An Online Guide to 350 International Art Styles & Movements: An Invaluable Resource for Students & Enthusiasts of Art History

If you majored in art his­to­ry, you no doubt have last­ing mem­o­ries, and pos­si­bly painful ones, of long nights spent in the library mem­o­riz­ing the names and sig­nal char­ac­ter­is­tics of var­i­ous art move­ments. What a shame, you might well think when look­ing back, that a sub­ject as fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant as the trans­for­ma­tion of human cre­ativ­i­ty over time could become such a chore. Now that you’re free to learn about art his­to­ry in what­ev­er man­ner and order you like, why not start in Mono­skop’s expan­sive online guide to art styles and move­ments?

As “a wiki for col­lab­o­ra­tive stud­ies of the arts, media and human­i­ties,” Mono­skop has long offered a wide selec­tion of down­load­able books, videos, sound record­ings, and oth­er mate­ri­als invalu­able for any­one with an inter­est in the arts, espe­cial­ly the mod­ern arts.

Its move­ment-and-style guide “brings togeth­er some 350 art styles and move­ments from the 1860s until today. Besides the canon­i­cal isms of mod­ern art, it expands the list with move­ments usu­al­ly treat­ed as sec­ondary to the visu­al art canon, such as Let­trism, Sit­u­a­tion­ism, Sound art, Expand­ed cin­e­ma, Neo­ism, or Soft­ware art, and does not leave out non-West­ern art either.”

Each move­ment or style’s entry pro­vides, among oth­er infor­ma­tion, the major artists, events, and texts (includ­ing, of course, “man­i­festos” and procla­ma­tions) asso­ci­at­ed with it, the media its works used, and links to all the rel­e­vant items both with­in and out­side of Mono­skop’s col­lec­tions. It also includes relat­ed his­tor­i­cal images, such as Futur­ist pho­tog­ra­ph­er Anton Giulio Bra­gagli­a’s 1911 Salu­tan­do, De Sti­jl painter Piet Mon­dri­an’s 1920 Com­po­si­tion with Yel­low, Red, Black, Blue, and Gray, George Seu­rat’s Pointil­lism-defin­ing 1884 A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te, or stills from com­put­er art pio­neers Lil­lian Schwartz and Ken Knowl­ton’s 1970 ani­ma­tion Pix­il­la­tion.

You may arrive in Mono­skop’s guide to art styles and move­ments intend­ing only to learn about one style or move­ment, but none of them devel­oped in iso­la­tion. The orga­ni­za­tion makes it easy enough to see the con­nec­tions that a dip in to research Arts and Crafts could well fin­ish up, who knows how lat­er, in Pre­ci­sion­ism, Neo-Dada, or the afore­men­tioned Expand­ed Cin­e­ma (an intrigu­ing term; if you don’t know the art to which it refers, you can fol­low that link and find out). Or maybe you are cur­rent­ly a stu­dent major­ing in art his­to­ry, and you need some­thing a bit more inter­est­ing than your text­book to solid­i­fy in your mind the nature of and con­nec­tions between all these artis­tic ven­tures, influ­en­tial or minor, long-lived or flash-in-the-pan — in which case, book­mark Mono­skop’s guide right away.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art Visu­al­ized in a Mas­sive 130-Foot Time­line

Take a Trip Through the His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art with the Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.