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The bestsellers are the great painters of art history, highlights of international museums, renowned paintings in great art exhibitions.
Mythological or religious motifs in painting are a large part of genre or portrait paintings. They mostly concern allegorical portrayals. All depictions are to be seen as portrayals of divine beauty, such as the paintings of Botticelli. These are concepts like beauty, virtue, morality, love, sin, which are depicted in allegorical form from mythology and religion.
Genre painting is the depiction of scenes from everyday life, it portrays the human figure in its social or scenic setting. With its division into courtly, middle-class and rural life, it blossomed in 16th and 17th century Netherlands. In the 19th century, through Courbet’s depictions of workers and farmers, genre painting gained a new dimension and thus became the forerunner of impressionism. In 1900, Munich became the center of European genre painters.
Paintings with oriental themes constitute a genre as well. Landscape or portrait painting. The painters of Orientalism maintained a realistic depiction in their motifs and in so doing created a contemporary document of the Orient at that time. The major painters of Orientalism are Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Théodore Jacques Ralli and Fabio Fabbi.
The depictions of animal painting belong to realistic painting. The best known artist of realistic animal depiction in the 15th century is Albrecht Dürer. Dürer developed realistic animal painting in still life, later known as "animal piece". Depictions of animals are also often set symbolically, especially in the Early Christian depictions. In the middle of the 19th century, Christian Malli especially devoted himself to animal painting, his speciality being cattle and sheep. One of the best known representatives of the 20th century is Franz Marc.
Floral painting, also known as flower pieces, belongs to still life painting. In its perfect imitation of reality and magnificent representation, baroque flower pieces were a reflection of the prosperity and splendor of Dutch society of the past. The choice of flowers depicted and compositions of bouquets with various flowers also portray, apart from aesthetic and representational depiction, the symbolic meaning of vanitas, withering and transience.
Still life is the genre of painting which realistically depicts dead or motionless objects. The composition follows from the subject matter and/or aesthetics. There are thus a variety of still life subjects, e.g., kitchen, flower, hunting or weapon still lives. In the baroque, still life blossomed in Holland and Flanders. The arrangements of still lives often depicted symbolically coded messages, showing a detailed development of realistic depictions of nature. The magnificent Dutch still lives show harmonious compositions as depictions of wealth. Trompe l'oeil is the culmination in realistic still life painting, reality and painting can no longer be distinguished by the eye. The baroque still life always showed in its variety, its perfect, realistic way of painting with harmonious compositions, the appearance of randomness.
Landscape painting depicts landscape for its own sake and for this reason belongs to realistic painting. In landscape painting, nature or its details are depicted, as with town scenes or marine, realistic or ideal landscapes. The varied facets of landscape painting range from the melancholy working scenes of the 17th century, the transcendental natural depictions of Caspar David Friedrich, the expressive landscapes of Vincent van Gogh, to the bright, colored, open air paintings of impressionists such as Claude Monet.
Marine painting depicts seashores and seas, mostly with ships, as well as harbors, naval battles and fishermen scenes. These marine paintings are also known as sea pieces. Marine painting developed into a variation of landscape painting, and developed into a distinct variation in the 16th century in the Netherlands and blossomed in the 17th century. Nevertheless, the concept of marine painting first appears in the 19th century. Sea captain paintings are a particular rarity among sea pieces. This concerns ship portraits which were painted specially for certain ships.
Town or city scenes are in the genre of veduta painting. This concerns objectively and perspectively accurate townscapes. Town scenes form a link between veduta painting and landscape painting. Major veduta painters are Giovanni Antonio Canale, also known as Canaletto, and Bernardo Bellotto.
Building and street scenes are also considered to be veduta painting. Inner city depictions of buildings and places provide realistic representations, as did later the photograph or postcard. By contrast, there is the capriccio in which separate elements of architecture are assembled as one pleases. Nevertheless, veduta painting is in this genre. In the 18th century, the veduta became the "postcard" of English tourists of Italy and experienced here its peak.
In addition to the revolution of the society around the turn of the century a whole new way of artistic expression has arisen. The art was then kind of an enormous medium for experiments with new styles. Artists began searching for new motives, painting techniques and shapes and turning away from the traditional painting. They try to express their own perception as well as imparting this to the viewer by using colours and shapes in a new creative way. This new modernity was criticised and admired in the art salons in European metropolises.
Nude painting always illustrates undressed, naked humans. The subject of the nude painting is developed from the movement and proportion studies in the academic art training. Up until the late 19th Century nude painting was bound by strict standards in art training. An example of this is the Birth of the Venus by Cabanel or the paintings of Albrecht Dürer or Leonardo da Vinci. Merged into a literary, mythological or religious context, the exposed female bodies corresponded with the decor of the decorous art; in this way they served the voyeuristic, but morally legitimate interest. While Ingres' classic Odalisques under the guise of an imaginary exoticism formed the scene for the ideal female nude still in representative form, nude art experienced a profound change with the introduction of Manets Olympia, in the year 1865. The picture not only shows a nude woman without any mythological or religious reference, but confronts the viewer with a prostitute, who shows herself self-confidently to the viewer. After the invention of photography which permitted nakedness to be fixed in detail, it was now also artists such as Manet, Courbet, Renoir or Degas who fixed the exposed female body on the canvas without consideration of the moral code. Thus the scenes and context of the nude representations became increasingly more varied, opener and more liberating. With Modigliani’s nude series, the subject experienced a change again at the beginning of the 20th Century: Without individual tracts, his naked females are not only a symbol for form-nascent beauty, but also an open to view exhibition of sensuality. In the modern trend the nude painting of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso continued its topicality.
Abstract painting - lat. abstract: separate, remove - makes the basic principles of the western painting completely invalid. It foregoes all pretence of reality, all imitation of a nature model or artistic representation of material existing objects. The artists operate exclusively with the means of form, colour, lines and geometrical forms. The representations avoid any reference to material reality, the abstract compositions are experienced as harmony or discord as order or disorder. The birth of abstract painting is in about the year 1910 although abstract painting techniques were already recognisable in the 19th century, e.g. William Turner or Gustave Moreau. In 1915 Kasimir Malewitsch shocked the art world with his abstract work “Black square against white background”. Later it was Jackson Pollock who created Action Painting with his expressive-spontaneous works. With Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Kasimir Malewitsch or Paul Klee the art world enthusiastically embraced abstract painting but it also met with polemic and sharp criticism - even today.
