Make an impression.

If you are asked a direct question, however, you need to understand that the history of art is cluttered with one ism after another; Romanticism, Futurism, Classicism, Cubism, not forgetting Vorticism. Realism anyone? But let’s start with the Impressionists, those eager tyros who upset the cultural establishment in the mid-19th century. Not for them stuffy realism, they experimented with colour and form, using bold brushstrokes and often, quelle horreur, knocking off a painting in a single day.

The names are all too familiar; Manet, Renoir, Degas Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, but you’re a bluffer so keep an aside or two to impress. ‘Yes Monet, lilies, lovely, but I’ve always been moved by his beguiling Woman with a Parasol. Van Gogh? Of course, those bright colours but you really ought to check out his (somewhat gloomy) early work of peasant life in his native Netherlands.’ 

Modern and Post-Modern. 

Modern art isn’t that modern. Some argue this ism was galvanised by Gustave Courbet when he painted The Origin of the World in1866,an X-rated vision of female genitalia which is too bracing to be shown on X. Modern lasted until the 1960s when it became passé and became Post-Modern, starring Andy Pop Warhol and Roy Whaam Lichtenstein with works which are brash, bright and cartoonish.

Jack the Dipper

Pre-Post-Modern; the Abstract Expressionists. A splashing time was had by all in the 1940s and 50s, few more than Jackson Pollock who dripped paint straight on to vast canvases to create riotous abstractions. Extra kudos for knowing his wife Lee Krasner was a hugely effective pioneer of the movement. As was Joan Mitchell, not be confused with Joni who painted some of her fellow musicians and the covers for her albums.

What’s the Pointillism?

It’s not enough to know painters used oil and water, you need to understand some technical terms. Take Pointillism, made popular by Georges Seurat who used tiny dots of pure colours, which trick the eye into seeing the images as a whole, but brighter and more sharply defined. When former Disney boss Michael Eisner was trying win over Portsmouth FC fans he played an animated version of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon to emphasise that he planned to bring steady growth to the club. Point by point.

It’s surreal thing

Out of World War One erupted a band of artists who were angry, disillusioned and eager to shock. Leading lights included Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel and Max Ernst whose paintings feature grotesque apparitions such as the flamboyant female in a garish orange cape of feathers with the head of an owl and the body of a woman naked from the breasts down.

They did shock but they had fun making mischief. Salvador Dalí, who made a sculpture of a phone with a lobster as the receiver once complained that when he asked for grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never served a cooked telephone.

(btw Hiëronymous Bosch was depicting a similarly dystopian world some 500 years before with his array of grotesques in Garden of Earthly Delights. Top marks for dropping that into the conversation).

Contemporary art 

More labels here than a Tesco superstore. Land art, street art, feminist art, performance art, video art, black art. All too confusing. Be a tad controversial by claiming The Young British Artists (YBAs) now the OBAs (Older BAs) were cleverly marketed Sensation seekers. Play safe and laud David Hockney as the Greatest Living British Artist.

Renaissance Man 

Now you have to up your game. The heart of soul of the story of art lies in the Renaissance, the golden age of art, music, and literature from the 1400s to the 17th century, in which artists rejected the formality expected of religious work to create a world of harmony and beauty.

The names are household: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Raphael. Where to stop? Titian,  Tintoretto, Veronese.....

To prove your credentials come up with something slightly left field. Flowers for example. Red carnations in a painting symbolise love, pink is for marriage, a white flower, good luck and white lilies like the one Gabriel presents to Mary in Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation (1472–1475) represent purity.

To really show how clever you are point out where the artists put themselves in the picture.

Raphael peeks out from The School of Athens fresco he painted in the early 16th century. Sandro Botticelli portrayed himself as the young blond man on the right of The Adoration of the Magi staring boldly out in a sort of Renaissance selfie.

Michelangelo who hated working on The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel included a gruesome image of himself as St. Bartholomew after he had been skinned alive.

Artful

Picasso, who worked his way through most of the isms of the 20th century, could have a guide to himself. He once declared: ‘Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.’

Hmmm.