Andy Warhol sought to make art that directly engaged and confronted popular culture in unique and surprising ways. Warhol also liked to experiment with methods that had a sense of automation, such as screenprinting. Both of these aspects of Warhol's work were shown in a series of paintings he did in the 1960s, which had images of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean reprinted in bright pinks, blues, and greens.

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.

Fabergé is known for his ceramic eggs, also known as "Fabergé eggs," which were given as gifts to the Russian nobility during the early twentieth century.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to Franco's fascist Spain.

Andy Warhol's 1962 series Campbell's Soup Cans was 32 separate screen-printed paintings of cans of Campbell's soup, each one depicting one of the different varieties Campbell offered at the time. The work featured many of Warhol's hallmarks, including screen-printing, repetition, and the use of commercial imagery. The work was Warhol's first well known piece, and helped launch his career, which would see him as a painter, filmmaker, art theorist, and screen-printer.

Pop Art as a general movement sought to bring post-World War II American popular culture into high art. One of the more famous approaches to this was Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic book imagery. Lichtenstein painted all of his canvases by hand, but would copy one frame from a comic, including shaded dots, dialogue bubbles, and weak colors, onto a large canvas.

The Persistence of Memory, completed in 1931 and hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, is widely considered Salvador Dali's masterpiece. The canvas features many of Dali's surrealist hallmarks, with a strange landscape as the background of an image of clocks that appear to be melting over branches and ledges. Dali's work is considered emblematic of surrealism, which drew on Jungian dream theory to create strange images in artwork.