Angelica Kauffman was a legendary Neoclassical painter who made an astonishingly successful career at a time when women artists were barely allowed to do so. The daughter of a poor Swiss painter, she became one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Art in Great Britain and one of the most commercially successful artists of her time. She balanced her creative spirit with wise self-promotion, leaving a great legacy behind. Read on to learn seven facts about Angelica Kauffman and her work.

1. Angelica Kauffman Was a Child Prodigy

Angelica Kauffman, the legend of 18th-century painting, was born in Switzerland in 1741. Although her family was relatively poor, the environment was still perfect for her developing creative spirit. Her father was a provincial painter who recognized his daughter’s talent already in her early childhood. He took the girl to his studio, teaching her how to draw and paint. By the age of thirteen, Angelica Kauffman already created astonishing painted works, the level of which corresponded more closely with the works of mature artists. At the same time, she demonstrated great interest in music and was torn between the two possible careers. According to a legend, she consulted a local priest who warned her that a career as a performer could harm the reputation and morals of the young Catholic lady.

Kauffman’s father was eager to develop his daughter’s talent and took her to Italy to observe and copy the works of the Old Masters. She worked in Rome, Naples, Florence, and Bologna, attracting significant attention everywhere since women, let alone young girls, rarely had opportunities to learn in such a manner. In Italy, she started to earn her first painting commissions while still a teenager.

2. She Painted Innovative Self-Portraits

In the mid-1760s, the fame of the young and gifted woman artist traveled from the continent to Great Britain. Invited by the British ambassador to Venice, Kauffman soon moved there and established a studio. She quickly gained prominence and made important friends. One of her closest confidantes was the famous portrait painter Joshua Reynolds. Rumors spread about their possible romantic affair, but historians have no reasons to suspect anything other than a close friendship.

From the start of her career, she created a lot of self-portraits that depicted the development of her artistic skill and self-perception as an artist. She often painted herself with a portfolio and a brush or crayon in her hands. Such pose was often used to depict amateur women painters, but Kauffman had no intention to diminish her importance as an artist. Instead, she refused to distance herself from those women who were less lucky and did not manage to secure a full-time career due to restrictions and responsibilities. In her allegorical works, she often painted female characters as writers or artists at a time when such occupations were rarely available to them.

3. She Worked With Various Forms and Genres

Unlike many other artists who specialized in one particular painting genre, Angelica Kauffman was a flexible painter, confident in her abilities. Although she was best known as a portraitist, she worked with allegories and mythological scenes. However, the boldest of her accomplishments was history painting—the most prestigious genre, reserved exclusively for men. Kauffman’s training in Antique and Classical art provided her with the perfect background to paint battle scenes and events of the past.

From a commercial point of view, she was also good at promoting her work. Kauffman worked closely with several printmakers and art dealers, creating wall decor, textile designs, and ceramics. She did not limit herself to her personal artistic ambition; she carefully studied the market and was ready to produce works corresponding to popular demand. Kauffman’s papers and receipts were kept in order first by her father, who worked as her manager, and then by her second husband, an older decorative painter who was eager to promote Kauffman’s career.

4. She Got Married Twice

Kauffman’s personal life became the subject of many myths and rumors. Some art historians believe that the nature of her relationships and marriages was the reason for her status as a prominent artist. Many other aspiring women artists became trapped in the duties of household and motherhood.

Angelica Kauffman got married for the first time in 1767 when she was 26 and recently moved to London. The marriage was a disaster that quickly turned into a scandal: her husband, Swedish Count Frederick de Horn, was not a count but an imposter, married to another woman in Germany. His main motivation for marrying Kauffman was to secure legal reasons to remain in Britain.

Months after the marriage, the fake Count revealed his scheme to his new wife. Eager to get rid of the scammer, Kauffman’s father paid him to leave his daughter as soon as possible, and the marriage was soon annulled. The scandal of the illegal marriage allowed Kauffman to remain single for the following decade, focused on her career. Rumors of her affairs still lingered: some said she had a short-term relationship with the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, and others speculated that her longtime friend Reynolds proposed to her but was rejected. In 1781, she married an Italian painter called Antonio Zucchi, who helped her manage her career.

5. She Was a Founder of the Royal Academy of Arts

One of the most significant accomplishments of Angelica Kauffman was her role in establishing the Royal Academy of Arts. As an artist in high demand, Kauffman kept close ties with the Royal family—this connection for sure helped her maintain her social status after her messy and scandalous divorce. In 1768, she approached King George III with the idea of establishing an institution that would oversee artistic training and production to develop British art. In December of the same year, the King officially established the Royal Academy of Arts, with Kauffman and still-life painter Mary Moser being the only two women out of 34 founding members.

Joshua Reynolds was appointed the Academy’s president. Other founding members included Thomas Gainsborough (who would soon refuse to exhibit there after a scandal), Nathaniel Hone, Thomas Sandby, and others. Generally, the Academy was supportive and respectful towards Kauffman and Moser, yet glimpses of inequality and disrespect still occasionally sparked. The 1772 painting by Johan Zoffany featured 32 Academy founders in one room, surrounded by Antique sculptures and nude models. The two remaining founders, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, were present only in the form of portraits hung on the wall, acknowledged but not allowed to be present.

6. Her Rome Studio Became a Tourist Landmark

Kauffman’s popularity was astonishing not only for a woman painter but for any artist of her time. The only artist who was paid more than Kauffman was Joshua Reynolds, who also worked with portraits of the British elite. In the 1780s, she moved to Rome, hoping to attract more attention to her history paintings rather than portraiture.

During the 18th century, upper-class young men often went on the so-called Grand Tour to finish their education. The Grand Tour was a long trip through Europe that proved that the young man was sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to enter society. The trip itinerary varied slightly depending on the person, their financial means, and interests, but there was always the focus on Italy with its Roman ruins and Old Master paintings.

Kauffman’s studio in Rome became so famous and popular that it became one of the top Grand Tour destinations in the city. She still communicated with the Academy from Italy, sending works for their exhibitions. Known as an educated, smart, and charming woman, she led a busy social and cultural life, attending meetings at poets’ and artists’ societies. There, she befriended Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the famous architect Antonio Canova.

7. The Dark Side of Angelica Kauffman’s Fame

The artist passed away in 1807, and Canova directed her funeral and designed her tombstone. In the years following her death, Angelica Kauffman’s staggering popularity eventually became her downfall. After several years of universal appraisal of everything related to her, the mass obsession reached its peak and plummeted. The art market became oversaturated with cheap reproductions that did no justice to the original paintings.

After Kauffman became unable to fend for herself, her artistic accomplishments gradually diminished. Critics complained about the “feminine sentimentality” of her works and the lack of “masculine” assertiveness and a strong hand. While hardly anyone dared to question Kauffman’s abilities during her lifetime, she was dismissed as too gentle and amateur after her death. Her work was rediscovered in the 20th century, and Kauffman was finally appreciated as an innovative and talented artist once again.

Fauvism was an art movement that celebrated pure color over realistic imagery. Like the Impressionists and most other modern painters, Fauvists focused on scenes taken from daily life instead of showing heroic stories in their pieces. Among the most famous Fauvists were artists like Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Georges Braque, and others. Read on to learn more about these Fauvist masters and their colleagues.

1. The Most Famous Fauvist Artist: Henri Matisse

The name Fauvists originates from the 1905 Autumn Salon. This was an annual exhibition organized by artists as a protest against the conservative and rigid values of the main Paris Salon. A group of artists, most of whom you will find on this list, united in their interest in bold color and painterly quality of images, exhibited their pieces together. They were inspired by the Impressionists in their treatment of urban scenes, but they preferred expressive brushwork to apparent realism. Their works were displayed in a room with one of Donatello’s sculptures. Entering the room, a conservative art critic called Louis Vauxcelles exclaimed that he saw Donatello among wild beasts (les Fauves in French), thus giving the name to the movement.

The most famous of all Fauvists was Henri Matisse, who ditched a promising career in law to pursue painting. Starting from Impressionism and Pointillism, he gradually moved to his own style. Matisse rarely used traditional perspective and illusion of depth, preferring to rely on color as his main instrument. Matisse was incredibly prolific and versatile, working with ceramics, textiles, and stage design. He even designed a chapel.

2. Andre Derain

Together with Matisse, Andre Derain was considered the father of the Fauvist movement. His artistic style was based on the technique of Divisionism, when artists applied paint on small separate strokes of pure color. From Fauvism, Derain soon moved to geometric landscapes, similar to but not exactly like Cubist ones. Derain’s reputation suffered greatly during World War II. Unlike many of his colleagues who left France, he chose to stay in Paris. The Nazi occupants saw him as a valuable asset, demonstrating the eagerness of French creatives to accept the new order. He even made several official visits to Germany, which earned him a post-war label of a Nazi collaborator.

3. Georges Braque

Although Georges Braque was more famous as a Cubist, his Fauvist period was no less remarkable. Braque was not a pioneer of the style, as he adopted it only after seeing the works of Matisse and Derain, yet nonetheless created work that was innovative enough. His Fauvist work became the starting point for Cubist thinking. His bold work with color and expressive form, combined with the influence of Paul Cezanne, soon led to the gradual geometrization of his form. These angels and shapes would soon become sharper and lead to the development of an entirely new type of art.

4. Kees van Dongen

Kees van Dongen was a Dutch artist who started his career in Rotterdam as an illustrator. In 1899, he moved to Paris, where he quickly became part of the progressive artistic establishment. His works were exhibited in the famous 1905 Salon. Portraiture was van Dongen’s signature genre. Apart from the Fauvist circle, he also worked among Expressionists, preferring expressive, bold colors and lines to realistic precision. He also created a lot of erotic works, which Henri Matisse allegedly hated, thinking they overstepped the boundaries of good taste.

Kees van Dongen’s portraits were popular among affluent commissioners. In particular, he often painted wives of the rich and had a clear formula when creating a portrait that should be loved by many. He painted elongated silhouettes and enlarged the jewels the ladies were wearing. However, despite this commercial success, van Dongen’s works occasionally stirred up scandals. In 1913, a nude portrait of his wife was removed from the Paris Salon on the grounds of indecency. The issue was not with nudity itself but the fact that the model was the artist’s wife and not an unknown person or a sex worker.

5. Maurice de Vlaminck

Maurice de Vlamick was considered the third greatest Fauvist after Matisse and Derain. Before moving to art, he was trained as a violin player. One of the decisive moments in Vlaminck’s career was his visit to a 1901 retrospective exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s work. For years, his art retained the influence of the underestimated Dutch master. Vlaminck claimed he wanted to burn down the conservative Ecole des Beaux-Arts with his colors and create art without considering the artistic traditions that came before him. He was also not enthusiastic about numerous art theories created by his colleagues: he compared them to doctors’ prescriptions in the sense that one had to be really sick to follow them.

6. Albert Marquet

Albert Marquet was a student of the famous Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. Moreau saw painting as a free play of imagination, completely detached from reality, and thus encouraged his students’ experiments with form and color, however unconventional they were. Marquet painted mostly landscapes and preferred to work with unmixed, pure colors. Unlike many of his fellow artists, he was not afraid of using pure black, painting bold contours and shadows. Albert Marquet learned to master colors out of necessity: in his early years, he was poor and could afford only the cheapest pigments. He learned how to balance the browns, grays, and other muted tones.

7. Georges Rouault

Georges Rouault was born into a working-class family and had to tailor his artistic inclinations to practical needs. As a teenager, he worked as a stained glass maker and restorer. Later, Rouault studied at Gustave Moreau’s studio and became Moreau’s museum curator after the artist passed away. Unlike many of his Fauvist friends, Rouault often painted allegorical and religious scenes, usually in dark tones. His early practice with glass left a lasting mark on his oeuvre: even after moving to oil painting, he kept the thick black contours and jewel-toned planes of color typical for glass.

Rouault designed his works to be “expressive, not beautiful.” His first oil paintings were heavily inspired by Gustave Moreau and Titian. Strictly speaking, he had little in common with the rest of the Fauvists: his works were dark, often with a mystical undertone or a tone of a bitter social satire.

8. Raoul Dufy

Raoul Dufy grew up in a poor family and had to quit school to earn a living in a coffee company. Working a full-time job as a 14-year-old, he managed to save money to attend private painting classes after work. Dufy’s office windows faced a seaport, so he frequently painted boats and sailors. The decisive shift in his career happened when he won a scholarship based in Paris, which allowed him to move and create art professionally.

Dufy deliberately avoided emotionally tense subjects and excessive drama. His works were joyful and uplifting, exploding with bold colors. His favorite color was blue, as he believed it was the only one that maintained its expressive independence when surrounded by others. Apart from fine arts, Dufy worked with furniture, stage design, and public art. He also collaborated with the legendary fashion designer Paul Poiret, designing textiles for his brand.

9. Jacqueline Marval: The Woman Fauvist Artist

Unfortunately, women artists were rare among Fauvists. Jacqueline Marval was an exception, and her male colleagues encouraged her. Although she demonstrated artistic inclinations as a child, her parents, who were both school teachers, envisioned a similar career and a conventional marriage to a salesman for her.

Her artistic career began when she divorced her husband and moved in with a new partner, the Parisian painter Francois Joseph Girot, a student of Gustave Moreau and friend of many prominent Fauvists. Fellow artists and critics appreciated Marval’s work for its boldness of color and subject matter and confident brushwork. She mostly painted women—either nude in their bedrooms surrounded by precious objects and draperies or in groups spending time together on beaches and in living rooms. Marval was an active member of the artistic community and was one of the leaders of the campaign against prosecuting Kees van Dongen for the alleged indecency of his paintings.

Although Abstract Expressionism, with its capacious, splattered, and stained canvases and its heroic, larger-than-life artists wielding their brushes like their lives depended on it, was still the most famous art movement of the 1950s, and painting was certainly the most esteemed medium, a few artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns challenged its sway over the art world, offering subversive and oftentimes amusing works that refused to identify themselves as painting or sculpture. Neo-Dada artists also collaborated with dancers and composers, finding inspiration in the dialogue between the disciplines.

What Is Neo-Dada? A Primer

To understand what “neo-dada” means, it’s necessary to first understand “Dada.” Dada art was a style that originated in Europe during and just after the WWI years, flourishing in cities such as Zurich, Paris, and Berlin. (Although in German “da da” is translated to “there, there” and in French it means “hobbyhorse,” the term “dada” as used here is nonsense; it was simply intended to be as anti-art a name as possible.)

Hugo Ball, its founder, stated, “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.” Dada was flamboyant, irreverent, nonsensical, and piquant, offering critiques of its bellicose and soulless society through performance, sculpture, poetry, and text.

Neo-Dada, then, was the label given to the 1950s American artists who also eschewed traditional boundaries between the mediums of painting and sculpture and who refused to jettison real life from their works like the Abstract Expressionists endeavored to do. Rauschenberg claimed that he worked in the “gap between art and life,” and Johns, for example, included real beer cans and images of maps and flags, while Cy Twombly evoked the scrawls of graffiti in his pieces.

Neo-Dada artists found inspiration in the quotidian and the commonplace, the base and the banal. They were experimental, and their work was often challenging to the lay viewer, who struggled with symphonies of silence and paintings of pure white. Nevertheless, their works permeated the consciousness of the art world and facilitated important conversations about art’s telos.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)

Rauschenberg is perhaps the most famous of the Neo-Dada artists. A prolific, dexterous, and endlessly inventive creator, his “combines” challenged the traditional separation of mediums. Critic Brian O’Doherty wrote of the combines in 1963, “For many years Mr. Rauschenberg has been pointed steadily towards an annihilation of conventions in a new freedom. His main characteristic is a conquest of common, everyday reality from a bridgehead of abstract expressionism. He is trying to materialize an ambiguous limbo between high art and low life.”

In these works, such as Monogram (1954-1959), he combined found objects in the mode of the “readymade”—Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s term for the found object that became a work of art when activated by the artist and the exhibition space—painted surfaces, and collage. In Canyon (1959), he combined a taxidermied eagle his friend found in the trash, paintings, a photo, and other printed matter. In Bed (1955), he took an actual bed with a wooden frame, sheets, and a pillow, scribbled and splattered paint on it, and then hung it from the wall like a traditional painting.

Rauschenberg refused to be confined by any label or fall prey to the assumption advocated by the Abstract Expressionists that an artist must be cerebral, stoic, and removed from the vicissitudes of life. Rather, Rauschenberg said, “I always wanted my work—whatever happened in the studio—to look more like what was going on outside the window.” This meant that he was also engaged in other avant-garde scenes, such as music and dance.

Scholar Brandon Joseph wrote, “Throughout his career, Rauschenberg was most inventive when in intense, dialogic, and collaborative contexts, from Black Mountain to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (for which he provided sets, lighting, and costume design) to the Judson Dance Theater (which he lit and performed with) and beyond.” Joseph claimed that “none of Rauschenberg’s contemporaries…would maintain the artist’s multiplicitous and inherently deconstructive interest in combining mediums (and media) into amalgams that would exist simultaneously within all of the media they straddled—and at the same time none.”

Jasper Johns (1930-)

If there is a figure who came close to Rauschenberg’s inventiveness, it was his friend, lover, and collaborator Jasper Johns. It’s hard to even sum up his oeuvre, and anyone hard-pressed to name his most famous piece would have to choose between the flags, the maps, the numbers, the cross-hatch paintings, the beer cans, the plaster heads, and so on. Johns was an erudite, serious, and accomplished artist, but he chose to incorporate quotidian objects and imagery, “things the mind already knows,” as he put it.

Johns had started off as a painter but struggled with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. He destroyed all his previous work and moved into recognizable objects like the flag and the alphabet. He preferred to use primary colors and while he did use paint, he mixed it with encaustic to create a quick-drying material that had almost sculptural qualities.

The Broad Museum says of Johns’ early encaustic paintings that “Johns presents images that move into the realm of objects and wrestle with the validity of representation as a philosophical concept. The targets and flags, in the words of critic Leo Steinberg, were ‘co-extensive’ with their canvases, existing somewhere between a symbol and a thing in the world. Not only did these paintings begin Johns’s successful dismantling of modern art through his ironic analysis of structures and rituals, but they also became the innovative new ground on which a generation of painters and sculptors made their work.”

Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022)

Claes Oldenburg made the case, as emphatically as Warhol with his soup cans, that food could be art. A hamburger, a piece of pie, french fries and ketchup—Oldenburg took American comfort food and made it into rather uncomfortable art. The pieces were grotesquely large, made of either plaster or vinyl. The vinyl pieces, or the “soft sculptures,” flopped, sagged, and sighed, while the plaster pieces maintained a brittle rigidity.

Oldenburg opened The Store in 1961, recreating the look and feel of neighborhood shops but with a spin. He had numerous small art pieces displayed like normal wares, but they were made of plaster-dipped muslin over wire and covered with garishly bright paint and had something uncanny about them. Like Rauschenberg and Johns, as well as the Pop artists, Oldenburg was interested in the banal, in the disposable, in the detritus of late-capitalist society.

In a 1961 artist’s statement, Oldenburg elucidated his feelings about art: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, / that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. / I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting / point of zero. / I am for an art that embroils itself with the / everyday crap and still comes out on top. / I am for an art that imitates the human, that is / comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is / necessary.”

Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

Cy Twombly’s scrawls and scratches represented a new type of gesture in visual art. Gagosian Gallery explains that “he produced works that [were] simultaneously personal and mythological, allowing narrative, language, and inner visions to erupt from his intimate, abstract notations,” doing so through painting’s traditional tenets, such as using canvas and hanging works from the wall, but ultimately deviating from many of the medium’s other characteristics.

He made marks and then erased them, referenced calligraphy and graffiti, left gaps and fragmented lines, traversed centuries, and conflated civilizations. He brought in sex, dirt, and violence, dialoguing between the ancient and the contemporary.

In 1962’s Leda and the Swan, he took the ancient myth of Jupiter turning into a swan and raping Leda and abstracted it into a cacophony of line and splotch and smear. The violent assault of Leda comes across through the violent assault on the canvas by crayon, pencil, and paint. The colors suggest semen, blood, feathers, and feces; the few discernible images of a window, heart, and phallus suggest the outlines of the story, but it is the feeling produced by the piece that gives it its power. Academy (1955) is sparser, using oil-based house paint (which Twombly smeared with his fingers), pencil, colored pencil, and pastel on canvas to create what looks simply like gray pencil scrawlings on canvas.

Critic Ann Temkin remarked that for Twombly, “the canvas was a field for mark-making that shouted and whispered, surged and slowed, swirled and skittered. The approach harked back to the automatism of the Surrealists…but now it had traded biomorphic elegance for a seemingly untutored rawness.” Temkin concluded that “Academy alludes to a tradition, a school, a set of accepted practices. Yet it is attached to a painting that writes itself out of art school and finds instead a territory unoccupied by official precepts or proscriptions,” and indeed, Academy is certainly something that its namesake would not have (initially) accepted.

John Cage (1912-1992)

John Cage was a composer who studied with modernist, atonalist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Like all composers, he sought to communicate through music, but he abandoned hierarchy and order in his pieces, not to mention the heroism and ego that came with being a composer. He valued the senses, chance, and spontaneity, and was also inspired by Duchamp’s readymade, looking for ways to interpret that pulled from real life in music. Cage said of Duchamp’s famous The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923) that the thing he liked so much is that “I can focus my attention on wherever I wish. It helps me blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence.”

And it was silence for which Cage became famous (or infamous). In his piece 4’33, a piano player sits down on the bench before the instrument but does not touch the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In that time span, what seems to be silence is instead filled with sounds—people coughing, shuffling their feet, whispering to their companions, moving their chairs, tapping their heels. The first time this was staged, the audience’s consternation was palpable, but Cage didn’t care; he was asking his audience what music really meant—what the limits of silence and sound really were.

The composer and scholar Kyle Gan suggested that the piece “begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.”

Judson Dance Theater: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and More

The Judson Dance Theater was a collective of dancers, choreographers, and visual artists headquartered at the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s West Village. The Church was a well-known performance space where Judson staged numerous works that challenged prevailing notions of dance. The main figures, including Yvonne Rainer (1934-), Trisha Brown (1936-2017), Lucinda Childs (1940-), and Simone Forti (1935-), wanted to democratize dance by emphasizing “task movement”—the commonplace, anti-expressionistic gesture.

The New York Times said of the movement in 1982, “following their own creative hunches, the Judson dancers experimented with structures ranging from the most rigid to the most improvisatory and incorporated many kinds of movements into compositions. To simplify what resulted, it could be said that these choreographers tended to emphasize the physical reality of the here and now and to maintain that any kind of movement can serve as a dance movement.”

We Shall Run, a 1963 piece, consisted of dancers simply running across the stage. They wore ordinary clothing and did simple, repeated actions. In Trio A, Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 masterpiece, there was a solo performer with no music—another thing Judson wanted to do was separate dance from music, the former being usually subordinated to the latter—who performed everyday movements. It was an exploration of action, not storytelling, and avoided any dramatic gestures like leaps or pirouettes. Though it was a difficult piece for a dancer to perform, it looked deceptively simple.

Rainer’s 1965 “No Manifesto,” a text she penned to articulate the new type of dance she promulgated, can describe much of neo-dada art as a whole:

“No to spectacle. / No to virtuosity. / No to transformations / and magic and / make-believe. / No to the glamour / and transcendence / of the star mage. / No to the heroic. / No to the anti-heroic. / No to trash imagery. / No to involvement of / performer or spectator, / No to style. / No to camp. / No to seduction of / spectator by the wiles / of the performer. / No to eccentricity. / No to moving or being / moved.”

While most people know the name Pablo Picasso, how many of his artworks can you name? Did you know that across his 70-year career, he produced more than 50,000 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and more? The Spanish master manipulated mediums, forms, and genres, never ceasing to experiment and never settling on one style for too long. Consequently, he has left behind an eclectic portfolio from the melancholic depths of his Blue Period to the radical geometric fragments of Cubism and the agonizing protest of his political murals. Start your exploration of Picasso with 12 of his most iconic masterpieces that every art lover should know.

1. Self-Portrait, 1900

Pablo Picasso began his artistic training quite conventionally, with the Old Masters and Roman Antiquity as the key source materials. However, by his early 20s, he had already begun experimenting with modernist techniques. Picasso created this self-portrait when he was only 18 years old, a year before he moved from Barcelona to Paris. He already demonstrated immense technique and command of his medium, working in a Post-Impressionist style that is still quite realistic but already departing into experimentation. Over the years, Picasso created countless self-portraits that would evolve with him and his artistic styles.

2. The Life, 1903

The Life was one of the most important paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period that came after the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Casagemas suffered from depression and shot himself in a Parisian cafe in front of his friends. Traumatized by his death, Picasso started painting in blue and green tones, usually on subjects of loss, poverty, and despair. The Life features a portrait of Casagemas, almost nude, embraced by the woman who rejected him not long before his death. Curiously, an X-ray of the painting showed that originally the work was a self-portrait, later repainted to resemble Casagemas.

3. Acrobat on a Ball, 1905

In 1904, Picasso fell in love with Fernande Olivier, a French artist and model who became his first long-term partner and major muse, easing the deep depression of his Blue Period. He gradually shifted tones and moved towards pinks and oranges. This stage of his life is usually called the Rose Period. He often painted groups of traveling performers and acrobats with whom he felt affinity. At the time, he lived in an artists’ commune called Bateau-Lavoir, sharing space with artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque. Bateau-Lavoir was a former factory building, almost ruined and squatted by artists, poets, and failed actors.

4. Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905-06

One of the most famous portraits of Picasso’s pre-Cubist era was of Gertrude Stein. Stein was a prominent art collector and writer whose influence, in many ways, defined the culture of her era. Picasso’s work on the portrait was far from easy, with more than 90 painstaking sittings producing almost no result. The artist was dissatisfied with his work on the face of his model and even thought of abandoning the work altogether. At some point, he erased part of the image and left his studio for several weeks. The break forced Picasso to rethink his relationship with the painted image. Instead of relying on the physical accuracy of the face and body, he decided to focus on the impression Stein created as a personality: confident, substantial, and observant.

5. Self-Portrait, 1907

Another self-portrait, this time at the age of 25, reflected Picasso’s obsession with African and Romanesque art. At the time, he was looking for alternatives to traditional Western visual language and found them in African sculpture. In May 1907, he visited the dusty, poorly lit Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris. He later described seeing traditional African ceremonial masks and sculptures for the first time as a spiritual awakening. His images were already being simplified to straight lines and geometric forms, but they did not exactly reach the mathematical complexity of Cubism.

6. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was one of Picasso’s most radical works. It shook the art world and launched an aesthetic revolution that would lead to the birth of Cubism. In this work, Picasso’s obsession with African art reached its peak. Picasso painted a group of sex workers; at the time, these women often earned extra by posing for artists. According to some art historians, the shocking and threatening faces and curves of their bodies were dictated by Picasso’s experience of venereal disease caught in a Parisian brothel. Suffering from symptoms, the artist channeled his suffering into the fear of women he felt were responsible for his state.

7. Ma Jolie, 1912

After Les Demoiselles, Picasso focused on the invention of Cubism. Cubism was a highly intellectual form of art that required dissecting and analyzing objective reality, turning it into a collection of planes, forms, and angles. To focus on the analytical aspect, Cubists like Picasso and Georges Braque simplified the color palette to grays and browns. Ma Jolie was one such bold experiment, representing Picasso’s then-partner, Eva Gouel, playing the guitar.

8. Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, 1917-18

After World War I, many Western artists took a step back from their radical experiments and returned to more traditional art forms. Picasso was one of them, temporarily moving to the Neoclassical style. One of the most famous works of that period was the portrait of Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian dancer who came to France with Sergei Diaghilev’s dancing company Ballets Russes. Picasso painted it to celebrate their engagement. Even though he painted Olga in a conventional style, he still added his signature experimental element by leaving most of the canvas blank. The marriage lasted for 17 years but was rarely a happy one due to Picasso’s infidelity.

9. Guernica, 1937

Guernica is perhaps the most famous anti-war painting ever painted. In 1937, German forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica at the request of right-wing dictator Francisco Franco. Spain at the time was going through a bloody civil war, and the left-wing Republican government tried to gather support in Europe. Picasso painted the shocking image of the city in chaos for the Paris World Fair as an attempt to raise awareness about the conflict.

10. The Weeping Woman, 1937

The Weeping Woman was one of the most famous paintings by Picasso and one of the ugliest illustrations of his behavior towards women. Starting a relationship with Dora Maar, he did not care enough to break up with his previous lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Amused, Picasso openly pitted both women against each other and even tried to force them to physically fight each other. Dora Maar’s distressed image became the basis for The Weeping Woman. Picasso turned a talented and sharp-witted woman into a hysterical mess during an ugly breakdown. This was not the type of gesture one would expect from a caring partner.

11. Bull’s Head, 1942

Although the work of Pablo Picasso is most frequently discussed in relation to his painting, he was a multi-faceted and curious artist who enjoyed experimenting with mediums. He worked with costume design, architecture, ceramics, and, of course, sculpture. One of his most famous creations was a Dada-like assemblage, Bull’s Head, made out of a seat and handlebars of a broken bicycle. Famous Parisian photographer Brassai, who was a close friend of Picasso and had recorded conversations with the two in the painter’s studio, once asked him about the work. Picasso told him that the idea of combining these objects came to him in a flash, without conscious thinking.

12. Ecce Homo, 1971

One of Pablo Picasso’s last works was a strange image based on an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn. The original image illustrated the Biblical scene of Jesus being presented in front of the crowd just before his execution. Picasso was not religious, but he revered Rembrandt, and thus, he reimagined the scene into a secular image of a theatrical play and its audience. The chaotic crowd featured familiar faces: fellow artists, ex-partners, and other significant figures in Picasso’s life. For the artist who died less than two years later at the age of 91, this work was, in a way, the final bow at the end of his career.

Wassily Kandinsky’s path toward abstraction was a complex one. He decided to become a painter at the age of thirty and, for several years, searched for his own expressive language. He found it at the intersection of science and spirituality, studying Theosophy, religious texts, and recent scientific discoveries. Kandinsky saw abstract art as the necessary tool to develop humanity’s spiritual consciousness and elevate their souls to a new state of being. Read on to learn more about Wassily Kandinsky’s thoughts on the spiritual power of abstract art.

Wassily Kandinsky & the Impressionists: First Steps Toward Abstraction

An important event that moved Wassily Kandinsky towards abstract art was his first encounter with Impressionist painting, particularly, a work by Claude Monet. In 1891, Moscow had its first exhibitions of the Impressionists, which included one of the paintings from Monet’s Haystack series. Later, Kandinsky remembered how unnerved he was with the composition at first, believing that he would not have guessed the work’s subject without the aid of a wall text. He felt acute discomfort because the painter chose to work in a way that was so unclear and confusing.

However, confronted with an unfamiliar experience, he soon realized that the painting, so vague and messy at first, appeared in his mind again and again, in every small detail. Looking at the Haystack, Kandinsky realized that the subject matter as the supposed core of every painted work was already compromised, with the painterly qualities and emotional effect taking charge of the viewer’s experience instead.

Kandinsky believed his generation was living in a time of profound cultural shock and a crisis of outdated values, and he believed it was the perfect time to direct one’s gaze from the phenomena of the material world toward aspects of the invisible inner life of every being. By skipping the imitation of the physical world, art could have launched a spiritual transformation, affecting the complex system of the human soul.

Kandinsky and Rudolf Steiner

Among the figures that left the most lasting effect on Wassily Kandinsky’s oeuvre was the German philosopher and spiritualist figure Rudolf Steiner. At the time of their first encounter, Steiner was the leader of the German branch of the Theosophical Society, a philosophical movement aimed at bridging the gap between art and science through the exploration of the spiritual. Theosophists based their ideology on the idea that all world religions had a single set of basic world principles ingrained into them. Still, most of them relied on Hinduism and Buddhism as the main sources for their conceptual framework. Steiner was more Western-centered, insisting that Christianity already had all the necessary answers. He frequently toured Europe with lectures on the transformative power of art, the underexplored aspects of natural science, and highly questionable theories on the spiritual evolution of human races.

Theosophy was immensely popular in Kandinsky’s time, with many famous artists attending Steiner’s lectures or even meeting him personally. Apart from Kandinsky, two other pioneers of abstract art Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian met Rudolf Steiner. It is possible that Hilma af Kint even played a decisive role in the development of Kandinsky’s abstraction. Although there is no direct proof of a link between the two artists, it is possible that Steiner shared at least part of his experience in Stockholm, potentially influencing Kandinsky’s own exploration of the non-figurative.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Kandinsky’s Theoretical Oeuvre

Apart from being a prolific painter and talented musician, Kandinsky was an outstanding writer. His years of thorough and diverse education, as well as his law practice, developed his habit of putting thoughts into verbal form. His occupation as a lawyer allowed him to theoretically justify his artistic practice, building it within a certain theoretical and practical framework. The work that expressed his ideas the most thoroughly was his famous essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Kandinsky explained that every work of art was a product of its time that carried unique aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual connotations that characterized its era and both expressed and shaped the perception of its contemporaries. That being said, by mindlessly imitating the principles of art of previous eras, artists created works that are dead and dysfunctional, even if technically successful. For Kandinsky, the era of post-Renaissance materialism had a detrimental impact on both the art and the souls of his contemporaries. Instead of focusing on emotions, feelings, and spiritual experiences, art turned towards imitating nature, either in its entirety or through certain aesthetic interpretations. As an example of such interpretations, Kandinsky cited Impressionism, which, despite its progressive visual form, remained committed to the supposedly accurate reflection of reality.

In that environment, art lost its transformative power and turned into a decoration and a commodity to be discussed only in the context of its material value. To find its way out of the deep creative crisis caused by the materialist worldview, the art of Kandinsky’s era had to abandon any attempts at legitimizing itself through theories and reason (which is ironic, given Kandinsky’s own way of expressing and justifying his ideas), and focus on uplifting the spirit of its audience. To find that focus, artists had to learn from their predecessors whom Kandinsky called the primitives—the artists who worked before or outside the dominant artistic tradition of the Western world. Instead of imitating these people, contemporary artists had to study the expressive and spiritual potential of their lines and colors.

The Spiritual Triangle

Kandinsky envisioned spiritual growth as an acute triangle constantly moving upward. Its upper section was reserved for progressive thinkers, artists, and creatives, who led entire generations toward new spiritual heights, despite often being misunderstood by their contemporaries. The lower sections were inhabited by less talented and progressive souls. Gradually, these individuals learned to appreciate the intellectual and spiritual ideas from the top and passed them down. In this way, the triangle continually ascended, even though the majority of its inhabitants remained unaware of the process.

In Kandinsky’s mind, the unpopular yet necessary idea from the triangle’s top of his time was to leave behind figuration in images and focus entirely on the properties of color and form. He insisted on the search for the inner objective beauty that was not tied to any natural object or event. Moreover, he believed that this inner beauty sometimes contradicted the conventional visual one and thus provoked outrage among the public. As an example of an artist producing exactly that kind of beauty, Kandinsky named the famous composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg was known for rejecting the traditional rules of musical composition and tones. Instead of relying on perfect harmonies, he extracted the emotional potential of dissonance. Despite public criticism of Schoenberg’s work, Kandinsky and his peers saw the ways in which he expanded traditional notions of musical beauty and turned them from purely acoustic into psychological.

According to Kandinsky, the cultural and intellectual state of the era called for a thorough and radical transformation of all forms of art. Visual artists particularly needed to find new forms and leave the figurative imitation of reality behind. The required instruments for it, in his opinion, could be found in another form of art—music, which was the least of all connected to physical reality. Like composers using sounds of music, painters had to learn to reach their audiences’ perception with form and color. Such transformation, wrote Kandinsky, was required by the inner necessity of both a single soul and humanity to progress spiritually.

Wassily Kandinsky & the Spiritual Power of Abstraction

Abstract art for Kandinsky was akin to ritualistic movement with no apparent practical purpose: its inexplicable mystery created a sense of grandeur and attracted attention to something that would otherwise be ignored. In the artist’s opinion, the human soul, compassion, and creative potential would progress when fueled by such mystical experiences. Particularly, in his writings Kandinsky paid extensive attention to the correspondence of color and form, and how one could diminish or elevate another. For example, he described a yellow triangle and a blue circle as the two opposing forces that balance each other.

Abstract painting was supposed to develop humankind’s empathetic and spiritual potential by triggering various emotions in its audience as if calibrating its settings. Kandinsky compared the human soul to an intricate piano in need of tuning, colors to keys, and human eyes to hammers. In that context, artists acted as piano players, forcing the whole instrument of the soul to vibrate and produce inspiring sounds.

In the summer of 1886, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted 35 still life paintings portraying flowers in vases, painted in brilliant colors. At that time, the artist was living in Paris in an apartment with his younger brother Theo who was working at the international art dealership Boussod, Valadon & Cie. Van Gogh’s sudden commitment to the subject of floral still lifes marked an important moment in the development of the artist’s style through which he was later able to paint masterpieces such as Starry Night and Almond Blossom.

Van Gogh in Paris: New Discoveries and Financial Trouble

Van Gogh decided to move to Paris in 1886 after spending a few months enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. He had spent his early development as an artist learning from the tradition of Dutch realist painting, but was aware that new developments in the world of art were burgeoning in Paris. Naturally, he wanted to participate in this dynamic environment and learn the artistic approaches of his contemporaries in order to develop his own style and technique. But more importantly, he wanted to take lessons at the studio of the artist Fernand Cormon. Van Gogh arrived in Paris at the end of February 1886 and soon enrolled in Cormon’s studio, although he only stayed there a few weeks. Nevertheless, his trip to Paris was far from fruitless.

Paris was a major turning point in Van Gogh’s artistic career. Discovering the light, colorful canvases of Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas showed him a brand new side of painting, while at the same time forcing him to face the growing reputation of realism as outdated. Not only did he witness avant-garde paintings, but he also became friends with a number of artists, such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and Paul Signac. He called this group the Painters of the Petit Boulevard. Each artist had a different theory and style of painting, and Van Gogh learned something from all of them. At the same time, woodblock prints from Japan called ukiyo-e had gained immense popularity in Europe during the 19th century, and the role of these prints in shaping Van Gogh’s style cannot be overstated.

But while the artist was living in the midst of one of the greatest art historical developments in Europe, his financial reality was less glamorous. Sharing the apartment with his brother saved him some money, but the reality was that Van Gogh did not hold a stable job and therefore relied on selling paintings as his source of income. He had hoped that Paris would be a suitable market for his work, but his work was not yet up to date with the modernist taste.

And so Theo took care of the finances, and Vincent focused all his time and energy on painting. He had hoped to develop his skill in figure painting, something that he had worked on both at the Royal Academy in Antwerp and in Cormon’s studio, but models were expensive, and Van Gogh had to look for another way. It was then that the artist turned to painting still lifes of flowers. Flowers were readily available and proved to be incredibly useful subjects for Van Gogh, particularly for his development as a colorist.

Flowers as a Means to Study Color Theory

In 1884, Van Gogh read a book by Charles Blanc that laid out a scientific theory of color. The theory proposed the concept of complementary colors: colors that intensify each other when placed together, providing maximum contrast. Blanc included a color wheel in his publication that depicted the complementary colors placed opposite each other: yellow and purple, red and green, and blue and orange. Color theory changed Van Gogh’s approach to color even before he set foot in Paris. “Color expresses something in itself,” he wrote to Theo in 1885, and expressed his admiration for the works of the French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix who applied color theory in his paintings.  Learning about color theory changed Van Gogh’s approach to color in his early days, but it was only in Paris that he could unleash the full potential of this theory by using bright and bold colors.

Flower still lifes were a helpful way to practice color theory in Paris. As mentioned above, lacking the money for models, Van Gogh started painting flowers in vases to practice his understanding of color theory. He painted 35 such works, including Vase with Gladioli and Chinese Asters and Vase with Zinnias and Geraniums. Flower still lifes took up a large portion of his summer during 1886, and he took up the project with enthusiasm, as he explained in a letter from October 1886:

“And now for what regards what I myself have been doing, I have lacked money for paying models, else I had entirely given myself to figure painting but I have made a series of color studies in painting simply flowers, red poppies, blue corn flowers and myosotys. White and rose roses, yellow chrysanthemums – seeking oppositions of blue with orange, red and green, yellow and violet, seeking THE BROKEN AND NEUTRAL TONES to harmonise brutal extremes. Trying to render intense COLOR and not a grey harmony.”

The artist explained his goals with these paintings at length, focusing on harmonizing a set of colors in a composition. Another notable point is that he called these still life paintings of flowers color studies, clearly stating his intentions with these works. These paintings also demonstrate the artist’s interest in different stylistic techniques. For example, the painting Fritillaries in a Copper Vase shows Van Gogh’s experimentation with the Pointillist technique pioneered by the Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. This style consisted of painting with dots and small dashes, something that Van Gogh implemented primarily in the background of this painting.

Van Gogh would be sent flowers regularly from his acquaintances, and he would paint them almost as soon as they arrived. The genre of floral still lifes offered the opportunity to test a wide range of colors and their interaction with light on the canvas, all the while being cost-effective. This project is today recognized as an important step in the transformation of Van Gogh’s palette from the dark and dull colors of his Dutch period to the bright and intense paintings from his mature years.

Floral Still Lifes, Adolphe Monticelli, and Impasto

A significant figure who influenced Van Gogh’s style in Paris was the French artist Adolphe Monticelli. Van Gogh witnessed Monticelli’s works in Paris during the summer of 1886 and soon discovered a different way to approach brushwork in his paintings. Monticelli worked with rough and fierce brushstrokes, but more importantly, he applied his paint thickly. Viewing Monticelli’s paintings, such as Flowers in a Blue Vase, resonated deeply with Van Gogh, and his thickly painted color studies of flowers marked the beginning of his experimentation with impasto. This technique is a crucial aspect of Van Gogh’s oeuvre and was never abandoned by the artist. Apart from his bold approach to color, his passionate brushwork featuring thick impasto is what sets Van Gogh apart in the history of European art.

For example, Van Gogh’s Vase with Chinese Asters and Gladioli not only features a wider and lighter palette than works from his Dutch period, but it also shows his impassioned brushstrokes and a generous application of paint. The petals of the flowers are almost three-dimensional, with each individual brushstroke clearly visible. The red background also shows an interesting use of the impasto technique through a basketweave pattern, something that also appears in many of his later still lifes.

The entire painting appears much more dynamic and intense than his works from the previous year, such as The Potato Eaters. The choice of flowers as a subject complemented this newfound stylistic practice as painting flowers required a speedy brush to capture fresh blooms before they wilted. Later in 1888, Van Gogh described his approach to brushwork in a quite straightforward way: “I follow no system of brushwork at all; I hit the canvas with irregular strokes which I leave as they are, impastos, uncovered spots of canvas . . .”

The Commercial Benefit of Paintings of Flowers

Van Gogh also chose to focus on flower still lifes in Paris because of their commercial appeal. This genre was in high demand in the contemporary art market, and many young artists made their living selling still life paintings of flowers. Facing a financial impediment due to the lack of any sales both in Antwerp and Paris, Van Gogh was eager to find buyers for his paintings. This was, however, difficult as the artist was only beginning to understand the taste of the modern market and had not yet discovered a style that was both modernist and unique to him. Flower still lifes appeared as a way out of this issue, but his goals with this project eventually shifted as he discovered the potential of this genre to experiment with color theory and brushwork. Nevertheless, Van Gogh was not able to sell these paintings during his lifetime.

While the decision to paint flowers in Paris was linked both to economic concerns and his technical development as a colorist, Van Gogh continued painting flowers long after leaving Paris. In fact, the still life series of sunflowers that he painted between 1888 and 1889 in Arles became one of his most famous masterpieces. These were made as decorations that he hung in the Yellow House where he lived during his time in Arles and were also meant as saleable paintings.

With Sunflowers, Van Gogh had found a flower that was his. The practice of picking one signature flower was common among artists as it distinguished them in the art market and helped establish their identity among the masses. Not only did Van Gogh place his signature in two of his Sunflowers on the vase, but he also clearly declared his ownership of the flower in a letter to Gauguin from January 1889: “if Jeannin has the peony, Quost the hollyhock, I indeed, before others, have taken the sunflower.”

How Flower Still Lifes and Color Theory Shaped Van Gogh’s Art

The experiments with floral still lifes in Paris were foundational to Van Gogh’s artistic development in the later years. Equipped with the knowledge of new stylistic techniques and color theory, Van Gogh left Paris in February 1888, longing for the peace of the countryside after spending two years in the busy environments of the French capital. He arrived in Arles, a town located in the south of France, that offered him the brilliant natural light, variety of colorful landscapes, and serenity that he needed to continue his work with renewed focus. His letters were now full of detailed descriptions of the color he saw around him under the Provençal sun, such as in this letter to Theo from May 1888: “Many of the subjects here are just — in character — the same as in Holland — the difference is in the color. There’s sulphur everywhere where the sun beats down.”

Some notable flower still lifes from his later years include Oleanders, Irises, and Roses. The time in Arles, however, also offered him the opportunity to work with models. These were usually people he knew personally instead of professional models, such as the postman Joseph Roulin, his wife Augustine Roulin, and the Belgian artist Eugène Boch. Nevertheless, portraits of these subjects are a testament to Van Gogh’s mastery of color and brushwork and show his success as a modernist painter who developed one of the most unique styles in European art history.

Many of the world’s most famous artists, like Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, fall under the umbrella of Modernism, even though their styles vary widely. So, how exactly do we define the Modernist era? Modern art is defined by its rejection of traditional academic standards. While historians debate the exact starting point, the 1863 Salon des Refusés marked a clear break, giving artists new freedom from the Academy’s rigid rules. Over the following hundred years, a succession of visionaries abandoned perspective, emotional restraint, physical representation, and artistic craft itself to create something new. Understand art in the Modernist era with ten pivotal works from modern masters.

1. Édouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863

Édouard Manet is often seen as the artist who cracked open the door to Modernism. His Luncheon on the Grass wasn’t just a painting. It was a provocation that sparked a movement. The scene shows two clothed men casually picnicking with a nude woman. She isn’t Venus or a goddess, but a modern-day figure, unidealized, staring directly at the viewer. That blunt realism, combined with rough brushstrokes, flat lighting, and an awkward sense of depth, shocked 19th-century Salon-goers accustomed to polished historical scenes.

Rejected by the official Salon, Luncheon on the Grass found its home in the Salon des Refusés. Its inclusion there marked a turning point in art history. Manet had rewired tradition, replacing old myths with modern-day reality. That shift toward the present, the personal, the provocative is what made Manet the father of Modern art.

2. Eugène Bataille (Sapeck), Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe, 1887

An early Modern group that headlined the beginning of the period was Les Arts Incoherents, French for “Incoherent Art.” Led by writer Jules Lévy, this group was defined by humor, satire, and accessibility of art, seen in the fact that most of their graphic artworks were cartoons published in widely distributed journals. While most of their works were made in the form of poetry or performance art, there were also some graphic artists, particularly Eugène Bataille.

Also known under the pseudonym Sapeck, his illustration of Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe for the journal Le Rire remains a virtually unknown piece of Modernism. Here, he draws the all-famed Mona Lisa with one simple addition: a pipe. Satirical images like this are still recreated today. Bataille appropriates the famous Mona Lisa by putting a phallic object in her mouth, poking fun at her renowned status.

Modernism is usually referred to as revolutionary, a title that makes all too much sense for someone like Bataille, living in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As rebellions spread throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it only made sense that the same ideas would integrate themselves into the art world. The works of the Modern era can even be argued to be a broad act of iconoclasm, defined as the destruction of images. While this term typically refers to the damaging of religious icons (such as the Byzantine Iconoclasm) or political images (seen during the French Revolution), its general idea can be applied to the Modern period. Artists were working to destroy the established concepts of art on a large scale, rejecting everything put in place before them.

3. Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

Vincent van Gogh created The Starry Night in June 1889 while seeking treatment at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, just a year before his death. Rather than a direct observation, the canvas is a composite of the view from his east-facing bedroom window, memory, and emotional imagination. Swirling waves of cobalt, indigo, and white surround eleven exaggerated, glowing stars and a crescent moon, applied with thick impasto brushstrokes.

The Starry Night stands as a pivotal bridge between late 19th-century Post-Impressionism and 20th-century Modernism. Where Impressionists sought to capture light as it fell in objective reality, van Gogh used color and form to express subjective psychological states. His approach influenced many subsequent Modernist artists. German Expressionists drew heavily on van Gogh’s dramatic brushwork and exaggerated forms to convey anxiety and internal conflict, while Henri Matisse and the Fauves built on van Gogh’s use of liberated, non-naturalistic color palettes.

4. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Painted in 1907, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is widely considered the single most decisive rupture in 20th-century art history, single-handedly firing the starting gun for Modernist abstraction. The massive 8-foot canvas portrays five prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona. Shattering Renaissance perspective, human bodies are reduced to jagged, razor-sharp planes and overlapping geometric forms rather than soft, naturalistic contours. The two figures on the right wear stylized facial features derived directly from African tribal masks.

The radical flattening of space in Demoiselles directly laid the foundation for Cubism, which Picasso developed alongside Georges Braque over the following years. By incorporating non-Western artistic motifs as equal visual tools rather than mere exotic decor, Picasso changed how European artists approached abstraction. Even Picasso’s closest avant-garde peers, including Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, were initially horrified by the painting’s aggression, proving just how far past the established boundaries of art it pushed.

5. Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled, 1915

An artist like Wassily Kandinsky leaned into abstraction and took it a step further, turning abstraction into non-representation. That is, the form is so deconstructed that there is hardly anything recognizable anymore. Kandinsky started Der Blaue Reiter group along with Franz Marc, where together they pioneered the German Expressionist movement. An artwork like Untitled (1915) confuses the viewer at first. The first question viewers ask sounds simple, but is deceptively complex: What is Kandinsky trying to show?

In his artworks, it’s not the what that’s important, but the how. Kandinsky is an expressionist who focuses on expressing or conveying emotions. What’s being shown on the canvas gives way to how it’s being shown. Kandinsky does this primarily through his colors. He considered himself a synesthete, so for him, color had sound, typically denoted by a certain instrument. For example, red was aggressive, and as a warm color, it moved out toward the viewer. On the other hand, blue was calming and receding in its cool qualities. Juxtaposing these two together created chaos and disharmony. If you look in the upper corners, you’ll see large splotches of red across from blue, which make the canvas almost tilt in imbalance. Keep this concept in mind when viewing Kandinsky’s works, and their meanings might come a little easier.

6. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1919

More than anyone or any movement, Duchamp and the Dadaists truly embody what Modernism means. Established in the early 20th century, Dadaism isn’t so different from Les Arts Incoherents. They focus on satire and appropriation, making fun of the elitism of the art world. Ironically, little did they know they’d become a symbol for what we consider elite art today.

Marcel Duchamp was a forerunner of Dadaism, with his most famous work, Fountain. In this piece, Duchamp took a manufactured urinal, flipped it on its side, and submitted it to be exhibited. Fountain created an outrage. If artists can take ready-made objects and call them art, then what does art really even mean? This question was the exact one Duchamp was trying to elicit.

7. Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948

Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 represents a seminal moment in late Modernism, marking the full emergence of Abstract Expressionism and shifting the center of the international art world from Paris to New York after World War II. Created in his Long Island barn, Number 1A, 1948 completely abandoned the traditional easel, palette, and brush-to-canvas contact.

Pollock laid raw, unprimed canvas flat on the floor, using his entire body to fling, drip, and pour liquid industrial enamel paint from sticks, trowels, and stiff brushes. Near the top right edge of the canvas, Pollock stamped his own paint-covered handprints directly onto the surface—an intimate signature linking the artist’s physical body to the recorded action. The painting lacks a central focal point, horizon line, or hierarchy. The dynamic web of black, white, grey, and metallic paint extends uniformly across the massive canvas, drawing the viewer’s eye endlessly around the surface.

Pollock made the act of creation the primary subject matter of his work. He treated the canvas as a record of kinetic movement, paving the way for modern Happenings, Performance Art, and Minimalist art movements in the mid-to-late 20th century.

8. Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52

Kandinsky’s Expressionism shouldn’t be confused with the later movement of Abstract Expressionism. Yes, he’s making abstract works in the expressionist style, but these movements are defined separately. One of the largest differences between the two is that Abstract Expressionism took place in the 1940s and 1950s, in the new art capital of New York City. A trailblazer in this style was the Dutchman Willem de Kooning. Artists like de Kooning were looking back a few decades, inspired by creators like Van Gogh and Munch. De Kooning’s Woman I takes a very traditional European subject, the female nude, and flips it on its head, not in a way entirely dissimilar from Bataille or Duchamp.

The figure depicted in Woman I is grotesque and disturbing, though it is still clear she is a woman through her prominent breasts. De Kooning was appropriating the female form, much like Duchamp or Sapeck did with the Mona Lisa, but on a broader scale. He reduced this woman down to her basic body parts, emphasizing the most important aspect of his movement: abstraction.

His dynamic, dramatic brushstrokes created a similar sense of chaos that Kandinsky depicted in his Untitled work. The colorful palette of pinks and greens gets drowned out by the large swatches of gray that create the woman’s form. We can’t tell if she’s standing or sitting, where her arms or legs are, or if she’s clothed or naked. The disorder of the form reflects the post-war world. Working in the United States, de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists distanced themselves from European tradition to forge a new, distinctly American art.

9. Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) marked the arrival of Pop Art, a decisive shift that challenged late Modernism’s obsession with heroic individualism and interior emotion. Debuted at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the artwork comprises 32 individual canvases; one for each variety of soup sold by Campbell’s at the time. Warhol utilized synthetic polymer paint applied partly via screen printing, mimicking the mechanical precision of commercial graphic design rather than traditional brushwork. The canvases were displayed horizontally on shelves, directly mimicking how grocery stores stock mass-produced consumer goods.

10. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, 1982

Modernism informally ended around the 1970s, ushering in a new era of Postmodernism. Artists like Duchamp and Kandinsky became household names. The context of the Cold War flipped the world upside down once again, and artists, doing what artists do, had to modify their works to keep up with the times.

This idea is exactly what the early Modernists were trying to do. For example, Manet took the traditional subject of a female nude in his Olympia and unveiled something deeper, something gritty, not unlike what de Kooning did with Woman I. His depiction of a sex worker astounded the Salon-goers in the 1860s, paving the way to the shocking early-Modern artworks of the Impressionists and beyond.

The neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat did what Duchamp did with L.H.O.O.Q. to Manet’s Olympia: he appropriated her iconic status as a symbol of the Modern art world. In Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, Basquiat took abstraction to an extreme, breaking apart all forms until everything was virtually unrecognizable.

It’s hard to tell where Olympia is meant to be. There’s some kind of face in the middle, but it looks nothing like Manet’s courtesan. Instead, it more accurately reflects the woman in de Kooning’s work: bald, ugly, and disturbing. Basquiat rejected the mainstreaming of modernism, reshaping its values into something that reflected his experience as a Black artist in New York.

Every artwork he made was an assault on the elitist art world. His graffiti medium portrayed the same idea of accessibility as Les Arts Incoherents did with their journals. Basquiat was painting identity, not just figures and bodies. He was evocative, just like the expressionists, forcing the viewer to analyze and interpret, not just observe.

Modern Art: How Did It Lead Us To Today?

The Modern era allowed artists to experiment with new forms, styles, and subjects. Without them, we might still be stuck in the stagnant tradition of academic formality. Imagine if every artwork looked just like a work made by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. Sure, they’re beautiful pieces to look at, but doesn’t it get quite boring? Shouldn’t we prefer a wide range of styles, enticing us with each new work we look at?

While Modern art can be hard to get, it’s still important to understand its place within art history. Without Modern artists, we could very well be trapped in the cycle of history without an escape. Their satirical takes on iconic artworks—and their abstract pieces that shattered traditional form—let audiences see something new each time. So, the next time you’re at a museum and feel overwhelmed by the complexity of Picasso or Matisse, remember: artists like them gave the art world freedom. That freedom opened the door to the full range of expression we enjoy today.

For more than two centuries, Japan remained largely isolated from the outside world under its national seclusion policy known as sakoku (1639–1853). This era came to an abrupt end in 1854, when Western pressure forced the country to open its ports and accept unequal trade treaties, setting the stage for the transformative Meiji Restoration. As Japan transitioned from feudal society to a modern nation-state, sweeping reforms reshaped society and altered the fate of its Buddhist heritage.

The Separation of Shintō and Buddhism in 1868

In 1868, the new Meiji government set out to redefine the nation’s political and cultural identity. At the heart of this transformation was the 1868 Edict on the Separation of Shintō and Buddhism (Shinbutsu Bunrei), which dismantled a syncretic religion that had shaped Japanese spiritual life for more than a millennium. By establishing Shintō as the ideological and ritual foundation of the modern state, the new regime fundamentally altered the place of Buddhism in Japan.

Shintō, Japan’s native belief system, centers on the worship of kami—deities or spirits associated with nature, ancestors, and sacred places. After Buddhism reached the archipelago via China and Korea in the sixth century, the two faiths gradually fused into a uniquely Japanese religious tradition. Shrines and temples often shared the same sites, while Buddhist priests performed rituals connected with Shintō beliefs. Under the doctrine of honji suijaku, many kami came to be understood as manifestations of Buddhist deities, giving rise to shared iconographic forms.

This centuries-old coexistence came under attack with the Meiji Restoration. Determined to forge a powerful and modern nation-state, the new government elevated Shintō as the embodiment of Japanese identity. Meanwhile, Buddhism became associated with the old political order and was increasingly portrayed as an imported foreign religion.

The Anti-Buddhist Movement in Meiji Japan

In theory, the new regulations provided for the administrative separation of Buddhism and Shintō rather than the destruction of either faith. In practice, some priests and local authorities interpreted them as a call for the complete eradication of Buddhism and consequently launched an extreme anti-Buddhist campaign, known in Japanese as haibutsu kishaku (“abolish Buddhism, destroy Śākyamuni”). The result was a period of religious turmoil.

The consequences were profound, but their intensity varied enormously from region to region. Across Japan, temples and shrines were abandoned and fell into disrepair. Waves of anti-Buddhist violence swept the country; in extreme cases, religious sites went up in flames, monks were defrocked, and sacred images, scriptures, and ritual objects were destroyed or dispersed. In some areas, bronze statues were melted down and treated as scrap metal, while elsewhere, stone Buddhas were smashed and repurposed as construction materials for new schools.

The Dispersal of Sacred Treasures Around the World

Since Buddhism had lost official patronage, temples facing financial hardship were forced to sell their possessions. The great Kōfuku-ji temple in Nara, once one of Japan’s most powerful Buddhist institutions, was disestablished; its lands were confiscated, buildings demolished, and sacred objects left neglected and broken.

In 1870, many of Kōfuku-ji’s statues and scriptures were put up for public sale. Contemporary accounts record that its five-story pagoda was purchased for 250 yen by a dealer who planned to burn it down and retrieve its metal fittings. It survived only because of concerns about the danger that such a fire would pose to the surrounding area. A structure that is now one of Nara’s most recognizable landmarks could, for one brief moment, be treated as little more than a source of salvage.

The transformation did not end there. Thousands of Buddhist objects flooded the antiques market. Some were rescued by monks and local residents. Others found their way into the collections of museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. Many more, however, passed into the hands of Western art dealers and private collectors, who arrived in Japan at precisely the moment when centuries-old religious artifacts were becoming available on an unprecedented scale, and often at prices far below their true value.

This created a striking disparity in perception. A Buddhist statue that had lost its ritual function could be worthless to a community seeking to distance itself from the past and dismantle an unwanted temple. To a foreign collector, however, the same statue could be regarded as an exceptional work of Japanese art. As these objects circulated through Japan and eventually crossed into Europe and North America, they became part of a growing market, laying the foundations of some of the earliest Western collections of Japanese Buddhist art.

From Devotional Image to Museum Masterpiece

One remarkable example is the Amida Buddha housed at the Musée Cernuschi in Paris. This monumental bronze sculpture survived the fire that destroyed the Banryū-ji Temple (Meguro district, Tokyo), where it was originally enshrined and was subsequently left exposed to the natural elements.

In 1871, the French-Italian banker, politician, and collector Henri Cernuschi (1821–1896) acquired the abandoned Buddha for 500 gold ryō during his journey through Asia. The statue was disassembled and transported to Paris, where it soon became the centerpiece of the grand hall in Cernuschi’s newly built mansion. Following his death, the residence and its extraordinary collection were bequeathed to the city of Paris, forming the foundation of the Musée Cernuschi. For more than a century, the sculpture has greeted visitors in the museum’s main gallery.

This story also illustrates a profound change in how Buddhist objects were understood. Once infused with spirituality and embedded in religious practice, the Amida Buddha crossed the sea and became part of the opulent decoration in a private interior as well as the main attraction of a museum. It lost its sacred identity and was classified in the West as a piece of art.

From Destruction to Preservation

The collapse of Japan’s Buddhist heritage also prompted a growing movement to preserve what remained. Among its most influential advocates was the American art historian Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), who witnessed firsthand the neglect, destruction, and commercialization of temples during the second half of the 19th century. He worked alongside Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913), a scholar and pioneering figure in modern Japanese art history, to promote the idea that Buddhist objects should be understood as works of national and artistic significance.

From a contemporary perspective, however, Fenollosa’s position appears rather complicated: as a collector, he participated in the very market created by the dispersal of Buddhist art, even as he increasingly championed these objects as cultural treasures worthy of preservation and display.

Nevertheless, Fenollosa and Okakura’s efforts contributed to a fundamental shift in Japanese attitudes toward Japan’s historic and religious legacy. The government gradually introduced measures and laws to protect important temples, sculptures, paintings, and other related objects. In this sense, the destruction of the haibutsu kishaku period helped expose the vulnerability of Japan’s cultural heritage and inspire the modern system to preserve it.

A New Era of Preservation for Japanese Sacred Art

The turning point came with the 1897 Law for the Preservation of Ancient Temples and Shrines (Koshaji Hozon Hō), which provided a legal framework for protecting historic religious sites and their treasures. The government established strict rules for restoring old temples, banned the export or alteration of designated cultural properties, and introduced official systems for identifying, registering, and safeguarding important Buddhist heritage.

The journey of Japan’s Buddhist artifacts from sacred objects to unwanted remnants of an old order, to commodities on an international market, and finally to protected cultural heritage, reveals the contradictions of the process of modernization. The Meiji Restoration transformed Japan into a modern nation-state, but at the cost of scattering pieces of its sacred heritage across the globe, a cultural loss whose consequences are still felt today.

Accordingly, some of the finest examples of Japanese Buddhist art are found not only in their native country, but in museums and collections across Europe and North America. Their presence abroad is a reminder of a turbulent moment when objects once rooted in Japan’s temples acquired entirely new lives far from home.

Van Gogh has one of the most distinct painting styles in European art. While it may seem like a product of his individual artistic genius, this style was not developed in isolation. The Dutch artist looked up to many artists, with four masters in particular having a huge impact on him. The influence of four artists led to pivotal developments in Van Gogh’s work. These four masters were Rembrandt van Rijn, Jean-François Millet, Eugène Delacroix, and Adolphe Monticelli, each influencing a different aspect of Van Gogh’s art.

Van Gogh’s Love of Rembrandt

Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt van Rijn are two of the biggest names in Dutch art history. It is then interesting to note the connection between the two, as Rembrandt was one of the earliest sources of influence on Van Gogh’s art. The Dutch Old Master was active two centuries before Van Gogh was born and was therefore already a well-established name during the 19th century. While living in the Netherlands, Van Gogh had some ideas about the developments in modern art in Paris, but had not yet been exposed to any of the new styles or techniques that his peers were working towards. As a result, his knowledge of painting was limited to the Dutch realist tradition, which in itself was heterogeneous.

In 1885, Van Gogh visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and saw Rembrandt’s painting The Jewish Bride. This allowed him to study the manner of the Old Master closely. An important thing that he learned from this close examination was that Rembrandt, along with other artists such as Frans Hals, painted quickly without revisiting the canvas too much. He noted that the canvases had minimal retouching and were essentially an arrangement of colors placed beside each other. Their technical perfection lay in the cohesive composition this arrangement produced when viewed from a distance.

Understanding this technique was significant for Van Gogh, and it stayed with him throughout his career as an artist. He started practicing it soon after his museum visit, producing the painting Still Life with Bible in one sitting. Once Van Gogh was exposed to the wonders of Impressionism and modern art in Paris in 1886, he quickly evolved his own palette and style to keep up with his peers and meet the demands of the art market. But Rembrandt’s influence stayed with him even after this transformation from the dark realist manner to the bright modern style, as most of the works that he made during his later years, particularly between 1888 and 1890, were made in one sitting.

The artist also found a way to combine the two by painting his own rendition of old works, such as The Raising of Lazarus, after Rembrandt. Both works depict stark stylistic differences as Van Gogh completely changed the color palette to incorporate bright yellows, greens, and blues in his rendition.

Millet and the Origin of a Peasant Painter

The French artist Jean-François Millet had a notable influence on Van Gogh during his early years as an artist. Millet was a member of the Barbizon school in France and focused most of his oeuvre on paintings of peasants in rural France. A particularly famous painting of his is The Gleaners from 1857. It was Millet’s authentic depictions of peasants that inspired Van Gogh to become a peasant painter. The artist lived in his family home in Nuenen between 1884 and 1885, surrounded by nature and laborers from the countryside.

Even before this, Van Gogh had spent a lot of his early life in rural Brabant, which made him develop a deep appreciation for nature. In Nuenen, Van Gogh became serious about following in the footsteps of Millet and capturing the character of peasant life. In April 1885, he wrote in a letter, “After all, I desire nothing other than to live deep in the country and to paint peasant life.” Van Gogh made a large number of paintings and drawings featuring peasants engrossed in labor, either digging the ground, picking up potatoes, or sowing the field. In addition to this, he also made 50 portraits of peasants as studies that eventually culminated in his first major painting titled The Potato Eaters in 1885.

Millet’s influence on Van Gogh’s interpretation of peasants was always evident as both artists focused on the mundane reality of peasant life. The latter described his views on painting this subject in a letter: “For my part, I’m convinced that in the long run it produces better results to paint them in their coarseness than to introduce conventional sweetness.”

Van Gogh also created several copies after Millet’s paintings throughout his life, such as The Evening (after Millet) and The Sheepshearer (after Millet), both made in 1889. But the most notable work by Millet that inspired Van Gogh was The Sower, made in 1850. Van Gogh was fascinated by this subject and Millet’s rendition of it, and made several sketches after this work. He was keen to paint a work featuring this subject, which resulted in two paintings, The Sower and The Sower with Setting Sun, both made in 1888.

Both of Van Gogh’s paintings depict stylistic differences but center on the subject of the sower who is in the midst of his work in the field, as well as the sun that holds a prominent presence behind the peasant. Van Gogh’s rendition of The Sower is stylistically different from Millet’s as the former uses brighter colors and conspicuous brushstrokes. This was due to the artist’s two-year stay in Paris, which allowed him to learn about and experiment with color and form in order to reimagine Millet’s depiction of the sower in a modern style, while maintaining the essence of the subject as a peasant who is sowing his field with an extended arm.

The Colors of Eugène Delacroix

A major shift occurred in Van Gogh’s art after 1886. During this year, he went to live with his brother in Paris and discovered the colorful palette of the Impressionists. Van Gogh had read about color theory before he arrived in Paris from the books of Charles Blanc, but only started experimenting with it in 1886. A major influence that pushed the artist to implement it in his own work came from the French artist Eugène Delacroix. Van Gogh saw Delacroix’s Christ Asleep During the Tempest in 1886 and was struck by how reds and greens were placed next to each other in the composition and the vivid effect this resulted in.

Another work by Delacroix that he saw was the ceiling painting of Apollo slaying Python in the Louvre, where the French artist put orange and green as well as yellow and purple together. While reading about color theory interested Van Gogh, it was only after he witnessed its successful employment in the works of Delacroix that he was inspired to experiment with it in his own work.

Delacroix’s use of color illustrated a modern approach, and Van Gogh was eager to try it himself. However, lacking the money to hire professional models, he settled on a different subject that allowed him to work with a variety of colors: flower still lifes. While not ideal, this genre was economical and also allowed him to experiment with a variety of different colors. The artist made thirty-five such paintings during the summer of 1886 in order to grasp the correct placement of complementary colors.

This exercise was incredibly important for the development of his style, as it was the beginning of his journey as a colorist. He remained preoccupied with color throughout the rest of his life and planned his paintings based on the color effects they would produce. The influence of Delacroix also stayed with him long after he left Paris, as he painted copies after the French artist’s work, such as Pietà (after Delacroix) in 1889 and The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix) in 1890.

Adolphe Monticelli and Van Gogh’s Use of Impasto

The most distinct stylistic feature in Van Gogh’s art is his use of the impasto technique, which refers to applying a large amount of paint thickly on the canvas. While it may seem that the artist had always adopted the impasto technique in his paintings, the reality is a bit different. Van Gogh’s intentional use of impasto only began after 1886 during his stay in Paris. This was a period of learning and experimentation. His two-year stay in Paris culminated in a completely transformed artistic style.

While working on flower still life paintings to practice color theory, Van Gogh became particularly fascinated by the works of the same genre by the French artist Adolphe Monticelli. Monticelli’s canvases were composed of a thick layer of oil paint applied with a free brush, producing an impasto effect. Van Gogh admired the spontaneous character of Monticelli’s canvases that went against the carefully calculated method of Dutch realist tradition. An example is Monticelli’s Vase of Flowers, painted in 1875, where the oil paint is distinctly visible due to the sheer amount applied to the surface. Van Gogh took inspiration from this visual effect and started incorporating impasto with freely applied brushstrokes in his works in Paris, never to look back.

The flower still lifes from 1886 show the beginnings of impasto in Van Gogh’s oeuvre. We can see this in Vase with Chinese Asters and Gladioli and Glass with Yellow Roses. In 1887, the artist began working alongside Emile Bernard, who was developing the cloisonnist style that featured large sections of color and bold outlines on a flat composition. Together, these elements created a decorative effect similar to stained glass and Japanese woodblock prints, both of which were sources of inspiration for Bernard. Van Gogh implemented these stylistic features in several paintings from his mature years, including the Sunflowers and The Bedroom from 1888-89. But even while working with flatness on the picture plane, he continued the use of impasto, as is visible on these canvases.

Painting with impasto was one of the major reasons Van Gogh ran out of paint quickly and had to ask Theo to send more supplies. However, it was a worthwhile exercise as the impasto, along with his spontaneous brushstrokes, gave Van Gogh’s canvases the sense of aliveness and passion unique to him.

Apart from these four master artists, the Dutch Post-Impressionist was also deeply influenced by Japanese prints, Neo-Impressionism, as well as the works of his peers Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin. Ironically, a few of these artists have gained recognition today specifically as sources of inspiration for Van Gogh. In addition to all these influences, it was ultimately Van Gogh’s dedication to learning about color and technique that resulted in a highly distinct oeuvre that showcases his stylistic individuality.

Before the second half of the 19th century, anyone referring to decadence probably had the decline of the Roman Empire in mind. How did the term—capturing the lurid, lascivious excesses and moral turpitude of the ruling class of that empire—come to define a movement in literature (and, to a lesser extent, art)? Decadence looked to the past, but it also kept a keen eye on the present. What it discerned, diagnosed, and perhaps even celebrated, were manifold ills at the end of a century of progress.

1. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (1884)

The English critic Arthur Symons once referred to À rebours as a “breviary,” or prayer book, of decadence. Even amid recent scholarly reassessment of the parameters of the term “decadent,” we tend still to worship at the altar of Huysmans’s 1884 novel.

Set against the slightly earlier aesthetic movement, À rebours does what its title (usually translated as Against Nature, but generally suggesting inversion, turning something inside-out or backward) suggests: it takes aestheticism and turns it on its head. Its hero, Des Esseintes—aristocratic, privileged, last of his line—is obsessively fascinated by art, not for art’s sake, but entirely for his own pleasure.

À rebours posed a bold challenge to 19th-century literary conventions, eschewing the plot-driven three-volume novel for a series of catalogs. Des Esseintes, ill and disgusted by the world around him, has withdrawn entirely from society and devoted himself to musing on art, literature, music, philosophy, perfume, flowers, liqueurs, and gemstones. His tastes tend toward the extravagant, profane, and cruel: Gustave Moreau‘s paintings of Salome, Arthur Schopenhauer‘s philosophy, and a jewel-encrusted tortoise.

Huysmans offers no moralizing in the midst of enumerating these curious pleasures; rather, his protagonist is fascinated by his discoveries, even when they touch on unpleasant themes or engender pain. This set the tone for decadent literature in all its proto-Freudian fascination: pleasure and pain were to be inseparable, the twin objects of many a protagonist’s pursuit.

2. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Chapter eleven of Oscar Wilde‘s classic tale, about a young man’s Faustian pact to retain his youth while his portrait ages and takes on the burden of his secret life of sin, recounts Dorian Gray’s perilous obsession with a novel. It’s a French novel (perilous enough in itself, for many contemporary English readers). It exerts such a strong influence that Dorian follows its advice to the letter and indulges in a series of rarefied hobbies: art, music, philosophy, perfume, flowers, gemstones. Wilde stops short of naming the novel, but this catalog-like chapter is undoubtedly a tribute to Huysmans’s À rebours.

Decadent heroes are known for their synesthetic excesses—pursuing indulgence in sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch with often studious zeal. This is usually accompanied by withdrawal from social relations, and thereby a severing of ethical ties. The parable-like aspects of Wilde’s story, with its device of the decaying portrait, make the latent potential moralizing of decadent works explicit.

As Wilde argued in defending the novel, “all excess […] brings its punishment.” Dorian immerses himself excessively in art, commits murder, and—uncharacteristically for a decadent work—receives his comeuppance when, in stabbing his portrait, he kills himself. We might take Dorian Gray as a relatively straightforward cautionary tale, then: absorption in art purely for pleasure leads to a solipsistic embrace of hedonism and immoral actions which cannot go unpunished.

However, Wilde also argued—within the novel itself and subsequently, when defending it—that all art is “sterile,” and “there is no such thing” as being “poisoned by a book,” as Dorian suggests he has been. According to this argument, Dorian Gray itself has no moral, positive or negative, and this is its strongest claim to decadence. Decadent writers aimed neither to celebrate nor criticize the subjects they put on display, but to make art that was (paradoxically, since Dorian Gray has had such a notoriously rich afterlife) a dead end.

3. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)

Most decadent works can trace their origins to one incendiary poetry collection: Les Fleurs du Mal, published by Charles Baudelaire in 1857 and promptly prosecuted for obscenity.

Were it solely focused on eroticizing corpses, castigating the reader for hypocrisy, and enumerating forms of monstrosity, ancient and modern, we might think of Les Fleurs du Mal as primarily an example of the grotesque.

Yet Baudelaire’s collection is an early example of decadence because of the poet’s fascination with these things—he revels in turning his attention to subjects from which others might rather turn away. He was an early enthusiast of synesthesia, writing poems about the heights of pleasure (and, consequently, the possibility of pain) which might be attained by uniting all of the senses in one aesthetic experience.

Like all the true decadents after him, Baudelaire proposed no corrective to the evils he portrayed. They are inevitable, even natural: just like the flowers in his title, Baudelaire proposes, the good and beautiful in human nature are liable to wither and decay.

4. Ernest Dowson, Verses (1896)

Ernest Dowson cut a ubiquitous figure in the literary circles of fin-de-siècle London before dying of alcohol abuse at the turn of the 20th century in 1900, leaving behind a handful of short stories and prose pieces but, most influentially, a body of tragic decadent poetry.

Like many British decadents, Dowson was a convert to Roman Catholicism, drawn to its rituals and its combination of ostentation and profundity; also like many British decadents, he was a Francophile, translating novels including Honoré de Balzac’s A Passion in the Desert and Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons.

His poems (with titles in English, French, and Latin) speak of fading love, dashed hopes, life’s dwindling twilight, futility, silence, and solitude. Best remembered is the poem Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae, whose speaker languishes in remembrance of his infidelity, all too aware that, in classic decadent fashion, he is trying to revive a love which is dying. His repetition of “I was desolate and sick of an old passion” grows more anguished with each stanza, while the description of his memories as “gone with the wind” gave Margaret Mitchell the title of her novel in 1936.

5. Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill/The Story of Venus and Tannhauser (1904-07)

Love and lust in decadent literature exist solely in extremes: when not lamenting their loss or lack, decadent writers at least look at these subjects slightly askew. Many were censured, like Baudelaire earlier in the century, for writing about sexual practices which their societies condemned or considered indecent.

Late-19th-century commentators pointed to perversion (which encompassed homosexuality, cross-dressing, and what they considered excessive sexual desire in women) as a root cause of social decay, and so decadent authors flocked to depict it.

Aubrey Beardsley went one step further, literally depicting darkly and disturbingly erotic scenes in the ornate black-and-white illustrations for which he is best known. As a writer, he was similarly ornate. In Under the Hill (unfinished at his death in 1898, and published in its original manuscript form nine years later as The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser), his prose is every bit as fanciful and capricious as his drawings.

It tells the story of Tannhäuser, a mortal who falls in love with the goddess Venus—familiar to many in the late 19th century through the opera by Richard Wagner, who was something of a godfather to the decadents. Yet while Wagner had made the Venusberg (the goddess’s  underground lair) into the magical stuff of opera, in Beardsley’s version it is more of a bordello, making Under the Hill a typically decadent riff on high art which reveals (and revels in) its less lofty parts.

6. Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (1884)

Another decadent work, which took up and twisted the classical goddess of love, was the second novel of a young woman, allegedly not yet twenty years old when she wrote it, who wrote under the name Rachilde.

Monsieur Vénus brought Rachilde the scandal she craved. Authorities in Belgium, where it was originally published, were not impressed with the novel’s dedication “to physical beauty” but more preoccupied with its depiction of a sexually voracious young woman.

The novel concatenated all of the age’s sexual taboos. Raoule, the heroine, not only dominates and flagellates her lower-class lover, Jacques Silvert, but transforms him into her so-called wife, forcing him to become more and more feminine and renounce any shred of power or self-assertion.

What’s more, when Silvert is killed in a duel, Raoule delves into a further taboo, necrophilia, by making, then making love to, an effigy of his corpse. In the newly coined language of the period, Raoule appears to be a nymphomaniac: driven solely, compulsively, by pleasure.

Monsieur Vénus was so notorious that it informed later depictions of transgressive sex and gender identity. In the original manuscript of Dorian Gray, Wilde did name the novel that so influenced his protagonist: the imaginary tome was titled Le Secret de Raoul.

7. Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden (1899)

Late in Dorian Gray, one character sighs “fin de siècle,” and another responds “fin du globe”—not end of the century, but end of the world. This encapsulates the literary mood on both sides of the Channel around 1890: a profound ennui at civilization, which seemed only to have led to death, decay, disease, and depravity. As 1900 approached, many looked back and wondered what the 19th century had achieved.

Octave Mirbeau was already famous in France for novels that starkly portrayed abuse and trauma by the time he published The Torture Garden in 1899. This was at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, when a wrongful and antisemitic plot to convict an officer of treason exposed deep divisions in the French state and the fragile standing of nationalist and socialist movements.

The Torture Garden sends up authority, institutions, and the notion of cooperation in society. It tells of a superfluous political aide who is sent on a mission to China and finds himself in a beautiful garden, witnessing horrific tortures (like Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, inverting the common representation of flowers as regenerative and healthy).

Also typically for a decadent work, it combines anti-authoritarianism with a depiction of women’s sexual voracity and sadism. The narrator’s female companion takes orgasmic pleasure in watching the flagellation and other tortures taking place in the eponymous garden. Consistent with contemporary medicine and philosophy, which demonized sexual desire in women as hysteria, Mirbeau elevates women to an integral—and highly dangerous—position by virtue of their sexuality:

“Woman possesses the cosmic force of an element, an invincible force of destruction, like nature’s. She is, in herself alone, all nature! Being the matrix of life, she is by that very fact the matrix of death—since it is from death that life is perpetually reborn, and since to annihilate death would be to kill life at its only fertile source.” (The Torture Garden, Introduction)

8. Gabriele d’Annunzio, Il trionfo della morte (1894)

Decadence may have originated in France, but its stylistic innovations, its willingness to shock with its subject matter, and its apolitical apathy found disciples across the world. In Italy, its best-known practitioner was the novelist Gabriele d’Annunzio (who would become even more notorious in the first few decades of the 20th century for his involvement in proto-fascist politics as an early rival of Benito Mussolini).

Revealing the influence of Wagner on decadent literature, Il trionfo della morte features a pair of lovers who, like Tristan and Isolde, are inexorably borne toward death. Once again, its protagonist is an aesthete who has become bored and disillusioned by aesthetic experience. Visiting a beautiful mountainous village and looking at its sculptures only makes him reflect on death and depravity. He and his lover wander hopelessly during a broiling summer, every encounter pushing them further into themselves and their paranoia toward one another.

D’Annunzio’s cloying, obsessive prose makes the ending seem inevitable. With nothing to contribute to a world which disgusts them, what more is there for these lovers to do but plunge off a cliff together, in that exhilarating, tragic combination of love and death which Wagnerians called Liebestod?

9. George Egerton, Keynotes (1893)

Amid the more scandalous stylings of decadent works, it’s easy to overlook an important definition of the term, as signaling the decline of one epoch before a new one arises. Decadence in literature was transitional, with dominant forms and genres of the 19th century (realism, naturalism, the three-volume novel) giving way in this period to those of the 20th century (modernism, fragmented narratives, stream of consciousness narration).

Keynotes was the debut short-story collection by George Egerton, pseudonym of the Anglo-Australian writer Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright. It was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, and one of its publishers was John Lane, publisher of Wilde and founder of The Yellow Book, English literature’s foremost journal for decadent writing.

Keynotes was such a roaring success that Lane started the Keynotes series, 33 novels or short-story collections which included other decadent classics such as The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen and Prince Zaleski by M.P. Shiel.

Egerton’s stories were decadent in style, hinting at synesthesia by incorporating musical notation as motifs (their “keynotes”) and delving into the consciousness of her protagonists, frequently women facing moments of moral ambiguity.

Egerton’s women are sexually liberated, railing against the restrictions of 19th-century marriage, and emboldened by the work of writers like Henrik Ibsen and Friedrich Nietzsche to imagine better lives for themselves. It’s important to remember Egerton among the many male decadents (and some female, such as Rachilde) who generally make women’s licentiousness a point of perverse fascination, often simply confirming the contemporary censure around hysteria and erotomania. In contrast, Egerton used decadent style and subjects to advocate for women’s freedom and fulfillment.

10. Vernon Lee, Hauntings (1890)

Vernon Lee (born Violet Paget) had been skeptical of the aesthetic movement in English culture in the 1870s and 1880s, writing a novel that lampooned what she saw as the perfunctory attitude of aesthetes who merely collected artistic objects and experiences like a checklist exercise. Lee was a scholar of aesthetics and Renaissance art who lived at some remove from the literary vagaries of Aestheticism and then Decadence, as an expatriate in Florence, Italy.

As such, she was also wary of the term “decadent,” and her writing engages critically with it, even when it appears to fulfill our expectations of decadence. The four stories that make up Hauntings each scrutinize their protagonists’ interactions with an art object, whether painting, sculpture, or music. In doing so, they question whether the decadent stance of paradoxically enchanted disengagement is healthy, useful, necessary, or even possible.

Lee’s protagonists all become obsessed with art in a typically decadent manner. The composer protagonist of the story A Wicked Voice feels he is being pursued by an operatic air from the 18th century, which so consumes him that he compulsively transforms the music he is composing from Wagnerian excess into this outdated recitativo. What is more decadent and dangerous, then: the music he composes or the music he listens to?

Each of Lee’s stories leaves us with questions like this about decadent works’ relationship to, and responsibility toward, their audience. In portraying decadent themes and writing decadent works that are alluring and seductive, do writers necessarily glamorize perversity and disease? Or are these works, as Wilde argued, sterile? How much is left to the reader? These questions make Lee’s stories into compelling meta-meditations on the power of art, and suggest the enduring fascination of decadence for readers today.