The question of why, at the turn of the 20th century, modern art flourished in Europe has long been one of art history’s most intriguing. Was it exposure to non-Western influences? The advent of the ...

Romanticism, Impressionism, Art Nouveau; Cubism (Picasso) and Surrealism (Dalí). In the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution spawned new artistic styles: idealized Romanticism, light-chasing Impressionism ...

Cover of Erika Doss's Spiritual Moderns featuring Agnes Pelton's "Sand Storm" (1929) (image courtesy University of Chicago Press) Religion influenced modern art's development far more than most ...

Artistic styles exist only in retrospect. While many of their defining characteristics are formulated in manifestos by pioneering artists, a style can’t be fully understood until it has become a thing ...

In 1943, Pablo Picasso received a desperate letter from an artist called Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss. “It’s all too late,” she wrote. “I have just been told that Otto has been sent to the north. Please do ...

Roaming Europe, we admire stately Neoclassical buildings and dramatic Romantic paintings. Around 1800, Europe was in transition, reflected in two art styles. First, we visit Europe’s great cities with ...

Hugh Eakin’s new book, “Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America” (Crown), isn’t really about Picasso, or about war, or about art. Its subject is the creation of a market for a certain product, ...