Initially serving imperial, private, civic, and religious patronage, Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy and middle class. From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy. The Renaissance saw painting advance significantly, in conjunction with the refinement of drawing, perspective, ambitious architecture, tapestry, stained glass, sculpture, and advent of the printing press.
Beginning with the Baroque era, artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. "Art for art's sake" started finding expression in the Romantic painters, influencing Impressionism.
Western painting was primarily concerned with representational and traditional art until the mid-19th century, when more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor. Commercial galleries also became established in the art world and continued providing patronage into the 20th century and contemporary era.
Minoan painting was influenced by nearby Ancient Egypt and the Near East, which had long produced sophisticated paintings.[14] Yet the mysterious character of the small, yet wealthy mercantile Minoan cities seems very different, with little evidence of large temple-based religion, monarchs, or warfare, and "all the imaginative power and childlike freshness of a very young culture".[15][a]
Mycenaean lady (13th century BC, NAMA), from the “Chief Priest’s House” in the cult centre of the citadel of Mycenae.
A goddess (c. 1200 BC, Archaeological Museum of Mycenae[el]) from the "House of the Frescoes" in the cult centre of the citadel of Mycenae.
Human-animal hybrids, or "donkey-headed daemons", Minoan Genius in a hunting scene (13th century BC, NAMA), from the "Ramp House" in the citadel of Mycenae.
The Minoans clearly dominated art of the contemporaneous Mycenaean (c. 1750–1050 BC) and Cycladic (c. 3300–1100 BC) civilizations,[18] even after Mycenaean occupation of Crete (c. 1450 BC); but few aspects of the tradition survived the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, during the Trojan War (c. 1194–1184 BC) and Greek Dark Ages (c. 1180–800 BC).[19][b] Several Mycenaean frescoes are at the Palace of Nestor and Tiryns.[21]
Tondo of a white-groundkylix, showing a raging maenad by the Brygos Painter. She holds a thyrsos in her right hand, her left is swinging a panther. A snake winds through the diadem in her hair (Archaic, c. 490-480 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen).
Pitsa panels, the only surviving Ancient Greek panel paintings from Greece proper (Archaic, c. 540–530 BC, NAMA). They are votive tablets or pinax.
After the Greek Dark Ages and legendary Dorian invasion, Greek painters in classical antiquity made remarkable contributions, including innovations in perspective derived from scenography,[22][23] contrasting with the mixed perspective of Egyptian and Minoan painting — faces and legs presented in profile, while eyes and torsos appear frontally.[24][25]
Most ancient Greek painters are known only from texts. Only few examples of wall paintings survive, such as those preserved in tombs and funerary art.[29][30] Only a single example of ancient Greek panel painting from Greece proper survives.[c]
Reconstruction of Battle of Marathon (490 BC) painting from the Stoa Poikile (Classical, c. 460 BC), by Carl Robert (1850-1922).
Skiagraphia innovator Apollodorus (fl. 5th century BC) influenced Zeuxis, who improved upon his advances.[38][39][40] According to Cicero (106 BC–43 BC),[41] when Zeuxis found no woman beautiful enough to pose as Helen of Troy, he combined the finest features of five Crotonian models.[42] According to Pliny the Elder (c. 24–79 AD), birds once pecked at Zeuxis's painted grapes. Parrhasius in turn painted a curtain, which Zeuxis asked to be lifted to see the image, only to discover it was the image.[43]
Obverse side, gathering around Heracles, crowned with laurel wreath, wearing the lion-skin and holding a club and bow.
Reverse side, massacre of the Niobids by Artemis and Apollo
The painter Pamphilus taught Apelles (fl. 4th century BC), described as antiquity's greatest painter, noted especially for charis (charm, grace).[44][45]PyrrhonistphilosopherSextus Empiricus (fl. 2nd century AD) likened ataraxia to Apelles's attempt to paint a horse foaming at the mouth. Apelles gave up, angrily tossing the sponge used to clean his brushes; and its mark on the painting produced the desired effect of foam.[46]
The Etruscans were heavily influenced by the Greeks, painting colorful polychromy, wall, and vase paintings. Almost all surviving Etruscan wall paintings are in tombs, mainly located in Tarquinia.[52]
The fourth panel from the "Odyssey Landscapes" wall paintings excavated from Via Cavour.[58] The Laestrygonians destroy Odysseus's fleet as he escapes. The West's earliest known mythological landscapes.[59] (Second style, c. 50 BC, Vatican Museums)
Roman painting was influenced by Etruscan and Greek painting, shown in both frescoes and mosaics, but with its own unique characteristics, containing ancient examples of trompe-l'œil, and more realistic landscapes, advanced by Spurius Tadius (fl. 1st century BC).[54][64]
Pliny the Elder mentions no other Roman painters until poet Pacuvius (c. 220–c. 130 BC).[66]Famulus (fl. 65 AD) was a prominent painter of the imperial period, tasked by emperor Nero (37–68 AD) with decorating the Domus Aurea after the Great Fire of Rome (64 AD).[67]
Some of the few surviving, painted portraits from antiquity are several Egyptiancoffin-portraits found in Al-Fayum;[73][74] Fayum also has panel paintings of gods, with some of the earliest frames.[75] Few miniatures from Late Antique illustrated manuscripts survive.[76][77]
Simone dei Crocifissi, Dream of the Virgin (1365, National Gallery)
Panel painting becomes more common during the Romanesque period, under the heavy influence of Byzantine icons, such as from Italo-Byzantine artists like Berlinghiero (fl. 1228–1242), father of Barone (fl. 1228–1282), Bonaventura (fl. 1235–1244), and Marco (fl. 1232–1255).[103]
Italian Medieval and Gothic painting became more realistic with the two greatest medieval masters of naturalistic Western painting: Byzantine-influenced FlorentineCimabue (c. 1240–1302) and his pupil Giotto (c. 1267–1337), who improved his master's style, most notably at Scrovegni Chapel.[109][110] Ever since, paintings became much more free and innovative, depicting three-dimensional volume and perspective.[111][112] According to Lives of the Artists (1550) by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), Giotto surreptitiously "painted a fly on the nose of a figure on which Cimabue himself was employed", and when Cimabue returned, "he believed it to be real".[113][g]
Renaissance painters (c. 1345–1600) continued to work for the church and a wealthy aristocracy.[80] However, while Christian imagery was still popular, painters increasingly returned to the humanist and secular, or pagan and classical; painting the world around them, or the products of their own imaginations.[133] Those who could afford the expense became patrons and commissioned portraits of themselves or their family.[133]
Venetian Renaissance painters developed a more naturalistic style, painting spontaneously, with less concern for precise drawing than richness of color.[146] They include Jacopo (c. 1400–c. 1470), Gentile (c. 1429–1507), and Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516), and Jacopo's son-in-law Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506), musician Giorgione (c. 1475–1510), Titian (c. 1490–1576), and Veronese (1528–1588).[147][146]
Parmigianino, Vision of Saint Jerome (1527, National Gallery). According to Vasari, this painting stupefied imperial troops who burst into Parmigianino's workshop during the Sack of Rome, allowing him to flee later.[148]
After 1520, the High Renaissance gave rise to a stylized art known as Mannerism, characterized by long necks and limbs.[149] Mannerist Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) authored The Lives,[150] and Parmigianino (1503–1540) fled the Sack of Rome (1527).[148]
Italian Mannerists such as Pontormo (1494–1557), Tintoretto (1518–1594), and Bronzino (1503–1572) paint restless and unstable compositions, with extreme effects of perspective, and stylized poses.[151] Pontormo replaced Renaissance serenity with troubled expressions; as Spanish Renaissance painter El Greco (1541–1614) did with emotional intensity.[149]
The illusion of glowing light with a porcelain-like finish characterized Early Netherlandish painting, in contrast to the matte surface of tempera.[154] Art historians Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958) and iconographer Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) were Early Netherlandish painting scholars.[155]
In Flanders, artists inspired by illuminators like the Limbourg Brothers (fl. 1385–1416) began painting more naturalistically.[156][154] Unlike Italians, who drew heavily from ancient Rome, German and Northern Renaissance painters retained the less idealized style of sculpture and medieval illuminated manuscripts.[155]
Baroque painting was the dominant style of 17th-century Old Masters,[169] characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, and chiaroscuro, evoking emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality prized during the Renaissance.[170]
Its associated movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation or Catholic Revival.[171][172] However, the painting style spread throughout Western Europe, and was also popular in non-absolutist and Protestant states.[173] Beginning with the Baroque era, artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class.[174]
Painters like Le Brun, preferring outline and drawing, were called Poussinists, Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) followers,[203] while those preferring color were called Rubenists, Rubens followers.[204] Additional French baroque painters include the Le Nain brothers, Antoine (c. 1600–1648), Louis (c. 1603–1648), and Mathieu (1607–1677), Georges de La Tour (1593–1652), and landscape painter Claude Lorrain (c. 1600–1682).[205] Frenchmen trained in Italy such as Poussin, La Tour, and Lorrain are known as "classical Baroque".[206]
Rococo painting followed as a lighter form of Baroque, often frivolous and erotic with light pastel colours, peaking in the 1730s.[209][210] Rococo developed first in French decorative arts and interior design, during Louis XV's (1710–1774) succession.[211][212] Rococo maintained Baroque's complex forms and intricate patterns, but also included Oriental designs and asymmetry.[213]
Rococo declined by the early 1760s. Jacques-François Blondel (1705–1774) decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants".[214]PhilosopheVoltaire (1694–1778) described Rococo as "degenerate" and "superficial".[215]
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers (1849, destroyed during World War II).
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) led the turn towards Realism at mid-century, with unidealized paintings of common people, offending viewers accustomed to the conventional subjects and licked finish of academic art, but inspiring many younger artists.[186]
In the late 19th century, Romanticism-influenced Impressionists eschewed allegory and narrative in favor of direct engagement with the modern world, sometimes painting with little or no preparatory study, relying on deftness of drawing and a highly chromatic palette.[266][268] The Musée d'Orsay houses many impressionist works.[269]
Cézanne united classical composition and a preoccupation with abstract geometric forms,[288] claiming all depiction of nature can be reduced to solids: cylinder, sphere, and cone.[289] while Van Gogh's turbulent painting style was coupled with a sonorous use of color.[290] Seurat transformed Impressionism's broken color into a scientific optical study, structured on frieze-like compositions, attracting many followers such as Paul Signac (1863–1935).[291]
Artists such as Whistler, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec were influenced by Japaneseukiyo-e.[292] For Gauguin, Impressionism gave way to a personal symbolism.[293] Gauguin influenced future art when in 1888 he said to Sérusier
How do you see these trees? Well then, put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So, render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermilion.[294]
20th-century Western painting influenced all the visual arts, including Modernist architecture and design, film, theater, and dance;[301][i] and was open to experiment, from photography and concrete poetry to advertising and fashion.[303] The avant-garde featured painters ranging from abstract to super-realist.[304] Post-impressionism and Symbolism resonated with younger artists at the turn of the 20th century, especially with the Fauvists and Surrealists.[295]
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), often contrasted with Matisse, made Cubist paintings influenced by Cézanne, and Bernard, who added cubes to Cézanne's conception.[289] Braque and Picasso jointly developed Cubism c. 1910, influencing several subsequent art movements.[316] Picasso's Cubist period was preceded by blue, rose, and African.[317]
Wassily Kandinsky, Last Judgment (1910, private collection). Der Blaue Reiter group formed in response to the rejection of this painting from an exhibition.
Kandinsky is one of the first modern painters of abstract art. As an early modernist, he theorized, as did contemporary occultists and theosophists like Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music.[330] They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality, and Kandinsky penned Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911).[331] Other abstract art pioneers include Klee, Swede Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), and Russian Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935).[332]
Delauney's orphism influenced abstract painting with his bold use of color and his experimentation of both depth and tone.[320][338]Arthur Dove (1880–1946) is the first American abstract painter.[339]Synchromists such as Morgan Russell (1886–1953) similarly were influenced by color's relation to music.[340]
De Stijl was influenced by Cubism and neoplatonic mystic mathematicianM. H. J. Schoenmaekers's (1875–1944) beliefs, such as ideal geometric forms (e. g. the "perfectly straight line").[344] It expressed a utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order, advocating pure, universal abstraction reduced to the essentials of form and colour, simplifying painting to vertical and horizontal lines, using only primary colors, black, and white.[n]
Bauhaus
In Europe, Bonnard and Matisse continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement.[347] The modernist Bauhaus movement saw painters influenced by De Stijl and constructivism like Kandinsky, Klee, and Josef Albers (1888–1976) utilized geometric shapes and balance.[348][337]
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) came to international prominence after the 1913 New York City Armory Show.[358] He combined Cubism and Futurism, pursuing art's limits using part painting, part collage, part construction.[358]
Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) moved to Paris, joining his brother Alberto Savinio (1891–1952), who knew Laprade, a jury member of the Salon d'Automne, which exhibited his mysterious and dreamlike works, instrumental to beginning Surrealism.[361] During 1913 his work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, noticed by Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) among others.[361]
Several Dadaists, such as Duchamp and Picabia, were associated with Surrealism and the avant-garde.[362] Surrealists emphasizing spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation like the Arps, Masson, Miró, and Max Ernst (1891–1976) were influential, especially in America.[358][363] Ernst studied Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the alternative realities experienced by the insane.[364]
Surrealists Yves Tanguy (1900–1955), René Magritte (1898–1967)[p] and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989)[q] used realistic depictions of fantastic imagination and dream imagery, creating some of the best known surrealist paintings.[363]Bernard Delvaille (1931–2006) has described Magritte's surrealism as "Symbolism plus Freud".[367]
A group of 75 artists issued a statement defending the museum, including Grosz, realists Barnet, Evergood, Marsh, Pierce, Sternberg, and Koerner; and abstract expressionists Schwartz, Xavier Gonzalez (1898–1993), and Milton Avery (1885–1965).[409]
Kline is best known for bold, black-and-white compositions,[406] focusing mostly just on dramatic gestures and brush strokes with wide swaths of paint across the canvas.[412] Pollock's drip technique, with canvas laid on the floor, derived from Masson.[413] Pollock's wife was Lee Krasner (1908–1984).[414]
Much of de Staël's late work, like his abstract landscapes, prefigures Color field painting. Matisse and Avery's color in seascapes and landscapes influenced Color field painters such as Gottlieb and Rothko.[420][421]
Color field involves abstract paintings with large, flat expanses of color on large surfaces, expressing sensual and visual feelings, attempting to channel an almost religious experience, awestruck in the face of sensuality, color and surface. The Washington Color School included Gene Davis (1920–1985), Morris Louis (1912–1962), and Kenneth Noland (1924–2010); and its associates include Paul Reed (1919–2015),[422][423]Thomas Downing (1928–1985), Sam Gilliam (1933–2002), Howard Mehring (1931–1978), and Alma Thomas (1891–1978).[424]
Post-painterly abstraction
Greenberg noted a new movement in painting derived from abstract expressionism but that "favored openness or clarity", as opposed to the dense, painterly surface, stressing contrasts of pure hues, and diluted paint.[425][426] Post-painterly abstraction included Color field painters influenced by Newman,[427] and the soak-stain technique of Frankenthaler,[428] such as Walter Darby Bannard (1934–2016), Dzubas, Louis, and Noland.[406]
Another tendency noted by Greenberg was hard-edge painting.[425] Influenced by Albers and Mondrian, hard-edge painting uses abrupt changes between color to define the shape of the painting.[433] The term was coined in 1959 by art historian Jules Langsner (1911—1967) to characterize the nonfigurative work of four California artists: Karl Benjamin (1925–2012), Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978), Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009), and John McLaughlin (1898–1976).[433]
Artists such as Ronald Davis, Al Held (1928–2005), Kelly, Alexander Liberman (1912–1999), Noland, Reinhardt, Stella, and Jack Youngerman (1926–2020) also explored hard-edge formats.[434]
The Minimalists thought art should not refer to anything other than itself,[434] reacting against action painting, and taking inspiration from conceptual art, suprematists, Color Field painters like Louis, Newman, and Reinhardt, and hard-edge painters; as well as Europeans like Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși (1876–1957).[434][435]
Reinhardt, whose reductive, all-black paintings prefigured minimalism, stated: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."[436]
Stella's early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the show "16 Americans" (1959), organized by Dorothy Canning Miller (1904–2003) at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[440][x] In the show catalog, Carl Andre (1935–2024) noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting."[442]
Influenced by Mangold, minimalism concerned itself with sculpture. Donald Judd (1928–1994) started as a painter, but ended as a creator of objects, influencing Minimalist aesthetics with his essay endorsing "Specific Objects" (1964),[443] which were not comfortably classified as either painting or sculpture.[443]
Judd rejected the inherited, European artistic values in American art, endorsing an array of New York artists, including Jasper Johns (born 1930), installation artistDan Flavin (1933–1996), and Lee Bontecou (1931–2022).[443] Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was George Earl Ortman (1926–2015), who distilled forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries.[444]
Post-minimalism
Minimalism was heavily criticized by high modernist, formalist art critics and historians, who felt it abandoned painting as understood by Greenberg. The most notable critic was Michael Fried (born 1939), who objected on the basis of its "theatricality". In "Art and Objecthood" (1967) he argued that work like Robert Morris's (1931–2018) transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle.[445]
Abstract illusionism was a derivative of expressionism and hard-edge, coined by Barbara Rose (1936–2020) in 1967,[450] insisting on flatness of the picture plane, but with the added elements of perspective, artificial light sources, and simulated cast shadows. Abstract illusionism includes painters Ronald Davis, James Havard (1937–2020), Jack Lembeck (born 1942), Joe Doyle (1941–2020), Tony King (born 1944), Jack Reilly (born 1950), George D. Green (1943–2020), and Michael B. Gallagher (born 1945).[451] Ronald Davis's polyester resin and fiberglass works pay homage to Duchamp.[452]
Art brut and outsider art
Art brut, coined by Dubuffet shortly after World War II, reacted against abstract art, preferring untrained artists with no contact to the larger artworld.[453][454] The English equivalent is "Outsider art", coined in 1972 by art criticRoger Cardinal (1940–2019).[455]
Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) was a largely self-taught realist during Abstract Expressionism, painting primarily landscapes, domestic interiors, and portraits.[456]
Neo-Dada combined manufactured items with artist materials, creating new conventions of art-making; they made acceptable in serious, contemporary art circles the inclusion of unlikely materials.[360][393][461]
Pop art also includes painters Dine, Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997).[z] Warhol was the "innovator of pop art", merging popular culture with fine art, while incorporating humor and irony.[467]Photorealism also developed from Pop Art.[475]
Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots to reproduce the appearance of commercial printing. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."[476]
In the late 1960s, abstract expressionist Philip Guston (1913–1980) helped lead a transition from abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings, inspiring a new generation of painters interested in a revival of intensely expressive imagery;[482] seen in Italian Transavantguardia, German Neue Wilde, French Figuration Libre, and the British school of London, plus the Stuckists.[483]
Related to earlier developments in Postminimal painting, neo-expressionists reacted against conceptual and minimalistic art, returning to portraying recognizable objects, though in a rough and violently emotional way, using vivid colors in large formats.[484] Critics were divided, as some believed neo-expressionism was driven by profit motivations of large commercial galleries.[482]
The 1960s and 1970s saw a reaction against painting.[380]Douglas Crimp (born 1956) viewed the work of artists like Reinhardt, and declared the "death of painting". New movements gained prominence, including Mail art and body art.[486][487]
Contemporary painting
However, painting still holds a respected position in contemporary art, both late modern and postmodern.[488][489] Throughout the 20th century, and into the 21st, distinctions have faded between what is generally regarded as the fine arts and low arts,[488] as high art continues to mix with popular culture.[490] Artists can achieve critical success whether their images are representational or abstract.[489] Instead what matters is content, exploring boundaries of the medium, and refusing to recapitulate paintings of the past.[489][491][492]
Damien HirstBeautiful revolving sphincter, oops brown painting (2003, private collection)
Mainstream painting is rejected by postmodern artists in favor of artistic pluralism.[494] According to art critic and analytic, aesthetic philosopher Arthur Danto (1924–2013), there is a prevailing "anything goes" attitude; an "everything going on", creating an aesthetic traffic jam and consequently "nothing going on".[495]
↑A graffito from Pompeii, House of the Ara Maxima reads: “If you have not seen the portrait of Venus by Apelles, look at my girlfriend, she’s just as beautiful as her”.[61][62]
↑Giotto is mentioned in Dante Alighieri's (c. 1265–1321) Divine Comedy (c. 1321): "In painting Cimabue thought he should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry, So that the other's fame is growing dim."[114]
↑Historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) never finished his work on Renaissance art.[132]
↑The Fauvists gained their name after Vauxcelles described their work with the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"),[308] contrasting the paintings with the Renaissance style sculpture that shared the room with them.[309] The jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope by non-Fauve Rousseau hung near the works by Matisse, and may have inspired the term used in the press.[310][309][311]
↑Apollinaire stated "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable."[313]
↑For Kandinsky, blue is the color of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal.[321]
↑De Stijl was also the name of a journal that was published by van Doesburg propagating the group's theories.[343]
↑Mondrian writes in his essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art": "...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."[345][346]
↑By 1923, Duchamp renounced artmaking for chess.[359]
↑Ernst was possibly inspired by Freud's psychoanalysis and study of the delusions of paranoiac Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911). Freud identified Schreber's fantasy of becoming a woman as a castration complex. The 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.[368]
↑The house in the background is Carpenter Gothic style. One of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art,[384] art critics assumed it was intended as satirical; but it was part of a literary trend depicting rural America critically, such as Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), and The Tattooed Countess by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964).[384] After the Great Depression, the painting was seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.[384]
↑Wyeth's tempera painting Christina's World (1948, MoMA), is one of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art.[385]
↑Woman III (1953, private collection of Steven A. Cohen) is one of a series of six paintings depicting a grotesque, three-quarter-length female figure, encouraged by art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996).[404]
↑The widths of the stripes were not entirely subjective, but determined by the dimensions of the lumber used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched.[441]
↑Rauschenberg's "combines" and constructions also included objects and pictures taken from hardware stores, junkyards, city streets, and taxidermy.[462]
↑Lichtenstein painted Drowning Girl (1963, MoMA), appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83.[474]
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12Cuttler, C. D. (1968). Northern Painting from Pucelle to Bruegel: Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries. Switzerland: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. p. 346
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123Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62, Universe Books and American Federation of Arts, 1994
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More recent, abridged version: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2Rev ed, 12 September 2005, Paperback, ISBN0-521-60774-4
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Chauvet cave, in Ardèche, showing Aurochs, horses, and rhinos probably Aurignacian, the oldest known Western cave paintings (35,000–30,000 BC, replica, Anthropos museum).
Aurochs, horses and deer painted on Lascaux cave (15,000–10,000 BC). One of the best known cave painting sites. [3]
The "Shaft of the Dead Man" or the "Well Scene" from Lascaux Cave. A bird-headed man with an erection, and a bison.
Stamp depicting the most notable Mesolithic artwork, the marching warriors, a rock painting at Cingle de la Mola, Castellón (7000–4000 BC). [5]
