Both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were heavily influenced by Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, pushing art more towards true abstraction in the early twentieth century. Although they had distinct styles, both artists used non-representational forms, vivid colors, and inspiration from non-European art. Matisse and Picasso greatly revolutionized the very form and trajectory of painting in the twentieth century.

Pop Art emerged in the 1950s from schools of fine art and graphic design schools, when trained artists turned their interest to working with images from popular culture. Celebrities, comic books, consumer items, film stills, and patriotic images were all copied, adapted, and repurposed as high art, which also challenged the very notion of high and low art. Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych is representative as it takes one image of the actress Marilyn Monroe and copies it multiple times in bright colors.

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.

"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.

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.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who took up painting after a horrific bus accident at the age of eighteen in 1925 and her marriage to the European-trained muralist Diego Rivera. Kahlo painted almost entirely self portraits, typically close ups of her own face, to which she added in the background indigenous native imagery, surrealist symbols, and references to her own troubled life. Her stormy marriage to Rivera was well known, and combined with her ill health contributed to a sense of loneliness and alienation in her work.

She Wolf and Stenographic Figure are popular Pollock pieces that hint at the artist's future abandonment of representational art in favor of his classic drip paintings. The rest are other 19th/20th century artists with signature styles.

The False Mirror depicts a large eye with an iris of blue sky. The title was given to Magritte by the Belgian writer Paul Nouge. It suggests an inherent limitation in the human eye's ability to perceive truth.

Fluxus artists railed against commercial art. They wanted to shock the viewer with simple, rather than complex, work, and they were eager to work with whatever materials they had on hand rather than outsourcing anything.

Georges Braque was one of the early developers and founders of Cubism in the early twentieth century. Compared with his contemporaries Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, Braque’s work was much more geometric and used more dull and dark colors. Still, Braque’s deconstruction of representational forms into component shapes and a modernist approach are hallmarks of cubism.