"Fauvism" is so named because the term "fauve," or "wild beast," was attributed to certain artists exhibiting at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. Their lack of realism, especially in the use of nonrepresentational colors, led to severe criticism of their work. Their movement was named after this insulting nickname.

The Spanish Juan Gris arrived in Paris in 1906 and helped develop the style known as Cubism with fellow young artists Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, and under the influence of Gris' fellow Spaniard, Pablo Picasso. Fittingly, one of Gris' signature cubist portraits is of Picasso himself, with a clear depiction of the painter that also features a cubist deconstruction of his clothing and surroundings.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Cubism, the style employed by Juan Gris in the painting seen here, was part of the broader trend of modernism, which was concerned with technological innovation, new ways of thinking, and breaking with tradition. A style which took many of modernism's and cubism's precepts even further was the Italian movement known as Futurism. As much a political movement as an artistic one, Futurism embraced machine age technology, progress, and activity in a cross-artistic style heavily indebted to cubism's breakthroughs.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Matisse wanted color to reflect feelings, and so used "nonrepresentational colors." He and the Fauves freed color from realistic representation of the subject. All the others are more traditional and realistic in their use of color.

Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is largely considered one of the first cubist paintings. As such, Picasso broke with traditional forms of representation, but did so by including many different influences, particularly impressionists like Paul Cézanne and trends toward a primitivism in art. Picasso also began creating the piece after seeing an exhibition on tribal art that included African masks like those portrayed in the painting.

The twentieth century saw an explosion in artistic forms that both presented non-realistic images, especially Abstract Expressionism and Cubism, or depicted elements of everyday life or lower culture, as Pop Art did. In this, one of the key forerunners to these movements was the late-nineteenth-century movement known as Impressionism. Impressionism had vivid brushstrokes that made images look less realistic, and intentionally depicted scenes of everyday life, like farmwork, cafés, and parks.

Mark Rothko essentially took abstract art to a logical place, creating massive canvases that featured only a few large swaths of color. While seemingly simple, these "colorforms," Rothko's own term, feature multi-layered paint and subtle gradations. Rothko developed the style shortly after World War II, and the creation of these paintings made Rothko world famous.

Marc Chagall was born in Belarus in 1887, and worked in France and the Soviet Union, before having to leave for the United States after the Nazi occupation of Paris. Chagall had worked in various modernist styles, like cubism and expressionism, and his background made him even more prominent after World War II. Remarkably, Chagall was commissioned to create replacement stained glass windows in French churches that had been damaged by German bombing.

Rene Magritte began his career as a surrealist, but as he grew older began moving from strange shapes to placing familiar images in odd poses. By the 1950s and 1960s, Magritte was focusing on specific images again and again, such as men in suits and bowler hats and green apples. These came together in his most famous work, The Son of Man, which is a straightforward portrait of a man in a black suit and bowler hat, but with an apple obscuring his face.

Joseph Lawrence's The Migration of the Negro is a sixty panel work, with each panel captioned, telling the story of the mass migration of African-Americans from the rural south to northern urban centers in the first part of the twentieth century. Lawrence stood apart for the way his work adapted more from cubism than expressionism or surrealism. Lawrence often commented that he was more influenced by his surroundings in Harlem, but that everywhere he looked in his community he saw elements of cubism.