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Art Movements: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
Baroque
Baroque art, from around 1600, is dramatic and full of movement, with strong contrasts of light and dark. Caravaggio, Rubens and Bernini are key figures.
Key fact
Baroque churches were designed to fill visitors with awe.
Romanticism
Around 1800, Romantic painters like Turner and Caspar David Friedrich celebrated emotion, wild nature and the sublime, over cool reason.
Key fact
Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is a Romantic icon.
Cubism
Around 1907, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke objects into geometric shapes, showing several viewpoints at once. That’s Cubism.
Key fact
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) paved the way.
Surrealism
Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte painted dreamlike scenes, inspired by the unconscious mind: melting clocks, floating apples.
Key fact
Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) features melting clocks.
Abstract Expressionism
In 1940s New York, artists like Jackson Pollock dripped and flung paint across huge canvases, making the act of painting itself the subject.
Key fact
Pollock often laid his canvases on the floor.
Pop Art
In the 1950s and 60s, Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein turned soup cans, comic strips and celebrities into art.
Key fact
Warhol said that in the future everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes.
Street Art
Street art moved from illegal graffiti into galleries. The anonymous artist Banksy became famous for stencilled works with a political twist.
Key fact
In 2018, a Banksy painting shredded itself just after selling at auction.
Fun facts
Caravaggio had to flee Rome in 1606 after killing a man in a fight.
Turner claimed he had himself tied to a ship’s mast in a snowstorm so he could paint it.
Cubism got its name from a critic who mocked Braque’s paintings as made of “little cubes”.
Dalí once gave a lecture in a diving suit and nearly suffocated inside it.
During the Cold War, the CIA quietly promoted Abstract Expressionism abroad as a symbol of American freedom.
Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, one for each flavour then sold, were first shown in 1962.
After it shredded, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon was renamed Love is in the Bin.
Story: The Painter They Forgot
The Painter They Forgot
Rome, 1600s. Artemisia Gentileschi learns to paint in her father’s studio, at a time when women were shut out of most art training.
Her dramatic, shadowy scenes rival Caravaggio’s. In 1616, in Florence, she becomes the first woman admitted to its Academy of Drawing.
For centuries, many of her paintings were credited to men, her father among them. Today she’s hailed as one of the great Baroque painters.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 10
Baroque art is known for drama and movement.
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True. And bold light and shadow.
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Question 2 of 10
Romanticism valued emotion and wild nature.
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True. Storms, mountains and seas.
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Question 3 of 10
Cubism shows objects from several viewpoints at once.
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True. Front and side together.
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Question 4 of 10
Salvador Dalí painted melting clocks.
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True. In The Persistence of Memory.
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Question 5 of 10
Jackson Pollock dripped paint onto canvases.
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True. Moving around them as he worked.
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Question 6 of 10
Andy Warhol painted Campbell’s soup cans.
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True. In 1962.
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Question 7 of 10
Banksy’s identity is officially unknown.
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True. The artist has never confirmed who they are.
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Question 8 of 10
Baroque art began in the 1900s.
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False. Around 1600.
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Question 9 of 10
Romantic painters mostly painted love scenes.
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False. “Romantic” here means emotion and drama: storms, mountains, the sea.
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Question 10 of 10
Cubism was started by Leonardo da Vinci.
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False. By Picasso and Braque, centuries later.
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Sources
- Tate — Art terms: Baroque, Romanticism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art
- MoMA — Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; The Persistence of Memory
- Hamburger Kunsthalle — Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
- Sotheby’s (2018) — Banksy’s Girl with Balloon shredded at auction
- Tate — Art terms: Realism, Post-Impressionism, Dada, Minimalism, Japonisme
- The Museum of Modern Art — “Degenerate Art”
