Tachisme was France's answer to Abstract Expressionism in the 40's and 50's. The word Tachisme was named after the French word for stain or drip and this aesthetic statement is apparent in the paintings—which are dripping with color. The compositions look to have suddenly been splashed across the canvas, very similarly to action painting.

This style of painting also has close roots to lyrical abstraction, and like lyrical abstraction was formed as a response to the calculated, formulaic approach of geometric abstraction.

The result was fluid, spontaneous art derived from the philosophy that art should be just that. While this term is used to describe most all French or even European art during American abstract expressionism, it is strikingly different to abstract expressionism. There is a softness in Tachisme that is not present in the raw abstraction of American art.

Critics have called the art sensual, suave and only concerned with handling the beautiful. Because of this, I think that a reproduction of a Tachisme era piece of art makes a very romantic gift. Whether for a guy or girl, a birthday or a just because Tachisme captures the essence of beauty, of sensual movement and all without being too obvious or cheesy.

No. 3/No. 13 (Magenta, Black, Green on Orange), oil on canvas painting by Mark Rothko

If there ever was a painting-by-mood school of art, color field would seem to fit the bill. Think large canvases of perfectly brush-stroked and mixed colors, paintings that are interesting in the way the paint is laid upon the canvas, how it is mixed, paintings that truly evoke a feeling, as there is no scene to look at and nothing else to get caught up in.

Color field was an American art movement, it's birth in New York City, mostly during the 40's and 50's. The color field painters for the most part were also known as the “New York School” of artists, which also included poets, dancers and musicians.

When imagining color field work, the fuzzy colors of Mark Rothko's infamous canvases first come to mind. Although it should be said that Rothko eschewed labels altogether, refusing to refer to himself as an abstract artist, much less a color field artist! While working on New York on his grand portfolio of colored canvases, he taught art and clay molding for income.

Punk Rock is to music, as Dada is to art. Both genres are duplicated, watered down over time and often misunderstood. Yet when each emerged it was by turning the world on the tip of it's head, it was with a revolution.

When Dada emerged in 1916 it was as anti-art. In the pieces themselves Dada used everyday imagery and any item that one could put in a collage, unless those things were a part of “high art.” Dadaists used images of high art only if they were defacing it. The resulting artwork is chaotic. Anti-art can be anything from political messages achieved in collage or the infamous early Dadist exhibit that displayed a row of urinals and a woman in a a communion dress reciting lewd poetry to patrons. Famous images of Dada art can be found in the works of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp.

Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, painting by Pablo Picasso

Cubism is synonymous with Pablo Picasso, but it wasn't this legendary artist alone who began the movement of cubism. Cubism was also jointly pioneered by french artist, George Braque. This avant garde art era was seen as radical, but was also highly influential in it's day, and continues to be. The cubist artist breaks up the object he is painting, disassembling it into an abstraction of (cube-like) pieces splayed all over the canvas. This was done so the artist could display the object in a multitude of arrangements, angles and representations, viewable all at once. It was common cubist form that all faces of an object would be painted, this revolutionized the way objects could be depicted in painting. It was also said to be a cheeky response to ambiguity in painting, and an attempt to engage the viewer in seeing the painting as a man-made construction.

The first school of Cubism was Analytical Cubism. These are the famed Picasso's that appear to be masses of intricate gray, beige and black from far away, but up close are closely detailed and structured. These paintings were not about use of color and were usually of scenes of nature, the scenes were taken apart and analyzed, the artist putting them back together in a new way.

Enter, the reflection of the human emotional spectrum, the back-lashing antithesis to impressionism: expressionism (taking place mostly in Germany, 1880's-1925.) If you think you don't know expressionism, think again. Envision Edvard Munch's The Scream or or the jazzy colorful compositions of Kandinsky and there you have it. Expressionism took the ideas of impressionism, such as painting by feeling and ignited them into a dreamy fire. The goal of this movement was to capture life, to express the very sensation of being alive.

I truly think this capture of life-essence shines through in the work. The paint on the canvas is distorted to reflect the artist's emotions. One descriptive emotion that is often thrown around simultaneously with this movement is angst. Angst is an emotion that is still often taboo in our society, one that was not really focused on in art before. This movement was covering new ground, depicting life more accurately, bringing in the idea of self awareness.

Where impressionists focused on the visual of the objects they painted, expressionists focused solely on the feeling, tapping into raw emotions and their subconscious, then recording this human experience on the canvas. Expressionists thought that they only way to truly paint something correctly was to paint the way the artist experienced it. The result was often dynamic, vivacious palettes of colors bringing to life extremely bold compositions.