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.

Cubism was a modernist art movement that developed in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century, by a community of multinational artists. The painters Pablo Picasso and George Braques first created the style, which featured images built out of harsh geometric shapes and used representational images to create broken depictions made up of peculiar shapes. Other important cubists included Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, and Henri Le Fauconnier.

The Mexican painter Diego Rivera first started his artistic career in the 1910s in Paris as a conventional Cubist. On the urging of the Mexican ambassador to France, Rivera began painting murals back in Mexico, which were large, symbolic, and drew on Mexican history and culture. This made Rivera an internationally famous artist, and he was commissioned to paint murals across the world.

Like fellow Pop Artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, Jasper Johns used familiar symbols and images, but reshaped and transformed them to present them in new ways. Unlike his fellow Pop Artists, who preferred commercial and pop culture symbols, Johns largely used icons of Americana, most notably the American flag and maps of the United States. One of Johns' most well known paintings is of an American flag that is completely in white.

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.

Nighthawks was painted in 1942 by Edward Hopper, who sought to capture the inherent loneliness and suffocation of the "new" urban society as well as the effects of wartime.