Movements

Abstract Art: The 'First' Painting Its Museum Backdated

A Kandinsky watercolor signed 1910 was long called the first abstract painting. Its own museum now dates it 1913, after a Swedish painter got there first.

Pop Art: The Collage That Said 'Pop' Before the Movement Had a Name

A 1947 collage carried the word "pop" nine years before Richard Hamilton's famous version, and fifteen before any essay printed the phrase "Pop Art."

Art Deco: The Retrospective Name for an Interwar Style

Art Deco’s familiar label spread decades after the 1925 Paris exposition, through a 1966 museum retrospective and Bevis Hillier’s 1968 book.

Renaissance Art: The Book That Named It Also Invented a Murder

Giorgio Vasari's 1550 book gave "Renaissance art" its name and invented a murder confession that took an archivist three centuries to disprove using burial records.

What Is a Daguerreotype? A "First Photo" That Barely Survived

A daguerreotype is a unique image on silver-plated copper. The 1838 plate cited as photography's first photo of a person survives only as a copy of a copy.

Art Styles: The Movement Names That Started as Insults

Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism all began as a critic's put-down. Baroque and Gothic carried the insult even longer before scholars made the names official.

Psychedelic Art Started in a Psychiatrist's Office, Not the Fillmore

A Los Angeles psychiatrist gave LSD to artists starting in 1954, twelve years before the Fillmore's posters. Their trademark lettering was borrowed, not tripped into.

Non-Objective Art: The Curator the Guggenheim Wrote Out of Its Name

Hilla Rebay named a Guggenheim museum after this term in 1939 and picked Frank Lloyd Wright to build it a home. She left the directorship in 1952 and was not invited when Wright’s building opened in 1959.

Monochromatic Painting: What's Hiding Under the Black Square

X-rays found two paintings and a disputed inscription under Malevich's 1915 Black Square. Klein never patented his blue, and Reinhardt's black held three different tones.