Georgia O'Keefe developed a unique, instantly recognizable style that focused on flowers presented in vivid colors in an extreme close-up perspective. This style grew out of Modernism and its use of bright color and different perspective. O'Keefe proved influential in her ability to capture nature and natural images in paintings in a striking manner.

Regionalism was an art movement that sprung up after World War I in America that sought to paint naturalistic scenes of regional America. Foremost among the Regionalists was Thomas Hart Benton, who was inspired by politically conscious muralists like Diego Rivera to make large-scale works about his native Midwest. Benton's work often had political overtones that supported left-wing positions, and he was influential as an art teacher.

Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is largely considered one of the first cubist paintings. As such, Picasso broke with traditional forms of representation, but did so by including many different influences, particularly impressionists like Paul Cézanne and trends toward a primitivism in art. Picasso also began creating the piece after seeing an exhibition on tribal art that included African masks like those portrayed in the painting.

Utilizing large canvases featuring only one or two bold colors in large blocks, Mark Rothko deconstructed the principles of Abstract Expressionism to their simplest form. Beginning in 1949, Rothko's "multiforms" became his chief artistic format, and made him a world-famous artist.

Diego Rivera began his artistic career in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century as a cubist influenced by Picasso. On moving back to his native Mexico in the 1910s, Rivera began embracing revolutionary politics, more direct figures, and native Mexican culture, as well as painting massive murals on the sides of buildings. These murals made Rivera much more successful, and produced many different commissions around the world.

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.