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Art movements and styles

249 articles

Sino-Tibetan style

Sino-Tibetan style is an art-historical term for Buddhist art produced in Chinese imperial workshops that fuses Tibetan Buddhist iconography with Chinese materials, techniques, and imperial aesthetics.

Social realism

Social realism, an international realist art movement of the interwar period depicting working-class and poor conditions critically; distinct from Soviet Socialist Realism (Stalin, 1934); figures include Orozco, Rivera, Shahn, Gropper.

Socialist realism

Socialist realism (Социалистический реализм, Sotsrealizm, Sorela) was the USSR's mandatory official art method from 1934, defined by Gorky at the Writers' Congress, requiring optimistic, party-minded depiction of reality in revolutionary development, enforced through state-controlled unions and spread across Eastern Europe and Asia.

Socialist realism in Bulgaria

Socialist realism in Bulgaria was the officially mandated artistic method of the People's Republic of Bulgaria, imposed on painting, literature, and theater from the late 1940s until 1989.

Sots Art

Sots Art (соц-арт) is an unofficial Soviet art movement of the 1970s and 1980s treating Socialist Realism ironically, named in 1972 by Komar and Melamid.

Soviet architectural modernism

Soviet architectural modernism (Soviet modernism, 1955–1991): the modernist current in late Soviet architecture launched by the 4 November 1955 anti-excess decree, known for prefabricated mass housing, republic-level regional variants, and contested post-Soviet heritage.

Suprematism

Suprematism, or suprematism (супрематизм), is the geometric abstract art movement founded by Kazimir Malevich in 1915, first shown at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd, claiming the supremacy of pure feeling over depiction.

Surrealism

Surrealism, avant-garde movement founded in Paris by André Breton's 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, explored the unconscious through automatism, dreams, and chance, drawing on Freud and Marx, and remains active worldwide.

Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia

The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia is a collective of artists and writers founded in Prague in 1934, the movement's second most prestigious group after Paris, still active today.

Surrealist Manifesto

Manifeste du surréalisme (Surrealist Manifesto), André Breton's founding text published in Paris on 15 October 1924 as preface to Poisson soluble, defining surrealism as pure psychic automatism; basis of the Surrealist movement, with Second Manifesto 1929.

Synchromism

Synchromism was a short-lived early twentieth-century movement in abstract painting founded by American artists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright in Paris, in which color alone generated form and movement.

Synthetism

Synthetism is a Post-Impressionist painting style developed at Pont-Aven, Brittany, around 1888 by Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, marked by flat, unmodeled color, strong outlines, and painting from memory rather than from life.

Tachisme

Tachisme (Tachism), from French tache (stain), was a French abstract painting style of the late 1940s-1950s within Art Informel: spontaneous stains, drips, and calligraphic marks, the European counterpart to Abstract Expressionism, led by Hartung, Wols, and Mathieu.

Taos art colony

The Taos art colony is a community of painters in Taos, New Mexico, begun in 1898 when Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert Phillips stayed after a broken wagon wheel.

The Poolrooms

The Poolrooms, also known as Poolcore, are a liminal-space aesthetic of endless white-tiled rooms flooded with shallow water, adopted by the Backrooms fandom as Level 37.

Theosophy and visual arts

Theosophy and visual arts: influence of the 1875 Blavatsky-Olcott esoteric movement on modern painting, shaping Symbolism and abstraction through Kandinsky, Mondrian, Hilma af Klint, Kupka, Thought-Forms color symbolism, and Ringbom's scholarship.

Tonalism

Tonalism was an American landscape painting style of about 1880 to 1915, using soft dark tones and colored atmosphere, led by George Inness and James McNeill Whistler.

Tori style

Tori style (止利様式, Tori yōshiki) is the style of early Japanese Buddhist sculpture founded in the Asuka period by Kuratsukuri no Tori, known as Tori busshi.

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin, born 1963 in Croydon, is a British YBA artist known for confessional works My Bed and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, a 1999 Turner Prize shortlisting, a damehood, and the 2026 Tate Modern retrospective A Second Life.

Transgressive art

Transgressive art deliberately violates moral, social, or aesthetic boundaries of its era; key examples include Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and the 1990 Mapplethorpe museum trial, with censorship as its recurring counterpart.

Tulip Period art

Tulip Period art (Lâle Devri sanatı) is Ottoman art and architecture of 1718–1730 under Ahmed III, known for a new floral style and Levni's miniatures.

Ukrainian modernism

Ukrainian modernism (український модернізм) was the modernist movement in Ukrainian art, literature, and theater from about 1890 to the early 1930s, ended by Stalinist repression.

Utagawa school

The Utagawa school (歌川派, Utagawa-ha) was the largest school of ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock-print tradition, founded in the late 18th century by Utagawa Toyoharu and led by Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, and Hiroshige.

Utopian scholastic

Utopian scholastic, also called Kid Frasurbane, is a design aesthetic of late-1980s to early-2000s edutainment media: DK Eyewitness books, Microsoft Encarta, documentaries, and museums, defined by photo cut-outs on white, serif type, and pre-9/11 optimism; coined in 2017 by CARI-affiliated archivists.

Utrecht Caravaggisti

The Utrecht Caravaggisti were early seventeenth-century Dutch painters, mostly from Utrecht, who absorbed Caravaggio's realistic, dramatically lit style in Rome and influenced Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer.

Vanitas

Vanitas is a still-life genre, chiefly Dutch and Flemish 17th-century painting, using skulls, hourglasses, snuffed candles, books, and jewels to symbolize life's transience and the emptiness of worldly goods.

Video art

Video art: art made with the electronic moving image as an artist's medium, emerging with the Sony Portapak in 1965. Key figures: Nam June Paik, the father of video art. Forms include single-channel video, video sculpture, and installation.

Vienna Modernism

Vienna Modernism, also called Vienna around 1900, is a cultural era in Vienna from about 1890 to 1910, defined by the Vienna Secession and figures like Gustav Klimt.

Vienna Secession

Vienna Secession (Wiener Secession): artists' association founded 3 April 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Moser, Hoffmann, and Olbrich after leaving the Künstlerhaus; built Olbrich's gilded-dome exhibition hall in 1898; Klimt Group departed in 1905; still artist-run today.

Vorticism

Vorticism was a British avant-garde art and literature movement founded in London in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis, expressing the machine age through angular geometric abstraction.