Art movements explained, and how to tell them apart

What exactly is an art movement?

An art movement is a tendency shared by a group of artists in a particular place and time, often with a manifesto, a shared exhibition or a common enemy. A style is narrower. It is the visual language itself, the way a work looks, and one artist can work in several styles over a lifetime. A period is wider still, a stretch of history such as the Baroque, inside which many artists worked who never met.

Many movement names began as insults. In 1874 the critic Louis Leroy mocked Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise and called the whole exhibition "impressionist". In 1905 the critic Louis Vauxcelles called Henri Matisse and his friends fauves, wild beasts, for their colour. Both names stuck because they described something true.

How do you recognise the main movements?

The table below is a starting point, not a rulebook. Dates are approximate, and the best artists rarely sat still inside one box.

How do you tell Impressionism from Post-Impressionism?

Impressionism is about light at a particular moment, and Post-Impressionism is about what the painter does with it. An Impressionist painting such as Monet's water lilies dissolves edges into flickering touches of colour, painted quickly and often outdoors. A Post-Impressionist painting keeps the bright colour but adds weight and structure. Paul Cézanne built landscapes from blocks of parallel brushstrokes, Van Gogh swirled the paint into thick ridges, and Paul Gauguin flattened colour into outlined shapes. If the edges are soft and the subject seems to shimmer, think Impressionism. If the paint itself is doing something deliberate and insistent, think Post-Impressionism.

How do you tell Fauvism from Expressionism?

Fauvism uses colour for joy and Expressionism uses it for feeling, often an uncomfortable one. Both arrived around 1905 and both refused natural colour. A Fauvist painting by Matisse might give a face a green stripe and still feel sunny and balanced. A German Expressionist painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner uses sharp angles, acid colour and crowded city streets to show anxiety. Edvard Munch's The Scream, painted in 1893, is usually seen as a forerunner of Expressionism for the same reason: the sky is not red because the sky was red.

How do you tell Cubism from abstract art?

Cubism still has a subject and abstract art does not. Look closely at a Cubist painting by Picasso or Georges Braque from around 1910 and you will usually find a guitar, a bottle, a newspaper or a face, taken apart and reassembled from several angles. A fully abstract painting, by Kandinsky or by Hilma af Klint, who made abstract works in Stockholm from 1906, has no object to find. The colour, line and form are the whole subject.

Where do the Nordic countries fit in?

Nordic art follows the same broad sequence with its own accents. The Skagen painters in Denmark, such as P. S. Krøyer, made Impressionist-influenced paintings of blue summer evenings on the beach in the 1880s and 1890s. Sweden, Norway and Finland had a strong period of National Romanticism, art that made the national landscape and folklore its subject, around 1890 to 1915. Swedish modernists such as Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén studied with Matisse and brought Fauvist colour home around 1909. Later, Swedish concrete art, strict geometric abstraction with no reference to nature, found a leading voice in Olle Baertling, while the Danish painter Asger Jorn helped found CoBrA, a postwar group known for spontaneous, childlike figures.

How should you describe the style of your own work?

Describe closeness, not membership. A painter working today is almost never part of Impressionism or Expressionism in the historical sense, and writing "Expressionist" in a catalogue entry claims too much. "Close to Expressionism in its colour" or "influenced by Nordic National Romanticism" is both more honest and more useful, because it tells a reader what to expect without pretending to a history that is not there.

A consistent style line also makes a body of work searchable. A collector looking for landscapes in a Romantic spirit, or a curator assembling a show about colour, finds work by the words attached to it. Choose the words once, use them the same way every time, and keep them with the images. Software made for cataloguing art can suggest a likely movement from a photograph, and that is a sensible place to start, but the final word on how a work should be described belongs to the person who made it.