Painting styles
In painting, as in any other art trend, style is understood in two ways. The former is the set of distinctive visual elements, methods and techniques that determine artist's performance. The latter meaning stands for the painter's belonging to a certain movement or school that his work is connected with. It happens in the way that a painter associates himself with this or that movement personally or art historians place the painter in. Nowadays, painter's techniques and methods are not so important as it was before, though it may be used in popular contexts.
Here, we will enlist the most important and interesting Western styles that developed one after another in the course of story.
One of the earliest styles that are recorded and described in the Medieval Europe are Rococo and Baroque. These styles belonged to the nobility and were unknown to the poor. By the way, Baroque and Rococo are considered to be the apogee of the French classicism and represent the art of luxury.
Afterwards, there emerged Romanticism and Impressionism. They are exactly those art styles that formed the grounds of modern painting. Before Romanticism, painting was viewed as "frivolous" manual labour that was no art. And Impressionism influenced the future art in the most powerful way as its founder Claude Monet is regarded the second world painter after Leonardo Da Vinci.
The 20th century saw the blossom of Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, Pop Art and many other ones.