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Abstract
An abstract genre of art; artistic content depends on internal form rather than pictorial representation

Abstract expressionism
A New York school of painting characterized by freely created abstractions; the first important school of American painting to develop independently of European styles

Art Deco
A style of design that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s; marked by stylized forms and geometric designs adapted to mass production

Baroque
Elaborately ornamented style of architecture, art, and music popular in Europe between 1600 and 1750

CoBrA
COBRA (or CoBrA) was a European avant-garde movement active from 1949 to 1952. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), Amsterdam (A).

Color Field
Color Field painting is an abstract style that emerged in the 1950s after Abstract Expressionism and is largely characterized by abstract canvases painted primarily with large areas of solid color. An alternate but less frequently encountered term for this style is chromatic abstraction.

Constructivism
An abstractionist artistic movement in Russia after World War I; industrial materials were used to construct nonrepresentational objects

Contemporary Art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced since World War II.

Cubism
An artistic movement in France beginning in 1907 that featured surfaces of geometrical planes

Expressionism
An art movement early in the 20th century; the artist's subjective expression of inner experiences was emphasized; an inner feeling was expressed through a distorted rendition of reality

Fauvism
An art movement launched in 1905 whose work was characterized by bright and nonnatural colours and simple forms; influenced the expressionists

Figuration Libre
Figuration Libre is a French art movement of the 1980s. It is the French equivalent of Bad Painting and Neo-expressionism in America and Europe, Junge Wilde in Germany and Transvanguardia in Italy. The term was coined by Fluxus artist Ben Vautier.

Fingerpaint
Fingerpaint is a kind of paint intended to be applied with the fingers; it typically comes in pots and is used by small children, though it has very occasionally been used by adults either to teach art to children, or for their own independent use.

Folk
Folk art describes a wide range of objects that reflect the craft traditions and traditional social values of various social groups. Folk art is generally produced by people who have little or no academic artistic training, nor a desire to emulate "fine art", and use established techniques and styles of a particular region or culture.

Graffiti
Graffiti (singular: graffito; the plural is used as a mass noun) is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property. Graffiti is often regarded by others as unsightly damage or unwanted vandalism.

Hard-edge
Hard-edge painting consists of rough, straight edges that are geometrically consistent. It encompasses rich solid colors, neatness of surface, and arranged forms all over the canvas. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.

Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists, who began exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is an art movement born in Paris after World War II. At that time, France was trying to reconstruct its identity devastated by the Occupation and Collaboration. Some art critics looked at the new abstraction as an attempt to try to restore the image of artistic Paris, which had held the rank of capital of the arts until the war.

Mannerism
Mannerism is a period of European painting, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts lasting from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520 until the arrival of the Baroque around 1600. Stylistically, it identifies a variety of individual approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the harmonious ideals associated with Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and early Michelangelo.

Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Modernism
Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged roughly in the period of 1884-1914.

Naive art
Naive art is characterized by a childlike simplicity. (See also outsider art, to which it bears many similarities.) It is a gross oversimplification to assume that Naive art is created by people with little or no formal art training.
Neo-classicism
Neoclassicism (sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism) is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture (usually that of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome).

Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a genre of visual art, especially painting, that makes use of optical illusions. Op art is also known as geometric abstraction and hard-edge abstraction, although the preferred term for it is perceptual abstraction.

Orientalism
Orientalism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, and peoples by Western scholars. It can also refer to the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists.

Orphism
Orphism or Orphic cubism, is a term coined in 1912 France by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. He used the French term Orphisme to label the paintings of Robert Delaunay, relating them to Orpheus, the poet and symbol of the arts of song and the lyre in Greek mythology.

Outsider art
The term Outsider Art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (which literally translates as "Raw Art" or "Rough Art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane asylum inmates.

Painterly
Painterly is a translation of the German term malerisch, one of the opposed categories popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864 - 1945) in order to help focus, enrich and standardize the terms being used by art historians of his time to characterize works of art. The opposite character is linear, plastic or formal linear design.

Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on making a painting of a photograph, recently seen in a splinter hyperrealism art movement. However, the term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States photorealism art movement that began in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

Pointillism
Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors.

Pop art
Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in the United States. The coinage of the term Pop Art is often credited to British art critic/curator, Lawrence Alloway in an essay titled The Arts and the Mass Media, although the term he uses is "popular mass culture".

Postmodernism
Postmodern art is a term used to describe art which is thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.

Post-painterly Abstraction
Post-painterly Abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

Primitive
Naive art is characterized by a childlike simplicity. (See also outsider art, to which it bears many similarities.) It is a gross oversimplification to assume that Naive art is created by people with little or no formal art training.

Realism
Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term is also used to describe works of art which, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid.

Romanticism
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution.

Romantic realism
Romantic Realism is an aesthetic term that usually refers to art that deals with the themes of volition and value while also acknowledging objective reality and the importance of technique.

Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. Although related, it should not be confused with social realism, a type of art that realistically depicts subjects of social concern.

Stuckism
Stuckism is an art movement that was founded in 1999 in Britain by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art. The Stuckists formed as an alternative to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists (also known as Brit Art).

Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early-1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

Tachism
Tachisme (alternative spelling: Tachism, derived from the French word tache - stain) was a French style of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism. Other names for this movement are l'art informel (similar to action painting) and abstraction lyrique (related to American Lyrical Abstraction).

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