An art movement is a group of artists who, for a limited time, share a goal and a way of working, and who usually show their work together.
Impressionism is the classic case: a group of painters in Paris who organized their own exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 and painted modern life in quick strokes of light color.
The names of the big movements and periods, from the Renaissance to Pop art, now sit in every museum guide as if the painters had chosen them. In most cases they did not. Several names came from critics, some of them mocking, and others from historians writing long after the painters had died.
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The Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli, for one, never heard the word Renaissance. Around 1485 he painted The Birth of Venus, in which the goddess stands on a scallop shell that the winds blow toward the shore.
The French historian Jules Michelet first applied the word to Botticelli's era in 1855, about 370 years later. Other names began as insults before they became labels, Impressionism, Fauvism and Baroque among them.
The Impressionists in Paris
Impressionism, the first name on that list, also shows what the word movement means in practice…
What You'll Discover
The critic who named two movements.
When the Renaissance finally got its name.
What the word Baroque once meant.
The movement launched on a newspaper front page.
A 1936 chart that mapped modern art.