Pablo Picasso emerged in the early years of the the twentieth century from Spain being clearly influenced by his Spanish antecedents Diego Velázquez, El Greco, and Francisco de Goya. When he moved to Paris in 1901, he began to be influenced, and helped shape the careers of, fellow artists like Henri Matisse and Georges Braque. After the 1930s, however, while Picasso himself was massively influential, he began to retreat into his own style and missed out on innovations by painters like Wassily Kandinsky.

The De Stijl movement grew out of the work of a select group of Dutch modernists in the 1890s, who all focused on basic shapes and form over function in design. Piet Mondrian, whose Tableau I is displayed here, was the foremost painter of the De Stijl movement. Mondrian's chief visual markers—primary colors, simple geometric forms, and thick black lines—are all hallmarks of the De Stijl movement more generally.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

Mondrian's use of geometric shapes and simple lines gave him the opportunity to create abstract art that nonetheless borrowed from familiar forms. The abstract expressionists, who flourished in the two decades after World War II in New York City, similarly used bold expressions of color and shapes to create abstract forms. Many of the abstract expressionists, most notably Mark Rothko, similarly used large blocks of color on sizable canvasses.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

While Piet Mondrian, the creator of this painting, is well known as an abstract artist, he actually used essentially no abstract shapes in his paintings. Instead, Mondrian placed together thick black lines to create geometrical patterns, almost entirely in squares and rectangles, and then used large blocks of primary colors to create different images.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

As an example of cubism, this painting deeply engages with various forms of advanced mathematics, especially geometry. Cubism broke down forms to various geometric shapes, and rendered them in crystalline forms based on those shapes. Cubism could be taken to different lengths; certain works may have a difficult underlying shape to discern, but Gris' Portrait of Pablo Picasso surrounds a rather conventional human form with geometric shapes.

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

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.