Art Nouveau developed in both Europe and the United States. Tiffany's work with stained glass and Antoni Gaudi's unique architectural style both had many elements from nature. These natural elements included flowers, leaves, and flowing, wavelike patterns.

Even if the image is not instantly recognizable as Vincent van Gogh, the piece of art has many of his hallmarks. This 1889 self-portrait features expressive colors, deep texture in the paint, and an emotional style. Van Gogh was one of the premier post-impressionists of the late nineteenth century, who took the emotional and innovative elements of Impressionism to new artistic ground.

This image, "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa" by Hokusai, is one of the iconic and indelible images of Japanes art. Done in the ukiyo-e woodblock printing style, the print is in many copies throughout the world, and in the usual fashion of nineteenth-century Japanese art, it depicts a dramatic force of nature in a landscape. Additionally, its formalism and representational elements are indicative of art from the Edo period (1603-1867).

Romanticism was an artistic movement across many disciplines during the first part of the nineteenth century which was a reaction to the empiricism of the Enlightenment and the formalism of Neoclassicism. Works like Lord Byron's poem Don Juan celebrated a bold hero devoted to the good life. Frederic Chopin used folk melodies to create sweeping, emotional music for the piano and symphonies. Eugene Delacroix's The Massacre at Chios commemorated a moment in the nationalist uprising of the Greek Revolution.

The Salon was the absolute pinnacle of the French art world from 1725 to 1890. In the late nineteenth century, the committee in charge of what art work was shown at the Salon valued grand historical and dramatic landscape paintings done in a clean realist style. The Impressionists desired to make paintings of vivid emotion with visible brushstrokes about scenes of everyday life.

Expressionism and Cubism began in the 20th century. Becoming more popular after World War I, Modernism led to more abstract works. Neoclassicism began during the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century and recalled the art and culture of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

Andy Warhol's most famous works are screen prints of familiar images, often in odd or bright colors. Jasper Johns appropriated national symbols in his paintings, but in altered forms. Roy Lichtenstein directly copied panels from comic books, down to the dialogue. All of these methods are representative of Pop Art, a 1950s and 60s artistic movement that sought to use popular forms and new technologies to change the nature of high art.

Cubism burst onto the art scene in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, with various artists creating avant garde images based more on representative shapes and symbols rather than strict representations. Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Braques, and Fernand Leger were among its most notable proponents. Amedeo Modigliani was a contemporary of the cubists, but worked in modernist approaches to portraits that featured elongated lines and dark colors.

During the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco's nationalist forces were supported by the German military led by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. In one of the more notable aspects of the war, the German Air Force bombed the Spanish, Republican-held town of Guernica in 1937. That same year, Pablo Picasso made a massive canvas, entirely in black and white, that used gruesome abstract shapes and symbols to convey war's horrors and tragedies. The painting was instantly famous, and caused Picasso to be unable to travel to Franco's Spain.

Salvador Dali's works were defined by realistic-looking objects placed in strange landscapes and weird positions. All of these are hallmarks of surrealism, which was influenced by the burgeoning field of psychotherapy, and drew on dreamlike imagery and situations. Dali helped pioneer surrealism, and remains one of its best-known artists.