Postwar & Contemporary

Art since 1945, when the centre of the art world moved from Paris to New York. The Abstract Expressionists, Pollock dripping paint and Rothko floating fields of colour, made huge canvases about the act of painting itself; Color Field painters thinned the paint further. In the 1960s Pop Art brought comic strips, soup cans and film stars into the gallery, Minimalism reduced art to plain industrial forms, and conceptual artists made the idea itself the work. Since the 1980s painting has returned in every form, from the raw figures of the Neo-Expressionists and Basquiat to installations, street art and photography, with no single style in charge.

What to look for: very large scale, abstraction or blunt everyday imagery, new materials and media; the question of what counts as art is often the subject.

3,029 works in the quiz. Play a round on Postwar & Contemporary.

Artists

Frida Kahlo · Pablo Picasso · Andy Warhol · Jean-Michel Basquiat · Banksy · Salvador Dalí · Marina Abramović · Brian Eno · Keith Haring · Jackson Pollock · Yayoi Kusama · Diego Rivera · David Hockney · Norman Rockwell · Henri Matisse · Mark Rothko · René Magritte · Marc Chagall · Francis Bacon · Lucian Freud · Edward Hopper · M. C. Escher · Damien Hirst · Zdzisław Beksiński · Jeff Koons · Roy Lichtenstein · Joan Miró · Cy Twombly · Tracey Emin · Ai Weiwei

Best-known works

“The Son of Man” — René Magritte, 1964
“My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love” — Dmitri Vrubel, 2009
“Christina's World” — Andrew Wyeth, 1948
“Campbell's Soup Cans” — Andy Warhol, 1962
“No. 5, 1948” — Jackson Pollock, 1948
“Love is in the Bin” — Banksy, 2018
“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” — David Hockney, 1972
“Marilyn Diptyque” — Andy Warhol, 1962
“Four Freedoms” — Norman Rockwell, 1971
“Christ of Saint John of the Cross” — Salvador Dalí, 1951
“Golconda” — René Magritte, 1953
“A Bigger Splash” — David Hockney, 1967
“Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” — Lucian Freud, 1995
“Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X” — Francis Bacon, 1953
“Orange, Red, Yellow” — Mark Rothko, 1961
“Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” — Jackson Pollock, 1950
“Woman III” — Willem de Kooning, 1953
“The Women of Algiers” — Pablo Picasso, 1954–1955
“Low Marks Again” — Fyodor Pavlovich Reshetnikov, 1952
“The Problem We All Live With” — Norman Rockwell, 1965
“Drowning Girl” — Roy Lichtenstein, 1963
“Comedian” — Maurizio Cattelan, 2019
“Massacre in Korea” — Pablo Picasso, 1951
“Cloud Gate” — Anish Kapoor, 2004
“Maman” — Louise Bourgeois, 1999
“Three Studies of Lucian Freud” — Francis Bacon, 1969
“Whaam!” — Roy Lichtenstein, 1997
“Voice of Fire” — Barnett Newman, 1967
“The Son of a Migrant from Syria” — Banksy, 2015
“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” — Damien Hirst, 1991