An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific art philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered a new avant-garde movement. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new style which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.
Jacques-Louis David, The Coronation of Napoleon, (1806), Musée du Louvre, Neoclassicism
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People 1830, Romanticism
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Savage State, 1836, Hudson River School
Gustave Courbet, Stone-Breakers, 1849, Realist School
Art is a diverse range of human activity and its resulting product that involves creative or imaginative talent generally expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
Clockwise from upper left: an 1887 self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh; a female ancestor figure by a Chokwe artist; detail from The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486) by Sandro Botticelli; and an Okinawan Shisa lion
20th-century bottle, Twa peoples, Rwanda. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.
Back of a Renaissance oval basin or dish, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Löwenmensch figurine, Germany, between 35,000 and 41,000 years old. One of the oldest-known examples of an artistic representation and the oldest confirmed statue ever discovered.