Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasised speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures were the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo.

It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism’s artistic style. Important Futurist works included Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla’s painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo’s The Art of Noises.

Although it was largely an Italian phenomenon, there were parallel movements in Russia, England, and elsewhere. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and even cooking. To some extent Futurism influenced the art movements Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada.

Plakatstil (German for “poster style”), also known as Sachplakat, was an early style of poster art that originated in Germany in the 1900s. It was started by Lucian Bernhard of Berlin in 1906. The common characteristics of this style are bold eye-catching lettering with flat colors. Shapes and objects are simplified, and the composition focuses on a central object. Plakatstil turned away from the complexity of Art Nouveau and propagated a more modern outlook on poster art. Famous Plakatstil artists include Ludwig Hohlwein, Edmund Edel [de], Ernst Deutsch-Dryden [de], Hans Lindenstadt, Julius Klinger, Julius Gipkens, Paul Scheurich [de], Karl Schulpig [de] and Hans Rudi Erdt. A later master of the Sachplakat was Otto Baumberger.

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Das Plakat was a German art magazine that was published from 1910 to 1921 by the Verein der Plakatfreunde (“association of friends of the poster”), founded in 1905 and later edited by the Berlin dentist Hans Sachs. Lucian Bernhard was a director of the association.

Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.

Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular in the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.

The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a historical sense, much older painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works.

The Expressionist emphasis on individual and subjective perspective has been characterised as a counter reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.

While the word expressionist was used in 1850, its origin is thought to have been traced to paintings exhibited in 1901 in Paris by obscure artist Julien-Auguste Hervé, which he called Expressionismes. 

An alternative view is that the term was coined by the Czech art historian Antonin Matějček in 1910 as the opposite of impressionism: “An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself… (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures… Impressions and mental images that pass through … people’s soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial content which produces the paintings clear essence.

The style originated principally in Germany and Austria. There were a number of groups of expressionist painters, including Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, named for a painting) was based in Munich and Die Brücke was originally based in Dresden (although some members later relocated to Berlin).

Die Brücke was active for a longer period than Der Blaue Reiter, which was only together for a year (1912). The Expressionists were influenced by various artists and sources including Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and African art. They were also aware of the work being done by the Fauves in Paris, who influenced Expressionism’s tendency toward arbitrary colours and jarring compositions.

In reaction and opposition to French Impressionism, which emphasized the rendering of the visual appearance of objects, Expressionist artists sought to portray emotions and subjective interpretations. It was not important to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter, they felt, but rather to represent vivid emotional reactions by powerful colours and dynamic compositions. Kandinsky, the main artist of Der Blaue Reiter group, believed that with simple colours and shapes the spectator could perceive the moods and feelings in the paintings, a theory that encouraged him towards increased abstraction.

The Wiener Werkstätte (engl.: Vienna Workshop), established in 1903 by the graphic designer and painter Koloman Moser, the architect Josef Hoffmann and the patron Fritz Waerndorfer, was a productive cooperative of artisans in Vienna, Austria. The Werkstätte brought together architects, artists and designers working in ceramics, fashion, silver, furniture and the graphic arts. It is regarded as a pioneer of modern design, and its influence can be seen in later styles such as Bauhaus and Art Deco.

Jugendstil (“Youth Style”) was an artistic movement, particularly in the decorative arts, that was influential in Germany from about 1895 until about 1910. It was the German counterpart of Art Nouveau. The members of the movement were reacting against the historicism and neo-classicism of the official art and architecture academies.

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It took its name from the art journal Jugend, founded by the German artist Georg Hirth. It was especially active in the graphic arts and interior decoration. 

Its major centers of activity were Munich and Weimar and the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony founded in Darmstadt in 1901. Important figures of the movement included the Swiss graphic artist Hermann Obrist, Otto Eckmann, and the Belgian architect and decorator Henry van de Velde. In its earlier years, the style was influenced by Belgian and French Art Nouveau mainly through van de Velde, who was among founders of the Belgian movement. It was also influenced by Japanese prints. In later years, it tended toward abstraction and more geometrical forms, and after 1910 began to be replaced by modernism.

The Glasgow School was a circle of influential artists and designers that began to coalesce in Glasgow, in the 1870s, and flourished from the 1890s to around 1910. Representative groups included The Four (also known as the Spook School), the Glasgow Girls and the Glasgow Boys. Part of the international art nouveau movement, they were responsible for creating the distinctive Glasgow Style.

Glasgow had experienced an economic boom at the end of the 19th century, resulting in an increase in distinctive contributions to the Art Nouveau movement, particularly in the fields of architecture, interior design and painting.

Among the most prominent definers of the Glasgow School collective were The Four. They were the painter and glass artist Margaret MacDonald, acclaimed architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (MacDonald’s husband), MacDonald’s sister Frances and Herbert MacNair. Together, The Four defined the Glasgow Style’s fusion of influences including the Celtic Revival, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Japonisme, which found favour throughout the modern art world of continental Europe. The Four, otherwise known as the Spook School, ultimately made a significant impact on the definition of Art Nouveau. The name, Spook School, or Spooky or Ghoul School, was originally a “derisive term” given to their work which “distorted and conventionalised human form.

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Through the 1880s and 1890s, around the same time that the Spook School was gaining prominence, a collective which came to be known as the Glasgow Boys was interpreting and expanding the canon of Impressionist and post-impressionist painting. Their subject matter featured rural, prosaic scenes from in and around Glasgow. Their colorful depictions attempted to capture the many facets of the character of Scotland.

The Glasgow Boys consisted of several men, most of whom were trained in, or had strong ties to the city of Glasgow. These men were brought together by a passion for realism and naturalism and this showed through in the pieces they produced. Along with this passion for naturalism, they shared a marked distaste for the Edinburgh oriented Scottish art establishment, which they viewed as oppressive. Driven and motivated by these ideals they embraced change, created masterpieces, and became Scottish icons in the process.

There were three distinct waves of Glasgow Boys. The leading figures of the first wave were:

 James Paterson (1854–1932) William York Macgregor (1855-1923), and the group used to meet at Macgregor’s studio.

The second wave was represented in Joseph Crawhall (1861–1913), Thomas Millie Dow (1848-1919), James Guthrie (1859–1930), George Henry (1858–1943), E. A. Hornel (1864–1933), James Whitelaw Hamilton (1860-1932) and E. A. Walton (1860–1922). The third wave of artists were David Gauld (1865–1936), William Kennedy (1859–1918), John Lavery (1856–1941), Harrington Mann (1864-1937), Stuart Park (1862–1933), William Wells (1872–1923), David Young Cameron (1865–1945), Alexander Ignatius Roche (1861–1923), Arthur Melville (1855–1904), Thomas Corsan Morton (1859-1928), James Nairn (1859–1904), George Pirie (1863-1946) and John Quinton Pringle (1864–1925).

Their main influences were that of Japanese print, French Realism including Jules Bastien-Lepage, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, but all of their experiences around the world greatly impacted on and inspired their work, in particular in Spain, North Africa, and Japan.

The group was constantly influenced by what they saw in the world around them and strove to display these images by utilizing the techniques of realism and naturalism; they had a passion to depict things as they actually are. This is one of the reasons that the group often chose to work outdoors. Working outdoors allowed them to produce paintings that were as true to nature as possible and it allowed them to paint realistic objects in their natural environment.

They painted real people in real places. The production of naturalistic paintings was new to this time period, and thus their techniques were considered to be innovative. Similarly, the pieces often created a sense of movement, an accurate (or naturalistic) depiction of light and shade, and extremely realistic texture. This made them stand out in the art community.

The past century has produced many prolific movements, but Art Nouveau was the one to open a new chapter in art (preceded perhaps only by the Arts and Crafts movement and William Morris). The main idea was to bring arts and crafts together again, which led toward functionalism which turned Art Nouveau into a total style, encompassing all media and genres.

Art Nouveau differs from what went before because its artists sought inspiration and guidance from nature, instead of machinery and technology.

The Movement became synonymous with progress, and it is often regarded merely as the transition period between traditional art and Modernism and although it didn’t “survive” the First World War, it did actually live through its descendants, some of which are quite obvious (such as Art Deco), or some less so (such as Bauhaus).

Art Nouveau appeared in many different countries at the approximately same time, thus you will find examples of architecture in and outside of Europe. It is quite easy to recognise a building influenced by Art Nouveau, anywhere across Western Europe and the United States. You only have to look at the Chrysler Building in New York to see what influence Art Nouveau in its design.

The creation of the flat quality of Art Nouveau style onto a painting is a difficult task, and we must understand that, even though the art of painting survived, it took on different shapes and possibly a step back to the decorative objects, graphic and print works, posters and book illustrations.

Gustav Klimt, famous for his easel paintings that depicted both narrative themes and more traditional form of portraiture art, also produced mural paintings and mosaic art as well. 

Besides these examples of art nouveau paintings, important for this period are the numerous stained-glass works, produced by yet another influential artist of this time, Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The work of the most innovative English designers, William Morris and Edward Burne –Jones, whose works heralds the movement, were applied with the use of a new technique that exchanged copper foil method as an alternative to lead, fussing the swirling motifs, the curved line, highly stylised depictions of the human figure this time applied on a glass surface. These glass panels illustrate the love for patterns, simplicity, and elaborate ornaments as a style of painting of this period. Unified not only by the legacy of the arts and crafts movement, many of the paintings of this period, both on an easel, walls of the buildings, and on glass as well, showcase the influence of Japanese art, more specifically the woodcut prints.

A keen observer of social culture stripped of glamor, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec belonged to both Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau, working as a fine illustrator and lithographer for the latter. His late-19th-century depictions of the bohemian lifestyle in Paris are still among the most remarkable artworks ever produced, almost as famous as his relationship with the Moulin Rouge cabaret, despite his physical disabilities and the fact critics often looked down on him and his work.

For Moulin Rouge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec produced a series of posters and eventually even showed his artworks on its walls. Among them, there were the portraits of singer Yvette Gilbert and dancers La Goulue and Jane Avril, alongside the scenery from other cabaret clubs and brothels, of which he was a frequent visitor.

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Emerging in the late 19^th and early 20^th century Victorian England, the Arts and Crafts movement was more than just a nouveau style in decorative arts. It made the concept of hand-made products made by craftsmen something to be celebrated. 

It was born as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution which introduced industrial manufacturing, mechanisation and mass-produced objects of inferior quality. 

The new, industrially made design patterns, elements of interior and crafts were cheaper and simplified versions of artisanal crafts and soon flooded the market, building interiors and the art scene in general. 

Contemporary critics found that the new trend was endangering the art scene with its awkward commercial aesthetics and they detected the need to rediscover new principles of beauty within the art and crafts production and moreover for re-establishing of humanistic values of pre-industrial times. 

The movement was rooted in the ideals of pre-industrial times, a response to the anxieties that did not only concern aesthetics but also fundamental social issues like industrial labour, capitalism, and alienation of people from their work. 

In the world of art, the Arts and Crafts movement is assigned as a style in decorative and fine arts, active between 1880 and 1910 inspired by the strong Anglo-Saxon tradition of craftsmanship and spread internationally from Great Britain and Europe to North America, Australia and Japan in the 1920s.

The major event of the end of the 19^th century, meaningful for the birth of the movement, was the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in London from 1^st May to 11th October 1851 that shown items which, according to critics were too vulgar, artificial, industrially produced and totally ignored the qualities and the performances of the materials used. 

The ornament was the crucial point of disagreement between craftsmen on the one hand, and the industrialists on the other. Influential authors of the time, agreed in the thesis that the ornament should be secondary to the decorated item, and which is more important to be conceptually connected and derived from the material qualities, and inseparable from the design vision of a whole. 

Suggestions about the future of the design were in the direction of the revival of craftsmanship and (re)humanisation of the design process.