What are the main art styles?

The styles museums define most often are Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Art Deco, Surrealism, abstract art, Abstract Expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, photorealism and street art.

What is the difference between an art style and an art movement?

A movement is a group of artists active at one time who shared ideas, often with a name and a manifesto, like Surrealism in 1924. A style is the look itself. The look can outlive the group: people still make Art Deco posters a century after the 1925 Paris exhibition.

What is the oldest art style on this list?

The Renaissance. Tate dates the revival of art in Italy to about 1400, under the influence of rediscovered classical art. Its peak, the High Renaissance, came between about 1500 and 1530 in the work of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael.

What are the newest art movements on this list?

Photorealism and conceptual art. Tate places photorealism in Europe and the USA from the late 1960s and conceptual art between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Street art is harder to date: Tate defines it by place and method, public and usually unsanctioned, rather than by years.

Which art style uses only shapes and colors?

Abstract art. Tate defines it as art that does not try to depict visible reality and works through shapes, colors, forms and gestural marks. Minimalism pushes it further, down to simple geometric forms based on the square and the rectangle.

Art styles: a list of names and how to spot each one

Art styles are the recognizable ways artists have made pictures, buildings and objects at different times. The best-known names in Western art run from the Renaissance, which began in Italy around 1400, through Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, to pop art, minimalism and street art. Each one has a tell you can learn to spot: a kind of brushwork, a color habit, a favorite subject. The table below gives every style its dates and that tell.

What is an art style, and how is it different from a movement?

An art style is a shared look: the same habits of line, color, shape and subject across many works. A movement is the group of artists who made that look at one time and place, often with a name, a leader and a manifesto. Futurism, for example, started on a single day in 1909.

The difference matters on screen. A film can be "Art Deco" without anyone in it belonging to the 1920s movement. The look traveled; the group did not. So when a review calls a cartoon "surreal" or a title sequence "pop art," it is naming a style that has outlived its movement.

Many style names were not chosen by the artists. Tate notes that the critic Louis Vauxcelles gave Fauvism its name ("the wild beasts") in 1905, and that his remark about "cubes" in Georges Braque's paintings in 1908 seems to be where Cubism got its name. Art Deco was named decades after its heyday.

Art styles list: names, dates and how to recognize each one

Here are 22 major styles in rough order of age, with the one feature that gives each away. Dates and descriptions follow museum definitions, mostly Tate's glossary of art terms and Britannica.

Style	When and where	How to recognize it
Renaissance	Italy, from about 1400; peak about 1500–1530	Calm, balanced figures and deep perspective modeled on ancient Greek and Roman art
Baroque	17th century, at its height in Rome about 1630–1680	Drama and movement, as if you are watching an actual event, with a direct emotional pull
Rococo	France, early 18th century	Light, playful decoration full of short curves, scrolls and shell shapes
Romanticism	About 1780–1830	Strong personal feeling and wild nature in place of classical calm
Realism	Mid-19th century France	Ordinary people and everyday life painted plainly, often with a gritty subject
Impressionism	France, from the early 1860s	Quick, broken brushstrokes that catch passing light, often painted outdoors
Post-Impressionism	From about 1886	Impressionist color pushed in personal directions: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh
Art Nouveau	1890s, international	Long, curving lines and flowing plant shapes
Fauvism	About 1905–1910	Wild, unnatural color straight from the tube and loose brushwork
Expressionism	Early 20th century	Distorted forms that show inner emotion rather than how things look
Cubism	From about 1907–08, Picasso and Braque	Several views of one object shown at once, so it looks broken into facets
Futurism	Italy, from 1909	Speed, machines and the energy of the modern city
Dada	Zurich, during the First World War	Satirical, nonsensical work made against the war and against art itself
Art Deco	1920s and 1930s	Sleek geometric shapes, zigzags and sunbursts, chrome and other glossy materials
Surrealism	Paris, manifesto of 1924	Realistic objects arranged as in a dream, where things cannot happen
Abstract art	From about 1910	No recognizable objects at all, only shape, color, line and mark
Abstract Expressionism	New York, 1940s and 1950s	Large canvases of gestural brushstrokes that look spontaneous
Pop art	Britain mid-1950s, America late 1950s	Comic strips, adverts, product packaging and celebrities as subjects
Minimalism	USA, 1960s	Simple geometric forms based on the square and the rectangle
Conceptual art	Mid-1960s to mid-1970s	The idea matters more than the object, which may be text or instructions
Photorealism	Europe and USA, late 1960s	Paintings so precise they pass for photographs
Street art	Public walls and streets	Usually unsanctioned work in public places: stencils, paste-ups, stickers

A table flattens a lot. Tate's entry on Expressionism, for instance, covers a whole family of artists, and "abstract art" is an umbrella for dozens of smaller groups. The three styles with their own guides on this site go deeper: what abstract art is, what Art Deco is and what pop art is.

How do you tell similar art styles apart?

Most confusion comes from pairs that sound alike or follow each other. Ask one question per pair: what is the artist trying to show? Light, feeling, objects, or nothing at all? That question separates almost every neighbor in the list.

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism both use bright color. Impressionists wanted to catch a passing moment of light; Tate describes the Post-Impressionists as taking that in four separate directions, from Seurat's dots to van Gogh's emotional brushwork.

Art Nouveau and Art Deco both decorate everything. Tate's definitions draw the line clearly: Art Nouveau is sinuous lines and plant forms, and Art Deco, shaped by Cubism, turns those into straighter, more geometric patterns.

Abstract art and Abstract Expressionism are related but not the same. The first is any art without recognizable objects. The second is one American branch of it from the 1940s and 1950s, known for big, gestural paint.

Surrealism and abstraction both look strange, but a surrealist painting is full of objects you can name. They are simply in the wrong place, as in a dream.

Pop art and photorealism can both show soup cans and shop fronts. Pop art borrows the flat look of print and advertising; photorealism copies the camera.

Where do viewers meet these art styles in films and animation?

Animation borrows museum styles openly, so a viewer who knows the names can read a film's design. A few examples are well documented.

Disney's Fantasia (1940) opens with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, where the orchestra fades into abstract patterns of lines, shapes and clouds. Disney hired the abstract animator Oskar Fischinger to work on that segment in late 1938.

Loving Vincent (2017), about the life of Vincent van Gogh and the circumstances of his death, is described as the first fully painted animated feature film. It was made from oil paintings, so a Post-Impressionist painter is told through pictures that look like his own.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) laid hand-drawn comic techniques over its computer animation: halftones, Ben-Day dots, misaligned colors and printed sound words. These are the same printing marks pop art painters enlarged in the 1960s.

Art Deco is everywhere in older cartoons and in game worlds; the guide to Art Deco on screen lists the main examples. For how animation techniques differ from each other, see types of animation, and for one look that grew out of early computer graphics, what pixel art is.

Which art styles came first, and how did they lead to each other?

The order runs Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, then Neoclassicism and Romanticism, then Realism and Impressionism in the 19th century. After about 1900 the styles come fast, often only a few years apart, and many begin as reactions to the one before.

Tate's Renaissance entry shows the chain: the style passed through Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and later artists revolted against it with Realism and Impressionism. Rococo itself grew up in reaction to the grandeur of Versailles.

The 20th century followed the same pattern. Tate describes Cubism as the starting point for many later abstract styles. American pop art turned back to recognizable images after the loose, personal painting of Abstract Expressionism. Minimalism then stripped abstraction down to plain geometry, and conceptual art dropped the object altogether.

How can you name a style you see on screen?

You can name most styles in a film or a series by checking four things in a single frame. Look at the line, the color, the subject and how real the space feels, then compare with the table above.

Check the line. Long flowing curves point to Art Nouveau; straight lines, zigzags and stepped shapes to Art Deco; thick black outlines and dots to pop art.
Check the color. Unnatural, loud color suggests Fauvism or Expressionism; soft broken color suggests Impressionism.
Check the subject. Brand names and comic panels mean pop art; impossible scenes built from real objects mean Surrealism; no objects at all means abstraction.
Check the space. Deep, balanced perspective is Renaissance; several viewpoints at once is Cubism; a flat surface of marks is abstract.

Visual looks that grew up online, like vaporwave and the Y2K aesthetic, mix several of these at once, which is part of why they are called aesthetics rather than styles. More guides on painting and design are collected in the painting and graphics section.