Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) was painted in response to the Fascist bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The black-and-white cubist painting uses animal imagery to denote brutality and darkness, as well as a women with a torch to symbolize freedom.

Henri Matisse and the Fauve movement where primarily interested in intense, unadulterated color as a formal element to convey meaning. The colors in this painting imbue it with deep emotional intensity.

Self-Portrait as a Soldier was painted in 1915, just after the artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had volunteered for service in World War I and quickly been discharged for mental health reasons. The alienation and detachment is shown by the off color in the main subject's skin tone and his missing hand, while his pride of being a soldier is evident in the prominence of the military uniform. With the general abstractness and surreality of the expressionists present before World War I, the horrors and frustrations of the conflict made post-war expressionism much darker in both color and subject.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kirchner_-_Selbstbildnis_als_Soldat.jpg

Piet Mondrian was a part of the Dutch artistic movement known as De Stijl, Dutch for simply "The Style," a group of painters working before the First World War who attempted to distill art to its basic elements. Between the World Wars, Mondrian pushed ahead with similar work in Paris he termed "Neoplasticism." Mondrian's hallmarks from this period were thick black horizontal and vertical lines across a white canvas, while inside some of the resultant rectangular shapes were large blocks of primary colors.

The letters “D BAL” are stenciled in the upper right corner of Portuguese, placed there by Georges Braque seemingly separately from the rest of the painting. As a cubist artist, Braque’s intention was to deconstruct the very concept of representation and clear imagery and present art in a new manner. Including the stencilled letters further reinforces the way in which the work of art intentionally separates itself from the traditional expectations of painting.

Georges Braque intentionally picked a monochromatic palette for his cubist works to highlight the way he deconstructed his images into framents. With a monochromatic palette, the viewer would have to focus on Braque’s lines and geometric shapes, rather than be distracted by blocks of saturated color or sharp contrasts between light and dark elements.

All of these are features of Rothko's work with rectangles except the notion that his works were monochromatic -in fact, the colors he employed varied over the course of his career, beginning as bright contrasting hues and moving toward darker maroons and blacks.

The technique of screen printing involves taking a stamp, covering it with cotton mesh, and inking the stamp onto a canvas to produce an exact image from the stamp. The technique, first developed in the early twentieth century, allows an artist to reproduce the same image repetitively on different pieces of art. This ability was used by Pop Artists like Andy Warhol to create similar images onto canvases which he then painted in a variety of colors to make similar, yet highly diverse, series of images.

Surrealism was inspired by the work of pioneering psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and used odd, dreamlike imagery in realistic lines and shapes. Its most famous figure was Salvador Dalí, who was the archetypical surrealist. Dali's painting often featured familiar images juxtaposed with strange objects in barren and off-putting landscapes.

Grant Wood lived almost his entire life in the state of Iowa, teaching at schools and supporting organizations in the state. His painting reflected this attachment to his native region, and were articulated by Wood, along with Thomas Hart Benton, into an artistic style known as "regionalism." Wood's most famous work "American Gothic," featuring a farming couple in an honest, empathetic, yet slightly off perspective, is emblematic of the style.