Painting

Picture

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface (support base). In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete.

    Painting is a mode of expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, composition or abstraction and other aesthetics may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature.

    A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by spiritual motifs and ideas; examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to Biblical scenes rendered on the interior walls and ceiling of The Sistine Chapel, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other scenes of eastern religious origin.

    Art consisting of representational, imaginative, or abstract designs produced by application of coloured paints to a two-dimensional, prepared, flat surface. The elements of design (e.g.,line, colour, tone, texture) are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light. The range of media (e.g., tempera, fresco, oil, watercolor, ink, gouache, encaustic, casein) and the choice of a particular form (e.g., mural, easel, panel, miniature, illuminated manuscript, scroll, screen, fan) combine to realize a unique visual image. Painting as an art form dates back to prehistoric cave paintings. The early cultural traditions of tribes, religions, guilds, royal courts, and states controlled the craft, form, imagery, and subject matter of painting and determined its function (e.g., ritualistic, devotional, decorative). Painters were considered skilled artisans rather than creative artists until eventually, in East Asia and Renaissance Europe, the fine artist emerged with the social status of a scholar and courtier. Fine artists signed their work and decided its design and often its subject and imagery. Over time painters have increasingly gained the freedom to invent their own visual language and to experiment with new forms and unconventional materials and techniques. In the early 20th century painters began to experiment with nonrepresentational art in which formal qualities such as line, colour, and form were explored rather than subject matter. Throughout the century styles vacillated between representational and nonrepresentational painting. In the late 20th century some critics forecast the "death of painting" in the face of new media such as video and installation art, yet talented new artists repeatedly brought painting back to the center of artistic production.


     Overview
        "The boundary of things in the second plane will not be discerned like those in the first. Therefore, painter, do not produce boundaries between the first and the second, because the boundary of one object and another is of the nature of a mathematical line but not an actual line, in that the boundary of one colour is the start of another colour and is not to be accorded the status of an actual line, because nothing intervenes between the boundary of one colour which is placed against another. Therefore, painter, do not make the boundaries pronounced at a distance."
        What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity. Every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity; by using just color (of the same intensity) one can only represent symbolic shapes. Thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization (perspective), and symbols. For example, a painter perceives that a particular white wall has different intensity at each point, due to shades and reflections from nearby objects, but ideally, a white wall is still a white wall in pitch darkness. In technical drawing, thickness of line is also ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters.

 
  Media,Techniques,and Styles

    In the course of its history, Western painting has taken several major forms, involving distinctive media and techniques. The techniques employed in drawing, however, are basic to all painting, except perhaps the most recent avant-garde forms. Fresco painting, which reached its heights in the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, involves the application of paint to wet, or fresh (Italian fresco), plaster or to dry plaster (see Fresco). Tempera painting, another older form, involves the use of powdered pigments mixed with egg yolk applied to a prepared surface—usually a wood panel covered with linen. Oil painting, which largely supplanted the use of fresco and tempera during the Renaissance, was traditionally thought to have been developed in the late Middle Ages by the Flemish brothers Jan van Eyck and Hubert van Eyck; it is now believed to have been invented much earlier. Other techniques are enamel, encaustic painting, gouache, grisaille, and watercolor painting. The use of acrylic paints (see Acrylic) has become very popular in recent times; this water-based medium is easily applied, dries quickly, and does not darken with the passage of time.
    Over the centuries, different artistic methods, styles, and theories—ways of thinking about the purposes of art—have succeeded one another, only to appear again, generally with modifications, in other times. Thus, a method of painting thought to have been used by cave painters involved blowing pigments through tubes onto the cave walls; a somewhat analogous method is that of those 20th-century painters who dribble pigments from their brushes onto canvas. In the Renaissance, fresco painting on walls and ceilings largely gave way to easel painting in oils, but wall painting returned to popularity in the 20th century—for example, in the work of the Mexican muralists (see Mural Painting). The impulse to express intense emotion in art links painters as different as El Greco in 16th-century Spain and the German expressionists of the 20th century. At the opposite pole from expressionist attempts to reveal inner reality, there have always been painters committed to the exact representation of outward appearances. Realism and symbolism, classical restraint and romantic passion, have alternated throughout the history of painting, revealing significant affinities and influences.
  
       Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are of music. Color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, white is. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover the use of language is only a generalization for a color equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C♯ in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic and derived (complementary or mixed) colors (like, red, blue, green, brown, etc.). Painters deal practically with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phtalocyan, Paris blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological, symbolical meanings of color are not strictly speaking means of painting. Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music (like "C") is analogous to light in painting, "shades" to dynamics, and coloration is to painting as specific timbre of musical instruments to music—though these do not necessarily form a melody, but can add different contexts to it.
Georges Seurat (1859–91) – Circus Sideshow, (1887–88)

         Rhythm
is important in painting as well as in music. Rhythm is basically a pause incorporated into a body (sequence). This pause allows creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, melody, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art and it directly affects the esthetical value of that work. This is because the esthetical value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom (of movement) of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the esthetical value.

         Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer. (There is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required.)
         In 1829, the first photograph was produced. From the mid to late 19th century, photographic processes improved and, as it became more widespread, painting lost much of its historic purpose to provide an accurate record of the observable world. There began a series of art movements into the 20th century where the Renaissance view of the world was steadily eroded, through Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism. Eastern and African painting, however, continued a long history of stylization and did not undergo an equivalent transformation at the same time.
          Modern and Contemporary Art has moved away from the historic value of craft and documentation in favour of concept; this led some to say in the 1960s that painting, as a serious art form, is dead. This has not deterred the majority of living painters from continuing to practice painting either as whole or part of their work. The vitality and versatility of painting in the 21st century belies the premature declarations of its demise. In an epoch characterized by the idea of pluralism, there is no consensus as to a representative style of the age. Important works of art continue to be made in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit.
          Among the continuing and current directions in painting at the beginning of the 21st century are Monochrome painting, Hard-edge painting, Geometric abstraction, Appropriation, Hyperrealism, Photorealism, Expressionism, Minimalism, Lyrical Abstraction, Pop Art, Op Art, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Neo-expressionism, Collage, Intermedia painting, Assemblage painting, Computer art painting, Postmodern painting, Neo-Dada painting, Shaped canvas painting, environmental mural painting, traditional figure painting, Landscape painting, Portrait painting, and paint-on-glass animation.



  History of painting
         In Western cultures oil painting and watercolor painting are the best known media, with rich and complex traditions in style and subject matter. In the East, ink and color ink historically predominated the choice of media with equally rich and complex traditions.

I. Prehistoric and Ancient Painting
  The earliest known Western paintings were executed deep within caves of southern Europe during the Paleolithic period, some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The early development of painting continued in the Mediterranean littoral.

* Cave Paintings
      The paintings still preserved on the walls of caves in Spain and southern France portray with amazing accuracy bison, horses, and deer. These representations were painted in bright colors composed of various minerals ground into powders and mixed with animal fat, egg whites, plant juices, fish glue, or even blood and applied with brushes made of twigs and reeds, or blown on. The pictures may have been part of a magic ritual, although their exact nature is unclear. In a cave painting at Lascaux, France, for example, a man is depicted among the animals, and several dark dots are included; the purpose of the design remains obscure, but shows the cave dwellers’ ability to record their thoughts with images, signs, and symbols. Cave painting of aurochs, (Bos primigenius primigenius), Lascaux, France.
       The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth or humans often hunting. However the earliest evidence of painting has been discovered in two rock-shelters in Arnhem Land, in northern Australia. In the lowest layer of material at these sites there are used pieces of ochre estimated to be 60,000 years old. Archaeologists have also found a fragment of rock painting preserved in a limestone rock-shelter in the Kimberley region of North-Western Australia, that is dated 40 000 years old. There are some examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia, India etc. See Paleolithic Art.

* Egyptian Painting
     More than 5,000 years ago the Egyptians began painting the walls of the pharaohs’ tombs with mythological representations and scenes of everyday activities such as hunting, fishing, farming, or banqueting. As in Egyptian sculpture, two stylistic constants prevailed: The images, being conceptual rather than realistic, present the most characteristic anatomical features and thus combine frontal and profile views of the same figure; and scale indicates importance—thus, a pharaoh is shown taller than his consort, children, or courtiers. See Egyptian Art and Architecture.

* Minoan Painting
      The Minoans, ancestors of the Greeks, created lively, realistic paintings on the walls of their palaces in Crete (Kríti) and also on pottery. For example, the famous Toreador Fresco (1500? bc, Heraklion Museum, Crete) shows a ritual game in which performers somersault over a bull's back. Marine life was a popular subject, as in the Dolphin Fresco (1500? bc) on the walls of the palace of King Minos in Knossos (Knosós), or on the Octopus Vase (1500? bc, Heraklion Museum), a globular container decorated with octopus tentacles that undulate around the pot, defining and emphasizing its shape. See Aegean Civilization.

* Greek Painting

      Except for a few fragments, Greek wall paintings and panels have not survived. The naturalistic representations of mythological scenes on Greek pottery, however, may shed light on what this large-scale painting was like. In the Hellenistic era, scenes and designs represented in mosaics are probably also echoes of lost monumental paintings in other media. See Greek Art and Architecture.

* Roman Painting
      The Romans decorated their villas with mosaic floors and exquisite wall frescoes portraying rituals, myths, landscapes, still-life, and scenes of daily activities. Using the technique known as aerial perspective, in which colors and outlines of more distant objects are softened and blurred to achieve spatial effects, Roman artists created the illusion of reality. In the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad 79 and excavated in modern times, a corpus of Roman painting, both secular and religious, has been preserved. See Roman Art and Architecture.

* Early Christian and Byzantine Painting
      Surviving Early Christian painting dates from the 3rd and 4th centuries and consists of fresco paintings in the Roman catacombs and mosaics on the walls of churches. Certain stylizations and artistic conventions are characteristic of these representations of New Testament events. For example, Christ was shown as the Good Shepherd, a figural type adopted from representations of the Greek god Hermes; the resurrection was symbolized by depictions of the Old Testament story of Jonah, who was delivered from the fish. Among the most extraordinary works of this Early Christian period are the mosaics found in the 6th-century churches in Ravenna, Italy. San Vitale, in particular, is noted for its beautiful mosaics depicting both spiritual and secular subjects. On the church’s walls, stylized elongated figures, mostly shown frontally, stare wide-eyed at the viewer and seem to float weightlessly, outside of time. See Early Christian Art and Architecture.

This otherworldly presentation became characteristic of Byzantine art, and the style came to be associated with the imperial Christian court of Constantinople (present-day İstanbul), which survived from ad 330 until 1453. The Byzantine style is also seen on icons, conventionalized paintings on wooden panels of Christ, the Virgin, or the saints, made for veneration. Illuminated manuscripts both of non-Christian texts—for example, the Vatican Virgil (4th or early 5th century, Biblioteca Vaticana, Rome)—and Christian writings such as the Paris Psalter (10th century, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) show remnants of Greco-Roman art style. See Byzantine Art and Architecture.

II. Medieval Painting

         The art of the Middle Ages—that produced outside the Byzantine Empire and within what had been the northern boundaries of the Roman world—can be categorized according to its distinctive stylistic traits. Anglo-Irish art, which flourished from the 7th to the 9th century in monasteries in various parts of the British Isles, was largely an art of intricate calligraphic designs (see Celts: Art; Irish Art; Calligraphy). Highly decorative illuminated manuscripts were produced, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels (698?-721, British Library, London), which display flat, elaborate linear patterns combining Celtic and Germanic elements. In the Romanesque period, during the 11th and 12th centuries, no single style appeared in the manuscripts of northern Europe; some illuminations were of classical inspiration, while others show a new, highly charged, energetic drawing style (see Romanesque Art and Architecture). In the Gothic period that followed, from the later part of the 12th century to the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, a larger repertoire of media was introduced, and painting ceased to be entirely the product of the monasteries.

* Gothic Painting
      During the early Gothic period, as cathedral structure gave more emphasis to windows, stained glass occupied a more prominent role in the arts than did manuscript illumination. Lay artists now established workshops in Paris and other major centers, producing elaborately illuminated manuscripts for royal patrons. Paintings of secular subjects also survive from this period, notably in Italy. Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted frescoes from 1338 to 1339 in the Palazzo Pubblico (Town Hall) in Siena, portraying 14th-century city and country life, and in the hall’s Council Chamber, Simone Martini painted an equestrian portrait in 1328 of a local military hero, depicting his encampment against a landscape background. See Gothic Art and Architecture.

* International Gothic Style
      A merging of the artistic traditions of northern Europe and Italy took place at the beginning of the 15th century and is known as the International Gothic style. Among the many characteristics that define painting in this style is an attention to realistic detail that shows the artist's acute observation of human beings and of nature. In the early 1400s the Limbourg brothers moved from Flanders to France and created a magnificent Book of Hours, the famous Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (1413-1416, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France). One of the greatest works in the International Gothic style, this manuscript was done for their patron, Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Its remarkable calendar pages portray peasant life as well as that of the nobility, providing a brilliant record of the clothing, activities, and architecture of the times. Although these are full-page illustrations, they reflect an older medieval style, in that the figures are small and must vie for attention with other imagery.

* Giotto
      By contrast, some 100 years earlier than the Limbourg brothers, the Italian painter Giotto had given a monumental scale and dignity to the human figure, making it the bearer of the drama. His work had thereby revolutionized Italian painting; eventually, his discoveries and those of other artists affected painting in the north. Giotto’s superb frescoes of the lives of Christ and the Virgin, painted from 1305 to 1306, are in the Arena Chapel in Padua (Padova). In addition, Giotto painted large wood-panel altarpieces, as did several other late medieval painters.

III. Renaissance Painting

       The term Renaissance, meaning “rebirth,” describes the cultural revolution of the 15th and 16th centuries; it originated in Italy with the revival of interest in classical culture and a strong belief in individualism See Renaissance Art and Architecture. The achievements of antiquity were revered, but at the same time a virtual rebirth of human potential occurred when new authority was accorded the individual’s direct observations. For example, in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, Masaccio—one of the great innovators of the period—executed a remarkable series of frescoes in about 1427 that reveal his keen observation of human behavior and at the same time demonstrate his knowledge of ancient art. In the The Expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve truly mourn; Eve’s pose, arms attempting to hide her body, is based on a pose characteristic of classical sculpture, the so-called Venus Pudica (modest Venus) type.
        An enormous body of Italian Renaissance painting can be seen in the churches and secular buildings of Italy and in museum collections throughout the world.

* Early Renaissance Painting
      The development of the principles of linear perspective by various architects and sculptors early in the 15th century enabled painters to achieve in two-dimensional representation the illusion of three-dimensional space. Many of the early Renaissance artists—such as Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Andrea Mantegna—employed dramatic perspectives and foreshortening, a method of drawing so as to produce the illusion of the extension of an object or figure into space. Innovations were also made in representing human anatomy and in exploiting new media, with oil painting competing with the general use of the tempera and fresco techniques. Painters exploiting the potential of the new medium worked by building up layers of transparent oil glazes, and the canvas surface replaced the older wood panel. Somewhat later, other artists, notably the Venetians, became noted for their glowing oil colors—in particular, Domenico Veneziano, Giovanni Bellini, and Giorgione.

* High Renaissance Painting
       The masters of the High Renaissance were Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian. Paradoxically, Leonardo left but a handful of paintings, so occupied was he with the scientific observation of phenomena and with technological inventions. Because of his experiments with the medium, attempting to use oil pigments on dry plaster, his surviving fresco paintings have badly deteriorated—as is the case, notably, with the Last Supper (1495-1497, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan). Raphael perfected earlier Renaissance discoveries in matters of color and composition, creating ideal types in his representations of the Virgin and Child and in penetrating portrait studies of his contemporaries. The Vatican’s Sistine Chapel in Rome, with its ceiling frescoes (1508-1512) of the Creation and the Fall and the vast wall fresco (1536-1541) of the Last Judgment, attest to Michelangelo’s genius as a painter. In Venice, a tradition of coloristic painting reached its climax in the works of Titian, whose portraits demonstrate a profound understanding of human nature. His masterpieces also include representations of Christian and mythological subjects, and his numerous renderings of the female nude are among the most celebrated of the genre.

* Mannerism
      A self-conscious, somewhat artificial style known as Mannerism arose in Italy about 1520. Complexity and distortion were emphasized rather than harmony of line, color, or composition; even religious Mannerist paintings are disquieting to the viewer. Among the Mannerists were Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino, Tintoretto, and Agnolo Bronzino. Best known of the later painters in the Mannerist style was El Greco, who had studied in Italy but settled finally in Spain. His intensely emotional approach charged even landscape—as in his View of Toledo (1600?-1610, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)—with apocalyptic meaning.

* Northern European Renaissance Painting
      The influence of the Italian Renaissance affected northern Europe at the beginning of the 15th century, but this renewal of artistic and cultural activity was not based on classical antiquity. Rather, it was marked by an acute interest in human beings and their surroundings and by a meticulous recording of natural detail in paintings. Generally speaking, an interest in ancient art and a knowledge of linear perspective did not develop in the north until the 16th century, and even then, not all artists availed themselves of the discoveries that were made in Italy.
       One of the most important of 15th-century Netherlandish painters was Jan van Eyck who, with some assistance from his brother Hubert, painted the remarkable polyptych (many-paneled) Ghent Altarpiece (completed 1432, Church of Saint Bavon, Ghent, Belgium). Its 24 panels contain hundreds of figures, as well as a rich variety of vegetation so carefully rendered that more than 30 plant species can be identified. Other outstanding Flemish artists of the period were Rogier van der Weyden, who focused on emotional drama in his religious paintings; Hans Memling, who created delicate, graceful figures against ethereal backgrounds; and Hugo van der Goes, who painted a superb altarpiece (1476?, Uffizi, Florence) with a wealth of precise details for the Italian Portinari family. Characteristic of all these artists was the use of symbols, or iconography. Objects stood not simply for themselves but conveyed abstract ideas; a crystal vase, for example, meant purity. Linear perspective was unknown among the Flemish; nevertheless, their achievements with oil glazes and tempera have never been surpassed.
         In France, the most important painter of this period was Jean Fouquet, a superb portraitist as well as a miniaturist, who was influenced both by earlier Flemish art and contemporary Italian painting. Evidence of his visit to Italy in the 1440s is seen in the representation of an Italian Renaissance church in the background of one of the panels (1450?) of the two-panel devotional painting known as the Melun Diptych. One panel is in Berlin, Germany, at the Staatliche Museen and the other is in Antwerp, Belgium, at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts.
         Great masterpieces were created in the early 1500s by painters who, more interested in the expressive value of their subjects, ignored perspective, anatomy, and correct proportions. An example is the Garden of Earthly Delights (about 1505 to about 1510, Prado, Madrid), a triptych by the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch; it is a surreal conglomeration of sensuously suggestive human and animal shapes and strange plant forms. Another example of the characteristic 16th-century northern exaggeration of human form is the profoundly moving work, Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1515?, Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France), by the German painter Matthias Grünewald. In contrast, another German artist, Albrecht Dürer, truly the Renaissance genius of the north, is renowned for his superb rendition of the human figure. A Christian humanist whose scientific curiosity was comparable to that of Leonardo, Dürer was inspired by the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus and by Martin Luther—as demonstrated in the engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) and the twin paintings the Four Apostles (1526?, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), both of which display his remarkable draftsmanship. Still another renowned German-born artist was Hans Holbein the Younger, who is principally remembered for his portraits, especially those of England’s Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More.
          Among the 16th-century Netherlandish painters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder is most notable; his scenes of peasant life, many of which are satirical comments on human folly, are highly esteemed. Drawing on myth, parables, and proverbs, Bruegel’s engaging paintings have charmed viewers for more than 400 years.

IV: Baroque Painting

         Baroque art of the 17th century is characterized by its dynamic appearance, in contrast to the relatively static classical style of the Renaissance (see Baroque Art and Architecture). Typical of the baroque style are diagonal compositional lines, which give a sense of movement, and use of strong chiaroscuro (contrasts of light and shadow). Both these techniques created a grandiose, dramatic style appropriate to the vital spirit of the Counter Reformation. Many painters of the early 17th century also began to turn away from the artificiality of Mannerism in an attempt to emulate more closely the natural world.

*Italian Baroque Painting
      In Italy, many innovative artists worked during the baroque period. Splendid ceiling frescoes by Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Guercino, and Pietro da Cortona decorate various palaces in Rome, all to some extent inspired by Michelangelo’s murals in the Sistine Chapel. Perhaps the most influential of the Italian baroque innovators was Caravaggio; his use of powerful chiaroscuro effects in religious and genre paintings had a profound influence on other Italian painters, such as Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, and, indeed, on European art in general. This style has been called tenebrism, from the Latin word for “darkness.”

*French Baroque Painting
      Two French painters in particular assimilated the Caravaggesque style. Georges de La Tour, primarily a painter of religious subjects, was a master of light and shadow, demonstrating his virtuosity at so illuminating faces and hands, by the light of a single candle, that flesh seems almost translucent. Louis Le Nain also used light and shadow dramatically in his monumental paintings of peasant life. In general, however, French baroque artists practiced a classical restraint that brought clarity, balance, and harmony to their pictures. This is seen both in the classical subjects painted by Nicolas Poussin and in the dreamlike landscapes of Claude Lorrain; significantly, both artists spent most of their careers in Italy.

*Spanish Baroque Painting
      In Spain, Jusepe de Ribera and Francisco de Zurbarán absorbed Caravaggio’s Tenebrism, but each brought different interests and tendencies to his work. Ribera could be brutally realistic, as in the Clubfooted Boy (1652, Louvre, Paris). Zurbarán imbued his religious paintings with Spanish mysticism; like Caravaggio, he also excelled in still life. Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV, was the greatest Spanish painter of the age and a consummate master of tone and color. He approached his subjects with detachment, dispassionately but realistically portraying members of the royal family. The royal entourage can be seen in his masterpiece, Las meninas (The Maids of Honor, 1656, Prado); as symbol of its veracity, it even includes a portrait of Velázquez himself at his easel.

* Flemish Baroque Painting
      Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish baroque master, was also strongly influenced by Caravaggesque Tenebrism as well as by the work of the great Venetian colorists Titian and Veronese. Such was Rubens’s popularity that he established a large workshop of assistants in Antwerp to help him carry out the great number of commissions he received from the city, the church, royalty, and private patrons. His enormous oeuvre includes portraits; a great outpouring of religious paintings; and treatments of mythological themes, classical legends, and history—all expressing the exuberance of the baroque style and attesting to the painter’s own vitality of spirit. Large in scale, these paintings are charged with vibrant color and light, dramatic in composition and fluid of line. Rubens’s way of contrasting light and shadow, as well as his wide range of themes, can be seen by considering just two of his paintings: The Descent from the Cross (1611-1614, Cathedral, Antwerp), with its great compositional sweep, and the tender portrait of a beautiful young woman in Le chapeau de paille (1620?, National Gallery, London).

* Dutch Baroque Painting
      An extraordinary number of fine painters emerged in the Netherlands during the 17th century; all, however, were surpassed by Rembrandt. His early works, such as the Money-Changer (1627, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), were influenced by Caravaggio; his later paintings, for example the 1659 Self-Portrait (Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London), display his incomparable chiaroscuro technique and psychological profundity. Other Dutch artists were Frans Hals, who, like Rembrandt, painted group portraits; and Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael, who did magnificent landscapes. Numerous “little Dutch masters” excelled in genre scenes, portrayals of everyday life that delighted the newly rising middle classes, who were becoming art patrons. Foremost among these painters was Jan Vermeer, whose paintings—such as View of Delft (1660?, Mauritshuis, The Hague)—although small in actual size, give a sense of ordered space and are, above all, masterpieces of the effect of light.

V: Rococo Painting

           Rococo art, which flourished in France and Germany in the early 18th century, was in many respects a continuation of the baroque, particularly in the use of light and shadow and compositional movement. Rococo, however, is a lighter, more playful style, highly suited to the decoration of, for example, the Parisian hôtels (city residences of the nobility). Among rococo painters, Jean-Antoine Watteau is known for his ethereal pictures of elegantly dressed lovers disporting themselves at fêtes galantes (fashionable outdoor gatherings); such pastoral fantasies were much emulated by other French artists. Highly popular also were mythological and pastoral scenes, including lighthearted and graceful depictions of women, by François Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard. J. B. S. Chardin, however, took a different view, portraying women in his genre scenes as good mothers and household managers; he also was outstanding in rendering still-life. The rococo style in Germany is exemplified by the work of the Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who spent some time in Würzburg, Germany; his huge illusionistic ceiling frescoes (1743-1752) decorate the staircase hall and the Kaisersaal (the main reception hall) of the Residenz, the episcopal palace in Würzburg.

Paralleling the rococo tradition of the continent were the works of three major artists of 18th-century England. William Hogarth was known for his moralistic narrative paintings and engravings satirizing contemporary social follies, as in his famous series (first painted and then engraved) Marriage à la Mode (1745), which traces the ruinous course of marriage for money. Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, following the tradition established by van Dyck, concentrated on portraits of the English aristocracy. The verve and grace of these paintings and their astute psychological interpretations raise them from mere society portraiture to an incomparable record of period manners, costumes, and landscape moods. See Rococo Style.

VI: Neoclassical Painting

         A revolution in painting took place in the latter half of the 18th century, as chaste neoclassicism superseded the exuberant rococo style. This classical revival in the arts was brought about by several occurrences. First, much archaeological excavation began to be done in the mid-18th century in Italy and Greece; books were published containing drawings of ancient buildings, which were eagerly copied by English and French architects. Second, in 1755 the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his influential essay Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture), praising Greek sculpture. This work impressed, among others, four foreign artists living in Rome. They were the Scotsman Gavin Hamilton, the German Anton Raphael Mengs, the Swiss Angelica Kauffmann, and the American Benjamin West; all were inspired to create paintings with themes based on classical literature.
        It was, however, a French painter—Jacques-Louis David—who became the leading proponent of neoclassicism. He, too, was imbued with classical influences from his stay in Rome, as well as from an earlier source, the paintings of Poussin, the 17th-century French classicist. David’s sober style was in harmony with the ideals of the French Revolution. Such a painting as the Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785, Louvre) inspired patriotism; others, such as the Death of Socrates (1787, Metropolitan Museum), preached stoicism and self-sacrifice. Not only did David’s subject matter have its sources in ancient history and classical myth, but the form of his figures was based on ancient sculpture. David’s great successor was Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, whose cool serenity of line and tone and painstaking attention to details—as in his striking portrait La comtesse d’Haussonville (1845, Frick Collection, New York City)—became identified with the academic tradition in France. Nevertheless, elements of the romantic trend soon to succeed neoclassicism can be found in Ingres’s interest in non-European subjects, as demonstrated by several paintings of odalisques (concubines or women in a harem).
       Among the many other French painters influenced by David were several women who figured prominently among his followers. Some of the most outstanding were Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marie Guillemine Benoist, and Constance Marie Charpentier. Some of the works of these painters have in the past been mistakenly attributed to David; recent scholarship has been attempting to identify their individual contributions. See Neoclassical Art and Architecture.

VII: Romantic Painting
         Closely succeeding neoclassicism, the romantic movement introduced a taste for the medieval and the mysterious, as well as a love of the picturesque and sublime in nature (see Romanticism). The play of individual imagination, giving expression to emotion and mood, superseded the reasoned intellectual approach of the neoclassicists. In general, romantic painters favored coloristic and painterly techniques over the linear, cool-toned neoclassic style.

* French Romantic Painting
      A follower of David who ultimately turned more to the romantic style was his pupil Baron Antoine Jean Gros, noted for his portrayals of Napoleon in full regalia and for large canvases vividly depicting Napoleonic campaigns. Gros’s colleague Théodore Géricault was especially renowned for his dramatic and monumental interpretation of an actual event. His masterpiece, the Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819, Louvre), endows the suffering of the survivors of a shipwreck with a heroic quality. This painting deeply impressed Eugéne Delacroix, who pursued the theme of suffering humanity in such energetic, intensely dramatic works as Massacre at Chios (1822-1824) and Liberty Leading the People (1830), both in the Louvre. Delacroix and other romantics also drew their subject matter from literature and from travels to the Middle East. Delacroix’s divided-color technique (that is, color laid on in small strokes of pure pigment) was to influence the impressionists later in the 19th century.
      During the romantic period, several French painters concentrated on picturesque landscape views and sentimental scenes of rural life. Jean François Millet was one of a number of artists who settled at the village of Barbizon, near Paris; taking a worshipful view of nature, he transformed the peasants into Christian symbols (see Barbizon School). Camille Corot, a painter of poetic, silvery-toned woodland scenes and landscapes, included visits to Barbizon among his extensive travels, portraying the lyrical aspects of nature there, as well as in other parts of France and Italy.

* English Romantic Painting
      Romantic landscape painting also flourished in England; the trend began early in the 19th century and is exemplified in the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Although distinctly different in their styles, both artists were ultimately concerned with depicting the effects of light and atmosphere. Despite Constable’s factual and scientific approach—working outdoors, he painted numerous studies of cloud formations and made notes on light and weather conditions—his canvases are poetic, expressing the cultivated gentleness of the English countryside. Turner, on the other hand, sought the sublime in nature, painting cataclysmic snowstorms or depicting the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—in a sweeping, nearly abstract manner. His way of dissolving forms in light and veils of color was to play an important role in the development of French impressionist painting.

* German Romantic Painting
      Of Germany’s romantic artists, Caspar David Friedrich was the leading figure. Landscape was his favored vehicle of expression. He imbued his hypnotic pictures with religious mysticism, portraying the earth undergoing transformations at dawn and sunset, or in the fog and mists, perhaps alluding thereby to the transience of life. Philipp Otto Runge also devoted his brief career to painting mystical landscapes. Morning (1808-1809, Kunsthalle, Hamburg) is part of an otherwise unfinished allegorical landscape cycle, The Four Phases of the Day.

* American Romantic Painting
      America’s first truly romantic artist was Washington Allston, whose paintings are mysterious, brooding, or evocative of poetic reverie. Like other romantics, he was inspired by the Bible, poetry, and novels, as is evident in numerous works. Several artists working between 1820 and 1880 are now distinguished as the Hudson River School; their enormous canvases reveal their reverence for the beauty of the American landscape. Thomas Cole, the most noteworthy of these painters, charged his scenes with moral implications, as is evident in his epic series of five allegorical paintings, The Course of Empire (1836, New-York Historical Society, New York City).
       In mid-19th-century landscape painting there appeared a new trend, now defined as luminism, an interest in the atmospheric effects of diffused light. Among the luminist painters were John F. Kensett, Martin J. Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane. A sense of “God in nature” is apparent in their pictures, as in the earliest works of the Hudson River School. In contrast to the smaller and more intimate luminist works—for example, Kensett’s scenes along the Rhode Island shore—Frederic E. Church and Albert Bierstadt painted the spectacular scenery of South American jungles and the American West on enormous canvases. See American Art.

VIII: 19th-Century Nonromantic Painting
       Although romanticism was the dominant movement in the arts throughout much of the 19th century, other—completely opposite—tendencies existed, and certain painters worked outside any tradition. For example, Francisco de Goya, Spain’s foremost painter, cannot be defined by alliance with a particular art movement. His early works are in a modified rococo style, and his late works (exemplified by the remarkable Black Paintings on the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo) are expressionistic and hallucinatory. In portraits of the royal family—for example, Family of Charles IV (1800, Prado)—he emulated a device used by his earlier compatriot Velázquez (in Las meninas) and included himself at the easel. But, unlike the work of Velázquez, Goya’s portraiture was never objective; his psychological acumen reveals the vapidity of his subjects, and his brilliant brushwork bluntly records their physical shortcomings.

* Realism
      About the middle of the 19th century in France, the painter Gustave Courbet, rejecting both neoclassicism and romanticism, proclaimed a one-man movement called realism. He had no interest in history painting, portraiture of heads of state, or exotic subject matter, for he believed that the artist should be realistic and paint everyday events involving ordinary people. The milieu chosen by Courbet for many of his canvases was Ornan, his native village in eastern France; there he portrayed laborers building a road, townspeople attending a funeral, or men sitting around the dinner table listening to music and smoking. Although there was no formal realist movement in art, trends in the work of certain other 19th-century painters can be identified as realistic. Honoré Daumier, although better known for his lithographs, painted small realistic canvases of Paris street life, and Jean Millet, of the Barbizon school, is sometimes termed a social realist.

* Late 19th-Century American Painting
      Three great American geniuses—Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder—worked in the late 19th century independent of the major art movements on the continent. Homer explored humanity’s struggle against the forces of nature in numerous oils and watercolors of the sea and shore. Like the luminists before him and the impressionists of his own day—with whom he was otherwise not aligned—Homer showed a keen interest in light and atmospheric effects. Eakins also used light with great effectiveness in his powerful realistic paintings of surgeons—for example The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia)—and a series of portrayals of rowers on the Schuylkill River, meticulously planned and executed in every detail. Ryder, on the other hand, turned from external reality to explorations of the interior self; his reduction of objects to patterns and silhouettes has affinities with the symbolists. Favorite motifs were boats, sea, and night sky, which Ryder infused with romantic and mystical feelings.

IX: Development of Impressionism
         In turning to everyday subject matter, the mid-19th-century realist artists set a precedent for the next generation of the French avant-garde. Édouard Manet was the major innovator of the 1860s, and his style was a precursor of impressionism. Like Courbet, Manet found many of his subjects in the life around him: Parisians at ease in restaurants, in parks, or boating. Manet also borrowed themes and compositions from earlier masters—Velázquez and Goya—and reworked them in accordance with contemporary life, in his own style, flattening the figures and neutralizing the emotional expressions. For these and other innovations, such as his free, sketchy brushwork and broad patches of color juxtaposed without transition, he is often referred to as the first modern painter.
         The most brilliant master of line in the late 19th century was Edgar Degas, who favored subjects in movement, as though caught by a candid camera. While the immediacy of his approach and his interest in painting contemporary life allies Degas with the impressionists, he differed from them in several ways. He did not dissolve form as radically as they did and he was more concerned with painting figures in interiors than landscapes. Degas’s style of composition was influenced by photography and by Japanese prints, which were then being widely circulated in Paris and were very popular with many artists of the day. Although his paintings of ballet dancers, musicians, laundresses, and bathing women appear casual and unstudied, the compositions, with their oblique views and asymmetrical balance, were in fact carefully calculated. Degas’s portraiture is also unique in its integration of figures with their settings and in its revelation of personality. A master of many techniques, Degas is particularly noted for his use of pastels (powdered pigments mixed with gum; see Crayon), with which he achieved unusually rich effects by roughly hatching one layer of intense color over another.
          The impressionist style was evolved by painters who were increasingly interested in studying the effects of light on objects—how light colors shadows and dissolves objects—and in transferring their observations directly to the canvas. Their disregard for exact details of form and their use of small, separate touches of pure color—techniques in complete contrast to the prevailing academic style—aroused the animosity of both the critics and the public. Nearly 20 years elapsed before Claude Monet, impressionism’s leading exponent, achieved recognition. Monet’s chief interest was landscape, which he rendered in all kinds of weather and in various seasons; he captured the sparkling effects of sunlight on trees in springtime and the drab light of winter on snow-tracked ground. In his late years, Monet devoted himself to painting the exquisite gardens and water lily ponds he had created at his home in Giverny; their forms became increasingly evanescent as he translated them into the shimmering play of light and color.
         Camille Pissarro was also one of the creators of impressionism, as was Pierre Auguste Renoir. Pissarro’s favorite motifs were landscapes, river scenes, views of Paris streets, and figures of peasants at work. Renoir’s interests were similar to those of both Monet and Pissarro, but he also did a great number of portraits and figure paintings; his many studies of female nudes, with their pearlescent skin tones, are particularly famous.
           Frequently, the impressionists worked outdoors side by side, as was often the case with Renoir and Monet. In 1869, for example, they both did renditions of La grenouillère (The Frog Pond); Monet’s hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, Renoir’s in the National Museum, Stockholm. In the early 1870s a similar relationship existed between Pissarro and Paul Cézanne; Pissarro did not dissolve forms as radically as did the other impressionists, and this may have persuaded Cézanne to work with him, for Cézanne’s interests were to lead him in other directions. While the impressionists were occupied with rendering the transitory, such as the changing effects of light, Cézanne was concerned with the eternal aspects of nature and thus sought its structural principles, as in his numerous late canvases of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Painted during the last years of his life, these studies are the result of Cézanne’s attempt to render the color and volume of a mountain form seen from a distance. Cézanne’s concern for geometric form was a major influence on the development of cubism.

X :Postimpressionist Movements
        For a brief period in the 1880s Pissarro was drawn to a new technique, an outgrowth of impressionism developed by Georges Seurat, known as divisionism or pointillism. Seurat and his neoimpressionist followers modified the loose brushstrokes characteristic of impressionist style into precise dots of pure pigment, juxtaposing tiny areas of complementary colors on the canvas surface. Seurat’s theories were derived from his readings in 19th-century scientific and aesthetic texts on color. The result of his painstaking technique is supremely visible in one of his most spectacular works, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884-1886, Art Institute of Chicago).
        Three major artists of the late 19th century showed influences of impressionism in their early works but went on to develop distinctively individual postimpressionist styles: the Dutch-born Vincent van Gogh and the French artists Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Van Gogh, like Pissarro, experimented briefly with color division. Typical of his developed style, however, was the use of pure color applied thickly in flickering strokes, conveying intense emotional expression. Many of his canvases, especially those of wind-tossed cypress trees and wheat fields under stormy skies, are expressions of his own moods as reflected in the forces of nature. Van Gogh’s style greatly influenced the northern European painters who in the early 20th century developed expressionism.
         The work of his colleague Gauguin also displays distortions of line and color, but it is quite different from van Gogh’s, being symbolic rather than expressionistic. Areas of flat, bold colors form decorative patterns, heavily outlined. Gauguin was the central figure of a new movement known as synthetism or symbolism (see Symbolist Movement); his immediate followers, a group active during the 1890s, were called the Nabis.
          In still another direction, Toulouse-Lautrec was largely a painter of people, choosing as his subjects cabaret singers, dance-hall performers, and prostitutes; these figures were an expression of the social decay of Paris in the so-called Gay Nineties. Like many artists—such as Manet, Degas, and the American Mary Cassatt—he was influenced by the flat style and seemingly casual composition of Japanese prints. Toulouse-Lautrec’s excellent sense of line is seen also in his drawings and color lithographs; he contributed greatly to this last medium, particularly with his posters for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian places of entertainment. See Postimpressionism.

XI: 20th-Century Painting Before World War II
        The art of the 20th century includes many movements and styles. Before World War II (1939-1945) some of the styles that originated in Europe were fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, neoplasticism, dada, and surrealism; artists in the United States developed the styles synchronism and precisionism. See Modern Art.

* Fauvism
      At the turn of the century, artists in both France and Germany were interested in aboriginal art. Gauguin, for example, searched for the so-called primitive, first in Brittany and later in the South Seas. His mode of decorative color patterning and his theories influenced a later group of painters who came to be known as the fauves (“wild beasts”); their leader was Henri Matisse. Other fauves were André Derain, Georges Braque, and Maurice de Vlaminck, who claimed to have been among the first European artists to discover African sculpture. See African Art and Architecture; Fauvism.

* Expressionism
      Expressionism is the name given to a movement involving artists more concerned with recording subjective feelings and responses, via distortions of line and color, than with the faithful representation of outer reality. In Germany the movement encompassed two groups. The young artists active between 1905 and 1913 and known as Die Brücke (The Bridge) were, like the fauves, inspired by African art and carried its boldness and power into their own work (see Brücke, Die). Members of the group included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Emil Nolde. Portraying the sufferings of humanity, they worked in a style somewhat resembling fauvism, but with the added ingredient of angst (anxiety). The early, emotionally charged work of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was well known in Germany and greatly impressed Die Brücke artists. Somewhat later, in 1911, Franz Marc and the Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky organized the other phase of German expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), in Munich; they were inspired by aboriginal art, fauvism, and folk art, and their expressionism evolved toward a semiabstract mode of painting (see Blaue Reiter, Der). Major Blaue Reiter artists were August Macke, Gabriele Münter, the Swiss Paul Klee, and the Russian Alexei von Jawlensky.

* Cubism
     Inspired by Cézanne’s increasingly geometric approach toward the depiction of landscape forms and still-life objects, and by the dynamic shapes of African and Iberian sculpture, the cubist style was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. Cubism, which became the most influential of all 20th-century art styles, emphasizes the flatness of the picture plane, or surface, and rejects traditional perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro. In the hands of Picasso and Braque and their colleagues the French painters Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and Sonia Terk Delaunay and the Spaniard Juan Gris, cubist painting passed through various phases. A group of Italian artists—Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Giacomo Balla—further modified the cubist style. Their attempt to express in art 20th-century dynamic motion was called futurism.

* Abstract Painting
      Abstract art, which involves not one but several distinct styles, began developing in Germany, the United States, Russia, and the Netherlands in the second decade of the 20th century. Cubism was crucial to its evolution, particularly in Russia, where artists, aware of French trends either through trips to Paris or seeing avant-garde art in Moscow collections, began to create geometrically constructed paintings. Kasimir Malevich called his approach to abstraction suprematism, while other Russians—such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky—were known as constructivists (see Constructivism). After his contact with cubism, the Dutch-born Piet Mondrian invented a form known as neoplasticism. His flat-plane grid paintings and his aesthetic theories were seminal to the development of geometric abstraction in the United States in the 1930s.

* Dada
      During World War I (1914-1918) in Zürich, Switzerland, a group of war resisters, disgusted with bourgeois values, chose a nonsense word, dada (French for “hobbyhorse”), to describe their protest activities and the art they created in defiance of established aesthetic criteria. Best known of the Dada artists was the French painter Marcel Duchamp, who expressed his disapproval of “pleasing and attractive art” with his readymades; one such work was a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait, the Mona Lisa, to which he added a mustache and goatee. Other Dadaists were Francis Picabia, George Grosz, and Max Ernst.

* Surrealism
     Dada artists employed accident and chance to create works, and these methods were adopted by their successors, the surrealists. In 1924 the French writer André Breton gave surrealism its name and manifesto, asserting the superiority of the unconscious and the role of dreams in artistic creation. The most important surrealists were Ernst, the Spaniards Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró , the Belgian René Magritte, and the French artists Jean Arp and André Masson.

* American Painting Before World War II
     At the turn of the century, Americans who worked in a somewhat impressionistic style, such as Maurice Prendergast or Childe Hassam, were painting genteel pictures of upper-class life. Another group of artists, including Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Bellows, rejected this kind of art and devoted themselves to portraying, with direct, vigorous realism, life in the city streets. They were later dubbed the Ashcan school, reflecting their choice of homely subject matter. It was not until the celebrated Armory Show of 1913, an international art exhibition held in New York City, that American artists became aware of avant-garde European styles. When finally exposed to cubism, they created synchronism, an abstract style stressing color rhythms, and precisionism, a sharply focused, stylized realism that incorporates cubism’s flattening of objects and pictorial space. Outstanding artists of this period were Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Stuart Davis.

During the 1930s, other American painters reacted against foreign influences and turned to portraying the American scene in their own ways. Regionalists such as Grant Wood were inspired by rural midwestern life—as in his universally popular work, the satirical American Gothic (1930, Art Institute of Chicago). Ben Shahn gave a political edge to his portrayals of city life during the Depression, while the greatest American realist of the century, Edward Hopper, took as the subject of his quiet, contemplative paintings the solitude of individuals in modern cities and small towns.

XII :Painting Since World War II
            Since World War II, American artists have played a vigorous role in originating new styles or developing those begun in other countries. These include abstract expressionism, op art and pop art, photorealism, and minimalism.

* Abstract Expressionism

      The catalyst in the creation of abstract expressionism, a movement centered in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, was undoubtedly the presence in the United States of many refugee European surrealists. Their exploration of the unconscious and of techniques employing accident intrigued Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and many others. These artists, who favored surrealist automatism (a technique similar to automatic writing) and expressionism, were known as gestural painters. In the hands of Pollock, for example, the painting technique involved dripping colors over large canvases to create energetic, random patterns. Other abstract expressionists, such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, developed color-field painting, applying great expanses of subtly modulated color to the canvas.

* Op Art and Pop Art
      In the 1960s, new styles and movements were initiated. Some painters continued in the path of abstraction, as exemplified by the op art works of Hungarian-born Victor Vasarély. Where op art relies on producing generally abstract optical illusions for its effect, pop art, as in the witty works of its originator, the English artist Richard Hamilton, is representational. Pop artists drew their imagery from advertising billboards, movies, comic strips, and ordinary, everyday objects. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol were major American pop artists.

* New Realist Painting
      The ironic images of pop art helped clear the way for a revival of realist painting. Realism is a continuous but highly individualistic tradition in American art, encompassing such diverse painters as Thomas Eakins, Sloan, Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Fairfield Porter. The realists who received the most attention in the 1970s and 1980s were those who had assimilated some of the aesthetic concerns of abstract art. Photorealism relied on photography to achieve a precisely detailed, impersonal kind of realist painting, as in the meticulous cityscapes of Richard Estes. The rigorously structured nude figures of Philip Pearlstein and the flatly composed paintings of Alex Katz and Wayne Thiebaud also imparted a cool, abstract tone to realism.

* New Abstract Tendencies
      After the intense subjectivism of abstract expressionism, abstract painting moved toward a more impersonal, rigorous formal purity. The culmination of this tendency was minimalism, in which painting was reduced to simple geometric forms, rhythmic patterns, or single colors. Leading minimalists included Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Robert Ryman, and Brice Marden. A related movement, hard-edge abstraction, evolved toward more complex and dynamic abstract compositions in the works of Frank Stella and Al Held. Conceptual art, influenced by Duchamp’s dictum that painting should be “at the service of the mind,” often consisted of only a single word or a theoretical statement.

*European Postwar Painting
      Among the major figures in European painting after World War II were the French artist Jean Dubuffet, whose witty paintings were inspired by the art of children and of psychopaths, and the Dutch painter Karel Appel, also influenced by children’s art. In England, the agonized figures of Francis Bacon and the lyrical, urbane pictures of David Hockney demonstrated the vitality of English figurative painting.

*Neoexpressionism
      In the 1980s a number of young European and American artists rebelled against the austere, impersonal formalist purity of much abstract art. The result was a revival of figurative and narrative painting called neoexpressionism. Most neoexpressionists avoided any attempt at realistic depiction, instead employing rough brushwork and bold color to convey their highly subjective, often ambiguous and cryptic visions. Among the most prominent neoexpressionists were the Germans Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz, the Italians Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, and the Americans Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

*To the 21st Century

      By the beginning of the 2000s painting appeared threatened with marginalization in the face of newer media, including video and photography. Leading painters appeared as concerned with the limitations of their medium as with its power. Some worked in several media. German painter Gerhard Richter painted over photographs to create intriguing abstract works in which an image of a place peeked through. Sigmar Polke, another German artist, experimented with a range of styles, subject matter, materials, and techniques. His refusal to be categorized seemed in tune with the times. Belgian artist Luc Tuymans presented spare, cryptic images that both fascinate but also confront the spectator with the need for clues as to their meaning, which can only be provided verbally.


 Aesthetics and theory of painting
     Apelles or the Art of painting (detail), relief of the Giotto's Bell Tower in Florence, Italy, Nino Pisano, 1334–1336.
      Aesthetics is the study of art and beauty; it was an important issue for such 18th and 19th century philosophers as Kant or Hegel. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle also theorized about art and painting in particular; Plato disregarded painters (as well as sculptors) in his philosophical system; he maintained that painting cannot depict the truth—it is a copy of reality (a shadow of the world of ideas) and is nothing but a craft, similar to shoemaking or iron casting. By the time of Leonardo painting had become a closer representation of the truth than painting was in Ancient Greece. Leonardo da Vinci, on the contrary, said that "Pittura est cousa mentale" (painting is a thing of the mind). Kant distinguished between Beauty and the Sublime, in terms that clearly gave priority to the former. Although he did not refer particularly to painting, this concept was taken up by painters such as Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.

Hegel recognized the failure of attaining a universal concept of beauty and in his aesthetic essay wrote that Painting is one of the three "romantic" arts, along with Poetry and Music for its symbolic, highly intellectual purpose. Painters who have written theoretical works on painting include Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Kandinsky in his essay maintains that painting has a spiritual value, and he attaches primary colors to essential feelings or concepts, something that Goethe and other writers had already tried to do.

Iconography is the study of the content of paintings, rather than their style. Erwin Panofsky and other art historians first seek to understand the things depicted, then their meaning for the viewer at the time, and then analyse their wider cultural, religious, and social meaning.

In 1890, the Parisian painter Maurice Denis famously asserted: "Remember that a painting – before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other – is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Thus, many twentieth century developments in painting, such as Cubism, were reflections on the means of painting rather than on the external world, nature, which had previously been its core subject. Recent contributions to thinking about painting has been offered by the painter and writer Julian Bell. In his book What is Painting?, Bell discusses the development, through history, of the notion that paintings can express feelings and ideas. In Mirror of The World Bell writes:A work of art seeks to hold your attention and keep it fixed: a history of art urges it onwards, bulldozing a highway through the homes of the imagination.’


Painting media

    Different types of paint are usually identified by the "medium" that the pigment is suspended or embedded in, which determines the general working characteristics of the paint, such as drying time,viscosity, miscibility, solubility, durability, flexibility and the appearance of the applied pigment. Common media include:
    * Acrylic
    * Dry pastel
    * Enamel paint
    * Encaustic (wax)
    * Fresco
    * Gouache
    * Ink
    * Light
    * Oil
    * Oil pastel
    * Spray paint (Graffiti)
    * Tempera
    * Water miscible oil paints
    * Watercolor

Paintings are not always executed using a single medium: Henry Moore, for example, used oil pastels and watercolours together, knowing that they would not mix. He would use oil pastel for the main features and then cover the paper with a watercolour wash, creating a bolder impression of the initial drawing.
Composition and design
An example of a wall painting

The execution and design of a painting can be subdivided as:
 * Formal Elements:
          o Colour - Color is more than a filling in of space, as it may have a structural role to play in the composition. The painter may use it to connect areas of the painting through similarity or create contrast by difference. It can also create spatial depth, harmony and mood.
            Leonardo da Vinci describes color contrast, in particular the simultaneous contrast of complementary colors, as follows: “Of different colors equally perfect, that will appear most excellent which is seen near its direct contrary blue near yellow, green near red: because each color is more distinctly seen when opposed to its contrary than to any other similar to it.”
          o Space - Painters describe different kinds of space, such as primitive ("flat") space; illusionistic, ("Renaissance") space; modern space (developed from Cezanne's union of flat and illusionistic space); and all-over space, such as that used by Jackson Pollock in his drip paintings. There is also "positive" space (occupied by a form or figure) and "negative" space (loosely, the background).
          o Composition - When deciding the composition of the painting, the painter will be influenced by the subject (eg landscape, portrait, still life) and then how the forms within the subject relate to the borders of the painting. How the viewer's eye is meant to be drawn over the whole and to certain areas will also determine the composition.
 * Pictorial Elements:
          o Line
          o Shape
          o Colour
          o Texture
          o Space

The elements of design (i.e., line, colour, tone, texture) are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light. The range of media (e.g., tempera, fresco, oil, watercolour, ink, gouache, encaustic, casein) and the choice of a particular form (e.g., mural, easel, panel, miniature, illuminated manuscript, scroll, screen, fan) combine to realize a unique visual image.

Movements
    The movement or school that an artist is associated with is usually reflected in the style of the painting. Movements include:
The Flood by Michelangelo (detail from the Sistine Chapel).

    * Abstract
    * Art Deco
    * Baroque
    * Constructivism
    * Cubism
    * Dadaism
    * Early expressionism
    * Expressionism
    * Fauvism
    * Futurism
    * Impressionism
    * Minimalism
    * Modernism
    * Neo-classicism
    * Neo-pop realism

Oil Spill by Lisa Kellner; installation art or sculptural painting?
     * Op Art
    * Pointillism
    * Pop art
    * Postmodernism
    * Precisionism
    * Realism
    * Rococo
    * Romanticism
    * Romantic realism
    * Surrealism

            Some adhere to a rigid definition of "art", such as paintings, sculpture and other traditional genres, while others believe that art should not be strictly defined, and thus believe that anything progressive may be labeled as such.


Painting styles
      'Style' is used in two senses: It can refer to the distinctive visual elements, techniques and methods that typify an individual artist's work. It can also refer to the school or movement that an artist is associated with. This can stem from an actual group that the artist was consciously involved with or it can be a category in which art historians have placed the painter. The word 'style' in the latter sense has fallen out of favor in academic discussions about contemporary painting, though it continues to be used in popular contexts. Such movements or classifications include the following :

 Western styles
     * Abstract
    * Abstract figurative
    * Abstract Expressionism
    * Art Brut
    * Art Deco
    * Baroque
    * Body painting
    * CoBrA
    * Color Field
    * Constructivism
    * Contemporary Art
    * Cubism
    * Digital painting
    * Expressionism
    * Fauvism
    * Figuration Libre
    * Folk
    * Futurism
    * Graffiti
    * Hard-edge
    * Hyperrealism
    * Impressionism
    * Lyrical Abstraction
    * Mannerism
    * Minimalism
    * Modernism
    * Naïve art
    * Neo-classicism
    * Op art
    * Orientalism
    * Orphism
    * Outsider
    * Painterly
    * Photorealism
    * Pinstriping
    * Pluralism
    * Pointillism
    * Pop art
    * Post-painterly Abstraction
    * Postmodernism
    * Precisionism
    * Primitive
    * Realism
    * Regionalism
    * Rococo
    * Romantic realism
    * Romanticism
    * Socialist realism
    * Street Art
    * Stuckism
    * Superflat
    * Surrealism
    * Tachism
    * Tonalism

Eastern styles
   Far eastern
        * Chinese
           o Tang Dynasty
           o Ming Dynasty
           o Shan shui
           o Ink and wash painting
           o Hua niao
           o Southern School
                + Zhe School
                + Wu School
           o Contemporary
         * Japanese
           o Yamato-e
           o Rimpa school
           o Emakimono
           o Kanō school
           o Shijō school
         * Korean

   Islamic / Near eastern
        * Ottoman miniature
        * Persian miniature
  Indian
       * Mysore
       * Tanjore
       * Madhubani
       * Rajput
       * Mughal
       * Bengal school
       * Samikshavad

Painting idioms include:
    * Allegory
    * Bodegón
    * Body painting
    * Botanical
    * Figure painting
    * Illustration
    * Industrial
    * Landscape
    * Portrait
    * Still life
    * Veduta

Some other painting terms are:
    * Altarpiece
    * Broken Color
    * Cartoon
    * Chiaroscuro
    * Composition
    * Drybrush
    * Easel Picture
    * Foreshortening
    * Four-dimensional painting
    * Genre
    * Halo
    * Highlights
    * History painting
    * Imprimatura
    * Landscape
    * Licked finish
    * Madonna
    * Maulstick
    * Miniature
    * Mural Painting
    * Palette
    * Panel Painting
    * Perspective
    * Pietá
    * Plein Air
    * Portrait
    * Sfumato
    * Stippling
    * Technique
    * Trompe l'oeil
    * Underpainting
    * Varnish
    * Wet-on-wet