[ 11 ]}

اكتُشفت أقدم لوحة فنية تصويرية معروفة آنذاك، يزيد عمرها عن 40,000 عام (وربما يصل إلى 52,000 عام)، تُصوّر حيوانًا مجهولًا، في كهف لوبانغ جيريجي صالح في جزيرة بورنيو الإندونيسية . وفي ديسمبر 2019، قُدِّرت لوحات كهفية تصويرية تُصوّر صيد الخنازير في كارست ماروس-بانكيب في سولاويزي بأنها أقدم من ذلك، إذ يبلغ عمرها 43,900 عام على الأقل. ووُصف هذا الاكتشاف بأنه "أقدم سجل تصويري لسرد القصص وأقدم عمل فني تصويري في العالم". ^{[ 39 ] [ 16 ]}

من الأمثلة الأخرى على اللوحات الإندونيسية فن كينياه الزخرفي، المستوحى من زخارف طبيعية محلية كالسراخس وأبو قرن، والذي يزين جدران بيوت كينياه الطويلة. ومن الفنون التقليدية البارزة الأخرى منحوتات توراجا الخشبية الهندسية. أما اللوحات البالية، فهي في الأصل صور سردية تصور مشاهد من الأساطير البالية والنصوص الدينية. وغالبًا ما تزين اللوحات البالية الكلاسيكية مخطوطات لونتار وأسقف أجنحة المعابد . ومن أبرز الرسامين الإندونيسيين المعاصرين الذين يتبعون التقاليد الأوروبية: رادين صالح ، وجان توروب ، وباسكي عبد الله، وعبد الله سوريوسوبروتو ، وتستكشف أعمالهم موضوعات رسم المناظر الطبيعية والبورتريه.

• 
  لوحة بالية تقليدية تصور مصارعة الديوك .
• 
  أسر الأمير ديبونيغورو ، 1857.
• 
  منظر طبيعي جاوي، مع نمور تستمع إلى صوت مجموعة مسافرة ، 1849.
• 
  عجلة الحياة ، إي كيتوت مورتيكا (مواليد 1952)، غواش على قماش
• 
  تفاصيل لوحة كاماسان باليندون التي تعود إلى ما قبل عام 1920 ، وهي مثال على الرسم الكلاسيكي على طراز كاماسان.
• 
  راقصة القناع (بواسطة AA Gde Anom Sukawati) في متحف بوري لوكيسان.
• 
  راقصة ليجونج .
• 
  رسم المعابد الإندونيسية .

يمكن اعتبار الرسم الفلبيني ككل مزيجاً من العديد من التأثيرات الثقافية، على الرغم من أنه يميل إلى أن يكون غربياً أكثر في شكله الحالي مع جذور شرقية.

يمكن العثور على رسومات فلبينية مبكرة في تصاميم الطين الأحمر (الطين الممزوج بالماء) المزخرفة على الأواني الفخارية الطقسية في الفلبين، مثل جرة مانونغول  . وقد عُثر على أدلة على صناعة الفخار الفلبينية تعود إلى 6000 قبل الميلاد في كهف سانغا سانغا، سولو، وكهف لورينتي، كاغايان. وبحلول 5000  قبل الميلاد، كانت صناعة الفخار منتشرة في جميع أنحاء البلاد. بدأ الفلبينيون الأوائل بصناعة الفخار قبل جيرانهم الكمبوديين، وفي نفس الوقت تقريبًا مع التايلانديين، كجزء مما يبدو أنه تطور واسع النطاق لتقنية صناعة الفخار خلال العصر الجليدي. وتتجلى أدلة أخرى على الرسم في تقليد الوشم لدى الفلبينيين الأوائل، وخاصة سكان فيساياس، الذين أطلق عليهم المستكشفون الإسبان اسم بينتادوس أو "الشعب الملون". ^{[ 40 ]} كانوا يزينون أجسادهم بأصباغ ملونة متنوعة بتصاميم مستوحاة من النباتات والحيوانات والأجرام السماوية. تتجلى بعض أكثر اللوحات تفصيلاً التي رسمها الفلبينيون الأوائل والتي لا تزال باقية حتى يومنا هذا في فنون وعمارة شعب ماراناو ، المعروفين بتماثيل تنانين ناغا وساريمانوك المنحوتة والمطلية في بانولونغ الجميلة في منزل توروغان أو منزل الملك.

بدأ الفلبينيون في ابتكار لوحات فنية على الطراز الأوروبي خلال فترة الحكم الإسباني في القرن السابع عشر. ^{[ 41 ]} وكانت أقدم هذه اللوحات عبارة عن جداريات كنسية وصور دينية مستوحاة من مصادر الكتاب المقدس، بالإضافة إلى نقوش ومنحوتات ومطبوعات حجرية تُصوّر أيقونات مسيحية وشخصيات نبيلة أوروبية. وشكّلت معظم اللوحات والمنحوتات بين القرنين التاسع عشر والعشرين مزيجًا من الأعمال الفنية الدينية والسياسية والمناظر الطبيعية، اتسمت بمزيج من الرقة والظلام والنور. وارتبط فنانون حداثيون أوائل ، مثل داميان دومينغو، باللوحات الدينية والعلمانية. وأظهر فن خوان لونا وفيليكس هيدالغو نزعة نحو التعبير السياسي. واستخدم فنانون مثل فرناندو أمورسولو ما بعد الحداثة لإنتاج لوحات تُجسّد الثقافة الفلبينية وطبيعتها وانسجامها. بينما استخدم فنانون آخرون، مثل فرناندو زوبيل، الواقعية والتجريد في أعمالهم.

• 
  خوان لونا ، موت كليوباترا ، 1881
• 
  خوان لونا ، Spoliarium ، ج.  1884
• 
  نوسترا سينورا دي لا سوليداد دي بورتا فاجا
• 
  لوحة سقف كنيسة ليلا
• 
  لورنزو دي لا روشا إيكازا، سيدة فلبينية ، 1895
• 
  فابيان دي لا روزا ، النساء العاملات في حقل الأرز ، 1902
• 
  خوان لونا ، تامبوهان ، 1895
• 
  خوسيه أونوراتو لوزانو، إنديوس ، 1847

• 
  Henri Matisse 1905, Fauvism
• 
  Pablo Picasso 1907, Proto-Cubism
• 
  Georges Braque 1910, Analytic Cubism
• 
  Henri Rousseau 1910 PrimitiveSurrealism

The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Matisse's second version of The Dance signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.^[53] It reflects Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907, Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions. analytic Cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and countless other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.

Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) were early-20th-century painters, experimenting with freedom of expression through color. The name was given, humorously and not as a compliment, to the group by art critic Louis Vauxcelles. Fauvism was a short-lived and loose grouping of early-20th-century artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. Fauvists made the subject of the painting easy to read, exaggerated perspectives and an interesting prescient prediction of the Fauves was expressed in 1888 by Paul Gauguin to Paul Sérusier,

How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.

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.^[54]

Fauvism, as a movement, had no concrete theories, and was short lived, beginning in 1905 and ending in 1907, they only had 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 Line, (above), caused a sensation in Paris when it was first exhibited. He said he wanted to create art to delight; art as a decoration was his purpose 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 like Charing Cross Bridge, London (above) in the Fauvist style, paraphrasing the famous series by the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Masters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement throughout the 20th century.

By 1907 Fauvism no longer was a shocking new movement, soon it was replaced by Cubism on the critics' radar screen as the latest new development in Contemporary Art of the time. In 1907 Apollinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable."^[55]Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and countless other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.

During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism, several movements emerged in Paris. Giorgio de Chirico moved to Paris in July 1911, where he joined his brother Andrea (the poet and painter known as Alberto Savinio). Through his brother he met Pierre Laprade a member of the jury at the Salon d'Automne, where he exhibited three of his dreamlike works: Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and Self-Portrait. During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, his work was noticed by Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire and several others. His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early beginnings of Surrealism. During the first half of the 20th century in Europe masters like Georges Braque, André Derain, and Giorgio de Chirico continued painting independent of any movement.

• 
  André Derain, 1905, Le séchage des voiles (The Drying Sails), Fauvism
• 
  Henri Matisse, 1905, Woman with a Hat, Fauvism
• 
  Jean Metzinger, c.1905, Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape, Divisionism, Proto-Cubism
• 
  Edvard Munch, Death of Marat I (1907), an example of Expressionism
• 
  Gustav Klimt, expressionism, 1907–1908
• 
  Pablo Picasso, 1908, Dryad, Proto-Cubism
• 
  Marc Chagall 1911, expressionism and surrealism
• 
  Marcel Duchamp, 1911–1912, Cubism and Dada
• 
  Albert Gleizes, 1912, l'Homme au Balcon, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud), Cubism
• 
  Jean Metzinger, 1912, Danseuse au café (Dancer in a café), Cubism
• 
  Franz Marc 1912, Der Blaue Reiter
• 
  Robert Delaunay, 1911, Orphism
• 
  Francis Picabia, 1912, La Source (The Spring), Abstract art
• 
  Wassily Kandinsky 1913, birth of abstract art
• 
  Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of Soutine 1916, example of Expressionism
• 
  Fernand Léger 1919, synthetic Cubism, tubism

In the first two decades of the 20th century and after Cubism, several other important movements emerged; futurism (Balla), abstract art (Kandinsky), Der Blaue Reiter), Bauhaus, (Kandinsky) and (Klee), Orphism, (Robert Delaunay and František Kupka), Synchromism (Morgan Russell), De Stijl (Mondrian), Suprematism (Malevich), Constructivism (Tatlin), Dadaism (Duchamp, Picabia, Arp) and Surrealism (De Chirico, André Breton, Miró, Magritte, Dalí, Ernst). Modern painting influenced all the visual arts, from Modernist architecture and design, to avant-garde film, theatre and modern dance and became an experimental laboratory for the expression of visual experience, from photography and concrete poetry to advertising art and fashion. Van Gogh's painting exerted great influence upon 20th-century Expressionism, as can be seen in the work of the Fauves, Die Brücke (a group led by German painter Ernst Kirchner), and the Expressionism of Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine and others..

Wassily Kandinsky a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist, one of the most famous 20th-century artists is generally considered the first important painter of modern abstract art. As an early Modernist, in search of new modes of visual expression, and spiritual expression, 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 (above gallery) 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.Robert Delaunay was a French artist who is associated with Orphism, (reminiscent of a link between pure abstraction and cubism). His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key contributions to abstract painting refer to his bold use of color, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone. At the invitation of Wassily Kandinsky, Delaunay and his wife the artist Sonia Delaunay, joined The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), a Munich-based group of abstract artists, in 1911, and his art took a turn to the abstract.^[56]

Other major pioneers of early abstraction include Russian painter Kasimir Malevich, who after the Russian Revolution in 1917, and after pressure from the Stalinist regime in 1924 returned to painting imagery and Peasants and Workers in the field, and Swiss painter Paul Klee whose masterful color experiments made him an important pioneer of abstract painting at the Bauhaus. Still other important pioneers of abstract painting include the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, Czech painter František Kupka as well as American artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell who, in 1912, founded Synchromism, an art movement that closely resembles Orphism.

Expressionism and Symbolism are broad rubrics that involve several important and 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. Expressionist artists are related to both Surrealism and Symbolism and are each uniquely and somewhat eccentrically personal. Fauvism, Die Brücke, and Der Blaue Reiter are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters.

Artists as interesting and diverse as Marc Chagall, whose painting I and the Village, (above) 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, Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, Georges Rouault, Amedeo Modigliani and some of the Americans abroad like Marsden Hartley, and Stuart Davis, were considered influential expressionist painters. Although Alberto Giacometti is primarily thought of as an intense Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well.

• 
  Piet Mondrian, 1912, early De Stijl
• 
  Kasimir Malevich 1916, Suprematism
• 
  Theo van Doesburg 1917, De Stijl, Neo-Plasticism
• 
  Stanton Macdonald-Wright 1920, Synchromism

Piet Mondrian's art was also related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908 he became interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century. Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a knowledge of nature more profound than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge.

De Stijl also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. The term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands.^[57][58]

De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, and Bart van der Leck, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Robert van 't Hoff, and J. J. P. Oud. The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as neoplasticism – the new plastic art (or Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch).

Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. Indeed, according to the Tate Gallery's online article on neoplasticism, Mondrian himself sets forth these delimitations in his essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art". He writes, "... this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour." The Tate article further summarizes that this art allows "only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line."^[59] The Guggenheim Museum's online article on De Stijl summarizes these traits in similar terms: "It [De Stijl] was posited on the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality; the predominant use of pure primary colors with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines."^[60]

De Stijl movement was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about "ideal" geometric forms (such as the "perfect straight line") in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematicianM. H. J. Schoenmaekers. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the international style of architecture as well as clothing and interior design. However, it did not follow the general guidelines of an "ism" (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism), nor did it adhere to the principles of art schools like Bauhaus; it was a collective project, a joint enterprise.

• 
  Francis Picabia 1916, Dada
• 
  Kurt Schwitters, 1919, painted collage, Dada
• 
  Max Ernst, 1921, Surrealism
• 
  André Masson, 1922, early Surrealism

Marcel Duchamp, came to international prominence in the wake of his notorious success at the New York City Armory Show in 1913, (soon after he denounced artmaking for chess). After Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase became the international cause celebre at the 1913 Armory show in New York he 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 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, and concentrated its anti war politic through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, along with Duchamp and many others are associated with the Dadaist movement. 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 which featured artists whose works varied from the abstract to the super-realist. With works on paper like Machine Turn Quickly, (above) 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. Joan Miró's The Tilled Field of 1923–1924 verges on abstraction, this early painting of a complex of objects and figures, and arrangements of sexually active characters; was Miró's first Surrealist masterpiece.^[61] Miró's The Tilled Field also contains several parallels to Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: similar flocks of birds; pools from which living creatures emerge; and oversize disembodied ears all echo the Dutch master's work that Miró saw as a young painter in The Prado. The more abstract Joan Miró, Jean Arp, André Masson, and Max Ernst were very influential, especially in the United States during the 1940s. 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.

Dalí and Magritte created some of the most widely recognized images of the movement. The 1928/1929 painting This Is Not A Pipe, by Magritte is the subject of a Michel Foucault 1973 book, This is not a Pipe (English edition, 1991), that discusses the painting and its paradox. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, and perception, sometimes evoking empathy from the viewer, sometimes laughter and sometimes outrage and bewilderment.

1931 marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: in one example, liquid shapes become the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting. Evocations of time and its compelling mystery and absurdity.^[62]

The characteristics of this style – a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological – came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modernist period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality."

Max Ernst whose 1920 painting Murdering Airplane, 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.^[63]

During the 1920s André Masson's work was enormously influential in helping the newly arrived in Paris and young artist Joan Miró find his roots in the new Surrealist painting. Miró acknowledged in letters to his dealer Pierre Matisse the importance of Masson as an example to him in his early years in Paris.

Long after personal, political and professional tensions have fragmented the Surrealist group into thin air and ether, Magritte, Miró, Dalí and the other Surrealists continue to define a visual program in the arts. Other prominent surrealist artists include Giorgio de Chirico, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Leonor Fini among others.

• 
  Egon Schiele, Symbolism and Expressionism 1912
• 
  Ernst Kirchner, Die Brücke 1913
• 
  Amedeo ModiglianiSymbolism and Expressionism 1917
• 
  Georgia O'Keeffe, American Modernism, 1921
• 
  Stuart Davis, American Modernism 1922
• 
  Chaïm Soutine, Expressionism, c. 1920

Der Blaue Reiter was a German movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded the previous decade in 1905 and was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. Founding members of Die Brücke were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members included Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller and others. The group was one of the seminal ones, which in due course had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism.^[64]

Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, whose psychically expressive painting of the Russian dancer Portrait of Alexander Sakharoff, 1909 is in the gallery above, 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 painting by Kandinsky created in 1903. It is also claimed that the name could have derived from Marc's enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky's love of the colour blue. For Kandinsky, blue is the colour of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal.

In the USA during the period between World War I and World War II painters tended to go to Europe for recognition. Artists like Marsden Hartley, Patrick Henry Bruce, Gerald Murphy and Stuart Davis, created reputations abroad. In New York City, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Blakelock were influential and important figures in advanced American painting between 1900 and 1920. 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 Pablo Picasso, at his gallery the 291.

• 
  George Grosz, 1920, Neue Sachlichkeit
• 
  Thomas Hart Benton 1920, Regionalism
• 
  George Bellows, 1924, American realism
• 
  Charles DemuthSpring, 1921, American Precisionism (proto Pop Art)

During the 1920s and the 1930s and the Great Depression, Surrealism, late Cubism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, German Expressionism, Expressionism, and modernist and masterful color painters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard characterized the European art scene. In Germany Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz and others politicized their paintings, foreshadowing the coming of World War II. While in America American Scene painting and the social realism and regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world. Artists like Ben Shahn, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, George Tooker, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh, and others became prominent. In Latin America besides the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García and Rufino Tamayo from Mexico, the muralist movement with Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, José Orozco, Pedro Nel Gómez and Santiago Martinez Delgado and the Symbolist paintings by Frida Kahlo began a renaissance of the arts for the region, with a use of color and historic, and political messages. Frida Kahlo's Symbolist works also relate strongly to Surrealism and to the Magic Realism movement in literature. The psychological drama in many of Kahlo's self portraits (above) underscore the vitality and relevance of her paintings to artists in the 21st century.

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 had favorable opinions about the painting, like Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, they assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It was thus seen as part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis' 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess in literature.^[65] However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.

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 Vladimir Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff. The film Cradle Will Rock includes a dramatization of the controversy. Frida Kahlo (Rivera's wife's) 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. Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her paintings' bright colors and dramatic symbolism. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work as well; she combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition—which were often bloody and violent—with surrealist renderings. While her paintings are not overtly Christian they certainly contain elements of the macabre Mexican Christian style of religious paintings.

Political activism was an important piece of David Siqueiros' life, and frequently inspired him to set aside his artistic career. His art was deeply rooted in the Mexican Revolution, a violent and chaotic period in Mexican history in which various social and political factions fought for recognition and power. The period from the 1920s to the 1950s is known as the Mexican Renaissance, and Siqueiros was active in the attempt to create an art that was at once Mexican and universal. He briefly gave up painting to focus on organizing miners in Jalisco.

• 
  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1935–1937, German Expressionism
• 
  Wassily KandinskyComposition X 1939, Geometric abstraction

During the 1930s radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to Surrealism, including Pablo Picasso.^[66] 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. The town was devastated, though the Biscayan assembly and the Oak of Gernika survived. Pablo Picasso painted his mural sized Guernica to commemorate the horrors of the bombing.

In its final form, Guernica is an immense black and white, 3.5 metres (11 feet) tall and 7.8 metres (26 feet) 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 contrasts with the intensity of the scene depicted and invokes the immediacy of a newspaper photograph.^[67] Picasso painted the mural sized painting called Guernica in protest of the bombing. The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1937, then Scandinavia, then London in 1938 and finally in 1939 at Picasso's request the painting was sent to the United States in an extended loan (for safekeeping) at MoMA. The painting went on a tour of museums throughout the USA until its final return to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where it was exhibited for nearly thirty years. Finally in accord with Pablo Picasso's wish to give the painting to the people of Spain as a gift, it was sent to Spain in 1981.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, through the years of World War II American art was characterized by Social Realism and American Scene Painting in the work of Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, Thomas Hart Benton, and several others. Nighthawks (1942) is a 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. It is currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The scene was inspired by a diner (since demolished) in Greenwich Village, Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper began painting it immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After this event there was a large feeling of gloominess over the country, a feeling that is portrayed in the painting. 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.

The Dynamic for artists in Europe during the 1930s deteriorated rapidly as the Nazi's power in Germany and across Eastern Europe increased. The climate became so hostile for artists and art associated with Modernism and abstraction that many left for the Americas. Degenerate art was a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany for virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely.

Degenerate Art was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria. German artist Max Beckmann and scores of others fled Europe for New York. In New York City a new generation of young and exciting Modernist painters led by Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and others were just beginning to come of age.

Arshile Gorky's portrait of someone who might be Willem de Kooning (above) 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.

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early Modernism 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. 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.

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, Mark Tobey, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Conrad Marca-Relli, Jack Tworkov, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Jimmy Ernst, Esteban Vicente, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Theodoros Stamos, among others. American Abstract expressionism got its name in 1946 from the art critic Robert Coates. It is seen as combining the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as futurism, the Bauhaus and synthetic cubism. Abstract expressionism, action painting, and Color Field painting are synonymous with the New York School.

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. As seen above in the gallery 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 collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 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 soon afterwards and encouraged the artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; Woman II collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Woman III, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Woman IV, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. During the summer of 1952, spent at East Hampton, de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He may have finished work on Woman I by the end of June, or possibly as late as November 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time.^[68] The Woman series are decidedly figurative paintings. Another important artist is Franz Kline, as demonstrated by his painting High Street, 1950 as with Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, 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.^{[69][70][71][72]}

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 (gallery) can be comfortably described as practitioners of action painting and Color Field painting.

Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or of the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. An exception might be the drip paintings of Pollock.

Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American Social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression but also by the Social Realists of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of those painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early 1940s at galleries in New York like The Art of This Century Gallery. The late 1940s through the mid-1950s ushered in the McCarthy era. It was after World War II and a time of political conservatism and extreme artistic censorship in the United States. Some people have conjectured that since the subject matter was often totally abstract, Abstract expressionism became a safe strategy for artists to pursue this style. Abstract art could be seen as apolitical. Or if the art was political, the message was largely for the insiders. However, those theorists are in the minority. As the first truly original school of painting in America, Abstract expressionism demonstrated the vitality and creativity of the country in the post-war years, as well as its ability (or need) to develop an aesthetic sense that was not constrained by the European standards of beauty.

Although Abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially in the New York School, and the San Francisco Bay area. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over" approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges). The canvas as the arena became a credo of action painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the Color Field painters. Many other artists began exhibiting their abstract expressionist related paintings during the 1950s including Alfred Leslie, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Milton Resnick, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Ray Parker, Nicolas Carone, Grace Hartigan, Friedel Dzubas, and Robert Goodnough among others.

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. Artists like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Zox, and others often used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. In Mountains and Sea, from 1952, a seminal work of Color Field painting by Helen Frankenthaler the artist used the stain technique for the first time.

In Europe there was the continuation of Surrealism, Cubism, Dada and the works of Matisse. Also in Europe, Tachisme (the European equivalent to Abstract expressionism) took hold of the newest generation. Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël, Georges Mathieu, Vieira da Silva, Jean Dubuffet, Yves Klein and Pierre Soulages among others are considered important figures in post-war European painting.

Eventually abstract painting in America evolved into movements such as Neo-Dada, Color Field painting, Post painterly abstraction, Op art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, shaped canvas painting, lyrical abstraction, Neo-expressionism and the continuation of Abstract expressionism. As a response to the tendency toward abstraction imagery emerged through various new movements, notably Pop art.

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, and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age.^[73] The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard HamiltonPeter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi were considered seminal examples in the movement.

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 set the table for pop art in America. In New York City during the mid-1950s Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper 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 and the combining of mundane materials into their work. The innovations of Johns' specific 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.

American pop art is exemplified by artists: Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Wayne Thiebaud, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein among others. Lichtenstein's most important work is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London^[74]), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War.^[75] The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering "Whaam!" and the boxed caption "I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..."^[74] 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. Sidney Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in the fall of 1962 an historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects exhibition of pop art, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum sent shock waves across the Western United States.

While in the downtown scene in New York City's East Village10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of Pop Art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront and made painted objects, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Later Leo Castelli exhibited other American artists including the bulk of the careers of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and his use of Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction. 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 (who became known for his parodies of portrait photography and suburban life), Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and the others.

While throughout the 20th century many painters continued to practice landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, like Milton Avery, John D. Graham, Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, Balthus, Francis Bacon, Nicolas de Staël, Andrew Wyeth, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Philip Pearlstein, David Park, Nathan Oliveira, David Hockney, Malcolm Morley, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Chuck Close, Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl, Vija Celmins and Richard Diebenkorn.

During the 1930s through the 1960s 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 figurative 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. 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.^[76] Throughout the 20th century many painters practiced Realism and used expressive imagery; practicing landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, and unique expressivity like still-life painter Giorgio Morandi, Milton Avery, John D. Graham, Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Balthus, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Philip Pearlstein, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Grace Hartigan, Robert De Niro, Sr., Elaine de Kooning and others. Along with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, and other 20th-century masters. In particular Milton Avery 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.^[77][78]

Head VI, 1949 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.^[79] 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."^[80] The Pope in this version seethes with anger and aggression, and the dark colors give the image a grotesque and nightmarish appearance.^[81] The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent, and seem to fall through the Pope's face.^[82] Italian painter Giorgio Morandi was an important 20th-century early pioneer of Minimalism. Born in Bologna, Italy, in 1890, throughout his career, Morandi concentrated almost exclusively on still lifes and landscapes, except for a few self-portraits. With great sensitivity to tone, color, and compositional balance, he would depict the same familiar bottles and vases again and again in paintings notable for their simplicity of execution. Morandi executed 133 etchings, a significant body of work in its own right, and his drawings and watercolors often approach abstraction in their economy of means. Through his simple and repetitive motifs and economical use of color, value and surface, Morandi became a prescient and important forerunner of Minimalism. He died in Bologna in 1964.

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 work was quickly recognised within the post-war art world, and he became one of the most influential artists of the 1950s. His 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 thinned, and diluted oil on canvas abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s predicts Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicolas de Staël's bold and intensely vivid color in his last paintings predict the direction of much of contemporary painting that came after him including Pop art of the 1960s.

• 
  John Baeder, Photorealism

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,^[83] as seen in Court les rues, 1962, by Jean Dubuffet, fluxus, neo-Dada, New Realism, 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, Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 50 1/2 inches, collection: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) 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. Although throughout the 20th century painters continued to practice Realism and use imagery, practicing landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, and unique expressivity like Milton Avery, Edward Hopper, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Philip Pearlstein, and others. Younger painters practiced the use of imagery in new and radical ways. Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, Wolf Vostell, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Malcolm Morley, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl, John Baeder 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, many of them affiliated with the New York School of writers, including John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. Many of his paintings were set in or around the family summer house on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine.

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.^[84][85]

Neo-Dada is also a movement that started in the 1950s and 1960s and was related to Abstract expressionism only with imagery. Featuring the emergence of combined manufactured items, with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose "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. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz among others were important pioneers of both abstraction and Pop Art; creating 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.

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  Yves Klein, 1962, Monochrome painting

Color Field painting clearly pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away from abstract expressionism. Color Field painting is related to post-painterly abstraction, suprematism, abstract expressionism, hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction. 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 Color Field painting, his work can serve as a bridge between abstract expressionism, Color Field 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. Josef 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,^[86]Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Larry Poons, Ronald Davis, Larry Zox, Al Held and some others like Mino Argento,^[87] are artists closely associated with Geometric abstraction, Op art, Color Field painting, and in the case of Hofmann and Newman Abstract expressionism as well.

In 1965, an exhibition called The Responsive Eye, curated by William C. Seitz, was held at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City. The works shown were wide-ranging, encompassing the Minimalism of Frank Stella, the Op art of Larry Poons, the work of Alexander Liberman, alongside the masters of the Op Art movement: Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Bridget Riley and others. The exhibition focused on the perceptual aspects of art, which result both from the illusion of movement and the interaction of color relationships. Op art, also known as optical art, is a style present in some paintings and other works of art that use optical illusions. Op art is also closely akin to geometric abstraction and hard-edge painting. Although sometimes the term used for it is perceptual abstraction.

Op art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing.^[88] Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.

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, John Hoyland, Larry Zox, and others often used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. Certain artists quoted 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 unified, cohesive, monolithic image.

Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Ronald Davis, Neil Williams, Robert Mangold, Charles Hinman, Richard Tuttle, David Novros, and Alvin Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas 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 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.

Another related movement of the late 1960s, 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.^[92] 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.^[93]

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)^[94] 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.^[94] 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.^[95] 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.

Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with color field painting and abstract expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction as exemplified by the 1968 Ronnie Landfield painting For William Blake, (above) especially in the freewheeling usage of paint – texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in abstract expressionism and color field painting. However, the styles are markedly different. Setting it apart from abstract expressionism and action painting of the 1940s and 1950s is the approach to composition and drama. As seen in action painting there is an emphasis on brushstrokes, high compositional drama, dynamic compositional tension. While in Lyrical Abstraction there is a sense of compositional randomness, all over composition, low key and relaxed compositional drama and an emphasis on process, repetition, and an all over sensibility.,^[96][97]

Agnes Martin, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Richard Tuttle, Neil Williams, David Novros, Paul Mogenson, Charles Hinman 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.

During the 1960s and 1970s artists such as Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Josef Albers, Elmer Bischoff, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Gene Davis, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Joan Mitchell, Friedel Dzubas, and younger artists like Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, Sam Gilliam,^[98]John Hoyland, Sean Scully, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, and dozens of others produced a wide variety of paintings.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a reaction against abstract painting. Some critics 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: postminimalism, Earth art, video art, installation art, arte povera, performance art, body art, fluxus, happening, mail art, the situationists and conceptual art among others.

However 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 diverse as Agnes Martin, 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 an 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. His painting Painting, Smoking, Eating 1973, seen above in the gallery is an example of Guston's final and conclusive 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,^[99]Neo-expressionism, the school of London, and in the late 1980s the Stuckists respectively. These paintings were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism. Critical reaction was divided. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries. This type of art continues in popularity into the 21st century, even after the art crash of the late 1980s. Anselm Kiefer is a leading figure in European Neo-expressionism 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 occultsymbolism, theology and mysticism. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life.

During the late 1970s in the United States painters who began working with invigorated surfaces and who returned to imagery like Susan Rothenberg gained in popularity, especially as seen above in paintings like Horse 2, 1979. During the 1980s American artists like Eric Fischl, David Salle, Jean-Michel Basquiat (who began as a graffiti artist), Julian Schnabel, and Keith Haring, and Italian painters like Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi, among others defined the idea of Neo-expressionism in America.

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 colours and banal colour harmonies. The veteran painters Philip Guston, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck and Georg Baselitz, along with slightly younger artists like Anselm Kiefer, Eric Fischl, Susan Rothenberg, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, and many others became known for working in this intense expressionist vein of painting.

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.

At the beginning of the 21st century Contemporary painting and Contemporary art in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of pluralism. The "crisis" in painting and current art and current art criticism today is brought about by pluralism. There is no consensus, nor need there be, as to a representative style of the age. There is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on", and consequently "nothing going on" syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently magnificent and important works of art continue to be made albeit in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit.

Hard-edge painting, geometric abstraction, appropriation, hyperrealism, photorealism, expressionism, minimalism, Lyrical Abstraction, pop art, op art, abstract expressionism, Color Field painting, monochrome painting, neo-expressionism, collage, intermedia painting, assemblage painting, digital painting, postmodern painting, neo-Dada painting, shaped canvas painting, environmental mural painting, traditional figure painting, landscape painting, portrait painting, are a few continuing and current directions in painting at the beginning of the 21st century.

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  The Great Gallery, Pictographs, Canyonlands National Park, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah, 15 by 200 feet (4.6 by 61.0 m), c. 1500 BCE
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  Pictograph, southeastern Utah, c. 1200 BC Pueblo culture
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  Painted pottery, Anasazi, North America: A canteen (pot) excavated from the ruins in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, c. 700 AD–1100 AD
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  Painted ceramic jug showing the underwater panther from the Mississippian culture, found at Rose Mound in Cross County, Arkansas, c. 1400–1600.
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  A Haida wolf mask, 1880.
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  A Hopi jar by Nampeyo (c.1860–1942), made in Arizona, 1880.
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  A girl from the Zuni tribe of New Mexico with a painted pottery jar, photographed in c. 1903.
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  Edward S. Curtis, Navajosandpainting, sepiaphotogravure c. 1907
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  Navajo man in ceremonial dress with mask and body paint, c. 1904
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  Ledger art of Haokah (ca. 1880) by Black Hawk (Lakota).
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  Kiowa ledger art, possibly of the 1874 Buffalo Wallow battle, Red River War.
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  Detail of ledger painting on muslin by Silver Horn (1860–1940), ca. 1880, Oklahoma History Center
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  Work on Paper, by Arapaho painter, Carl Sweezy (1881–1953), 1904
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  An Uncompaghre Ute, Shaved Beaver Hide Painting. The Northern Ute would trap beavers, shave images into the animals' stretched and cured hides, and use them to decorate their personal and ceremonial dwellings, c. 19th century.
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  Tlingit totem pole in Ketchikan, Alaska, circa 1901.
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  The K'alyaan Totem Pole of the Tlingit Kiks.ádi Clan, erected at Sitka National Historical Park to commemorate the lives lost in the 1804 Battle of Sitka.
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  The Chief Johnson totem pole in Ketchikan, Alaska, in the Tlingit style.
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  Detail on Raven Stealing the Sun totem pole, Ketchikan, Alaska
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  Detail on Raven Stealing the Sun totem pole, Ketchikan, Alaska

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  A totem pole in Totem Park, Victoria, British Columbia.
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  From Totem Park, Victoria, British Columbia.