Art movement

How it is used

Central in art history classes, museum texts and exam questions. A movement emerges, develops, influences later artists or fades; artists belong to, lead or break away from it. Many movement names end in -ism and are written with a capital letter.

Example sentences

1. Surrealism was one of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century.

2. Which art movement do you think this painting belongs to?

Common collocations

• a major art movement
• found a movement
• belong to a movement
• avant-garde movement

Related terms

• ImpressionismA French art movement of the 1870s and 1880s whose painters, such as Monet, Renoir and Morisot, tried to capture light, colour and passing moments, often painting outdoors.
• CubismAn art movement started around 1907 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which broke objects into geometric shapes and showed them from several viewpoints at once.
• SurrealismAn art and literary movement launched in Paris in 1924 by André Breton, which explored dreams, the unconscious and strange combinations of images.
• avant-gardeArtists, works or ideas that are new and experimental and challenge accepted rules; the word is French for the front part of an army.
• styleThe particular way an artwork looks that links it to an artist, a group, a place or a period, shown in its forms, colours, technique and subjects.

More terms: Movements & Periods

• Renaissance
• abstract art
• modern art
• Realism
• Baroque
• Gothic
• Romanticism
• Expressionism
• Pop Art
• Neoclassicism
• Post-Impressionism