Abstract Expressionism – A form of abstract art mostly developed by American painters that utilized spontaneity and gestural brushstrokes, and was inspired in part by Surrealism’s interest in revealing the subconscious. Artists included: Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others.

Analytic Cubism – The earlier phase of Cubism (approximately 1908-1912) which was focused on fragmenting subjects into multiple viewpoints, dissecting the object into overlapping planes. Artists included: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque.

Automatism – A form of art-making that relies on disconnecting from conscious thought and attempting to communicate from the subconscious mind, often through rapid and spontaneous brushstrokes or drawing.

Constructivism – An abstract art movement begun around 1915 in Russia which focused on reflecting the modern industrial world. As opposed to Suprematism, Constructivism focused on materiality and utilitarian objects, seeing the artist as a kind of engineer. Artists included: Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and others.

Dada – Founded during WWI in Zurich, this art movement included satirical and nonsensical works that responded to the horrors of war. Dada spread to other cities, including Berlin, and took on other forms. Artists include: Hugo Ball, Hannah Höch, Georges Scholz, Sophie Täuber, and others.

De Stijl – An abstract Dutch art movement that relied on use of primary colors and horizontal and vertical lines. De Stijl translates to “The Style” — implying the universality of the elements and approach. Piet Mondrian was a pioneer of this art form.

Divisionism – Late 19th century art movement and a form of Neo-Impressionism that used small, defined dabs of color to imitate light. Artists include: Georges Seurat, Lucien Pisarro, Paul Signac, and others.

Documentary Photography – A photographic style marked by an interest in realism and straightforward representation of people, places, and events, also referred to as reportage. Documentary photography can include a focus on social issues and social justice, and also includes war and battlefield photography. Artists include: Robert Capa, Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, and more.

Fauvism – A form of post-Impressionism marked by vivid colors and bold brushwork that was particularly interested in complementary colors. Artists included: Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, and more.

Feminist Art – Art movement by artists in the 1970s (onward) that responded directly to feminist theory, including Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Feminist artists used their own bodies, vaginal imagery, experimental performance, and more traditionally “feminine” media like embroidery in their works. Artists include: Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, and others.

Futurism – An art movement of the early 20th century that focused on movement, dynamism, and the modernist future and rejected the past. Futurists were later associated with pro-war and fascist ideologies. Artists included: Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and others.

Expressionism – An art movement starting in Germany that focused on expressing inner emotional truth instead of realistic depiction of the outside world. Many artists explored feelings of angst and alienation amidst rapidly-changing urban environments. Two core groups included Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) and Die Brücke (The Bridge). Artists included: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Edvard Munch, and more.

Exquisite Corpse – A collaborative drawing game invented in Paris in 1925 and played by Surrealist artists looking to create strange and intuitive drawings together.

Harlem Renaissance – A period of African American cultural and intellectual development based in Harlem, New York in the 1920s and 1930s, which followed the Great Migrations of Southern African Americans relocating to Northern cities in the U.S. Artists included: James Van Der Zee, Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and others.

Hudson River School – An American landscape art movement in the mid-19th century that included idealized, detailed depictions of the Hudson River Valley (where many of school’s painters were located) and beyond. English-born painter Thomas Cole is known as the founder of the movement, which included artists like Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, and Asher Brown Durand. Many Hudson River School paintings depicted the settlement and “taming” of the American landscape, especially the American West, and visually represented the concept of Manifest Destiny.

Impressionism – An art movement that developed in 19th century France and which involved painting en plein air (outside) rather than a studio setting, and which focused on depicting the fleeting qualities of light with looser, more disparate brushstrokes and brighter rather than blended colors. Artists included: Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Berthe Morisot, and many others.

Japonisme – A French term for the craze for Japanese art and design in the West during the late nineteenth century after trade resumed with Japan in the 1850s. Japanese art and design influenced artists like James McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, and many others.

Land Art – Also known as Earthworks, Earth art, and environmental art, an art movement beginning in the 1960s and 1970s (primarily in the U.S. but also in England and other countries) in which artists worked directly with the natural landscape and materials, often to create site-specific works that ranged from the monumental to the ephemeral. Artists include: Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, Andy Goldsworthy, and more.

Nabis – A group of French Symbolist artists who were inspired by Paul Gauguin’s style and focused on mystical, spiritual themes in their paintings. The group’s title comes from the Hebrew word for prophet. Artists included: Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Maurice Denis and others.

Négritude – An anti-colonial movement started by a group of African and Caribbean students and scholars in Paris in the 1930s that sought to reclaim blackness and African culture. Led by poets Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Sédar Sengh, and including artists such as: Wifredo Lam, Ben Enwonwu, and Ronald Moody.

Neoclassicism – An art style that began in the 1760s and revived classical values of Greek and Roman in antiquity. In painting this included linear design and architectural composition, blended, more muted colors, and classical themes and subject matter instead of contemporary scenes. Jacques-Louis David is an important example and leader in this style of painting.

Neo-Impressionism – A form of post-Impressionism that connected brushwork and color techniques to optical science, further separating dabs of paint and working with primary colors. Artists included: Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, and others.

Orientalism – This art movement focused on depicting the East from a Western perspective, often creating a fantasy or imagined idea of locales rather than a realistic, authentic representation. Orientalist works often sexualized and eroticized the East, emphasized military brutality, and collapsed disparate places like Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa into generalized, exoticized ideas. Artists included: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Osman Hamdi Bey, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and others.

Primitivism – Art movement in the Western world that idealized the “primitive,” and drew inspiration from the arts of Africa, Oceania and Asia as a reaction to modern art that embraced urbanization and technological advances at the time. Primitivists yearned for connection to nature and the spiritual instead, and created work with more simplified forms. This work also perpetuated racist stereotypes and othered the non-European cultures that it borrowed from. Artists included: Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and others.

Romanticism – A movement in the early 19th century characterized by a shift away from the classical tradition and toward emotionalism and expression of human feeling in painting as well as the depiction of more contemporary scenes. Artists included: Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault and others.

Suprematism – An abstract, avant-garde art movement begun in Russia in the early 1900s by Kazimir Malevich which used basic geometric forms and a limited color palette to create art interested in feeling rather than direct representation.

Surrealism – A 20th century art movement interested in the unconscious and the uncanny as well as the liberation of the mind. Artists used seances, automatic drawing, dream journaling and other techniques to try to access the subconscious and integrate it into their work. Artists included: Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, André Masson, René Magritte, and others.

Symbolism – An art movement from the 19th century focused on expressing the mystical and the emotional over realistic depictions of the natural world. Artists included: Paul Gauguin, Carlos Schwabe, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and others.

Synaesthesia – A condition that leads to a blending of the senses, in which one experiences one sense as connected to and triggering another (for example, a visual triggers a sound, or a sound brings up a taste). Wassily Kandinsky had synaesthesia and it influenced his beliefs on color being connected to music and sound.

Synthetic Cubism – A later phase of Cubism (1912-1914) marked by brighter colors, simpler shapes, and the use of collage, texture and pattern.