Browse the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg, the classical composer who also explored expressionist painting.

Arnold Schoenberg, a pioneer of modern music, and painter Wassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract art, were close friends who inspired one another's work.

Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music influenced generations of musicians who followed.

Arnold Schoenberg expanded the confines of music by abandoning traditional chords and embracing dissonance.

Arnold Schoenberg's experimentations with dissonance and sound influenced the way films are scored.

Listen to Arnold Schoenberg's Holocaust tribute, 'A Survivor from Warsaw.'

Fed up with difficult audiences, Arnold Schoenberg started a private concert club that prohibited audible reactions.

Arnold Schoenberg was superstitious about the number 13 and died on Friday the 13th, 1951.

Mozart defined the Classical period with realism and social commentary

Dive into the Classical period, a time that emphasized a less extravagant approach to music and focused on societal issues. Defined by Mozart’s influence, find specifics about his career and why he’s remembered for his compositions and the wit and emotional depth of operas like "The Magic Flute."

Arnold Schoenberg designed a musical typewriter that transcribed complex compositions with a simple keyboard.

Jackson Pollock and others developed 'action painting,' highlighting the creative process

A subcategory of performance art, action painting emerged in 1945 as a way to capture a moment-by-moment view of the creative process through painting. For these pieces, the physical act of painting is as important as the finished product. This short explainer video covers the philosophy behind action painting, as well as exploring the works of several well-known action painters, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko.

Friedrich's paintings embody the romantic notion of 'the sublime'

Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s art uses vast, massive scale and masterful compositions to convey complex ideas of power, decay, permanence, and more. But his landscapes also present beautiful, overwhelming portraits of nature that perfectly embody philosopher Edmund Burke’s concept of “the sublime.”

Arnold Schoenberg invented a variation of chess that mimicked geopolitics.

Check out pictures from the Bauhaus' elaborate costume parties

Bauhaus is known for its innovation, but, at the end of the day, it was still an art school. That means parties were regular occurrences and often featured elaborate costumes—Gropius once dressed as the renowned architect Le Corbusier, while Kandinsky was known for pretending to be an antenna.

Although primarily known for his painting, Pablo Picasso was also a poet.

Basquiat's work is often called neoexpressionist

The neoexpressionist movement was a reaction to the minimalism of the 1960s, employing bold colors and brash symbolism to convey emotion and, at times, make political statements. As the style’s name implies, it was a new form of expressionism, a movement popular in the early 20th century.

Exploring Oskar Schlemmer's 'Triadic Ballet,' a Bauhaus-inspired performance piece

The "symphonic dance of threeness" brought together Bauhaus' varied artistic interests and offered a fable in which collectivism wins. This history and timeline of the work details its origins as well as its near-destruction at the hands of the Nazis, who considered it profane.

German expressionism produced some of horror’s earliest classics

After World War I, German filmmakers turned from reality to the surreal, fusing experimental art with the nascent world of film. Some of the movement’s most notable films, like FW Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” and Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” were intent on frightening their audiences.

Watch an interview with Philip Glass about his career and theory of creativity, which he believes needs to be consistently deconstructed and reinvented.

Picasso had several distinct periods

Picasso was known for his ever-evolving style, which art historians have often divided into his artistic periods. Warmer color palettes and subjects characterized his Pink Period (sometimes called the Rose Period). Other phases focused on neoclassical, surrealist, and mythological art and subjects. Below is Family of Saltimbanques from the Pink Period.

Friedrich's perspective draws in viewers

Friedrich produced several works, including "Wanderer," portraying figures with their back to the viewer. The effect—called Rückenfigur, or ”figure from the back”—can create complex emotions of longing, immersion, or awe.

Romanticism changed the norms of the artworld

Romanticism’s expressiveness led to a change in the norms of portrait painting, favoring emotion, nuance, and less conventional subjects. One such example is Géricault’s portraits of mental illness, depicting patients, including a kleptomaniac and a “child snatcher,” in states of expressive emotion.

The widespread violence of World War I birthed surrealism

Following World War I, artists used unconventional forms of expression to make sense of the death and destruction they'd witnessed for years. Life as they knew it had ended, and movements like Surrealism, founded by André Breton, rebelled against tradition.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 'Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette' is considered an impressionist masterpiece that captures the fleeting moments of working-class people at a beer hall.

'Einstein on the Beach,' often considered a groundbreaking experimental work, is structured like a classical opera.

The impressionist painters—the 19th-century group that included Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, and more—got their name from a critic who used the term in a negative review, claiming they were unable to paint more realistic scenes.

Picasso was one of the 20th century's most influential artists

The artist is recognized as one of the inventors of cubism, which simplified figures and scenes into flattened geometric shapes and imagined arrangements. The movement spurred new styles in response and led to increasingly abstract art. Styles like futurism, dada, De Stijl, and art deco were built on the simple forms, abstract ideas, collage, and found objects of early cubism.

Arthur Russell's avant-garde music spanned many genres

The classically trained cellist moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, mingling with the hippie movement and the Beat Generation. After arriving in New York in 1973, he began exploring the nascent punk and disco scenes, infusing them with his classical training; however, his eclectic style might've been part of the reason he never broke through during his lifetime. That variety, though, is what draws so many devoted listeners to his work today.

Read the original curriculum for the Bauhaus school, which was founded as a breeding ground for artistic collaboration across disciplines.

The ideas of Einstein and Freud combined in 'The Persistence of Memory'

The Persistence of Memory was painted on a canvas roughly the size of a sheet of paper, depicting a desolate landscape with melting clocks, ants, and a distorted figure. The piece incorporates Freud and Einstein's ideas, resulting in a haunting composition symbolizing time's fluidity and Dalí's personal anxieties.

'Waiting for Godot' was inspired by a Friedrich painting

Samuel Beckett was an admirer of art and, while touring German art galleries in 1937, saw Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon. A directorial notebook for the original production of “Waiting for Godot” notes that the end of the play’s first act was inspired by the 19th-century work.

The 'Old Guitarist' challenged art's standards of beauty

For much of Western art history, the definition of “beauty” in art was dictated by academies rather than personal taste. Artists like Picasso challenged these standards with works considered “ugly” for discarding anatomical accuracy or linear perspective in favor of a feeling.

Why Bauhaus—the 20th-century design school and aesthetic movement—matters today

The school, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, was an experimental educational environment that valued the function of an object before its form, a philosophy that would animate the rise of minimalist and modernist design in the 20th century.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

Browse some of the most iconic Bauhaus furniture

The Bauhaus style has become so commonplace that you might not have realized its influence on modern furniture, but the German school's impact is profound, from the Wassily and Barcelona chairs to Gropius' industrial style door knob.

Music was a profound inspiration for Basquiat

The prolific artist loved music, obsessing over David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, and numerous jazz figures. Many of his favorites appeared in his paintings, creating a body of work that also acts as a glossary of influences. Below is a 1984 portrait of Max Roach, the jazz drummer. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Romanticism challenged neoclassicalism

Neoclassical artists believed in the promise of the Enlightenment—that logic was a cure-all for society’s problems—and sought to apply a similar rationality to their artwork. That meant straightforward, realistic work that portrayed historical scenes as close to real life as possible without any visible evidence of the artist’s handiwork.

The scientists trying to prove Jackson Pollock's symbolism

Jackson Pollock is one of the most famous American artists in history. He is well-known for his Abstract Expressionist "drip paintings," which seemed to defy interpretation. But following the artist's posthumous bipolar diagnosis, a team of scientists attempted to prove that his symptoms, including mania and psychosis, caused Pollock to embed images under his thrown paint.

Surrealism toyed with ideas from psychoanalysis

The movement's artists were interested in the ideas being explored in the burgeoning fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. Dalí, in particular, often created works that toyed with Freudian theories.