The Avant-Garde

From 1900 to the end of the Second World War, each new movement set out to break with the one before. The Fauves freed colour from description; Picasso and Braque took objects apart in Cubism; the Futurists painted speed and machines; Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian left the visible world behind for pure abstraction. The First World War brought Dada's mockery and, in Germany, the cold stare of the New Objectivity; in the 1920s the Surrealists painted dreams with photographic precision. Revolutionary Russia briefly led the world with Suprematism and Constructivism before Socialist Realism closed the door, while in America painters looked at their own cities and plains.

What to look for: broken or flattened forms, colour used for its own sake, geometric abstraction, dream imagery; almost any rule of earlier painting deliberately overturned.

13,784 works in the quiz. Play a round on The Avant-Garde.

Artists

Frida Kahlo · Pablo Picasso · Salvador Dalí · Claude Monet · Jackson Pollock · Georgia O'Keeffe · Gustav Klimt · Edvard Munch · Paul Gauguin · Diego Rivera · Norman Rockwell · Henri Matisse · John Singer Sargent · Mark Rothko · René Magritte · Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Wassily Kandinsky · Marc Chagall · Francis Bacon · Amedeo Modigliani · Piet Mondrian · Raja Ravi Varma · Edward Hopper · Camille Claudel · Paul Cézanne · M. C. Escher · Auguste Rodin · Egon Schiele · Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Marcel Duchamp

Best-known works

“Guernica” — Pablo Picasso, 1937
“The Kiss” — Gustav Klimt, 1907
“American Gothic” — Grant Wood, 1930
“The Persistence of Memory” — Salvador Dalí, 1931
“Nighthawks” — Edward Hopper, 1942
“Black Square (1915)” — Kazimir Malevich, 1915
“Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” — Pablo Picasso, 1907
“Dance” — Henri Matisse, 1910
“Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” — Gustav Klimt, 1907
“Water Lilies” — Claude Monet, 1914
“Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” — Marcel Duchamp, 1912
“The Treachery of Images” — René Magritte, 1929
“The Tortoise Trainer” — Osman Hamdi Bey, 1906
“Midwinter's Sacrifice” — Carl Larsson, 1915
“The Two Fridas” — Frida Kahlo, 1939
“The Great Masturbator” — Salvador Dalí, 1929
“Nu couché” — Amedeo Modigliani, 1917
“Broadway Boogie Woogie” — Piet Mondrian, 1942
“Composition VII” — Wassily Kandinsky, 1913
“Autoportrait” — Tamara de Lempicka, 1929
“The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room)” — Henri Matisse, 1907
“At the Dressing-Table” — Zinaida Serebryakova, 1909
“Suprematist Composition: White on White” — Kazimir Malevich, 1918
“Mont Sainte-Victoire” — Paul Cézanne, 1902
“Garçon à la pipe” — Pablo Picasso, 1905
“Freedom of Speech” — Norman Rockwell, 1943
“Danaë” — Gustav Klimt, 1907
“I and the Village” — Marc Chagall, 1911
“The Joy of Life” — Henri Matisse, 1906
“Soft Construction with Boiled Beans” — Salvador Dalí, 1936