Abstract Art
Art that does not try to show an accurate picture of the visible world. Instead, the artist works with shape, colour, and gesture on their own terms. A shape in an abstract painting does not have to represent anything outside itself, it can just be a shape.
Some abstract work starts from a real object, a figure, or a landscape, then simplifies it past the point of easy recognition. Other abstract work never referenced anything real to begin with, it is built from geometric form or free mark-making alone.
Source: Tate, "Abstract art"
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Abstract Expressionism
A specific movement, not just a style description. The term names the abstract painting American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning developed in the 1940s and 1950s. It is usually recognized by visible brush-strokes or gestural mark-making, and by a sense that the paint went down fast and without much second-guessing.
The name captures two things at once: the work is abstract in form, but it still carries real emotional weight. The movement borrowed from surrealism's interest in unconscious, unplanned mark-making, then pushed it toward pure abstraction.
Source: Tate, "Abstract expressionism"
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Surrealism
A movement that started in the 1920s among writers and artists trying to unlock the subconscious imagination. André Breton, who wrote the movement's founding manifesto in 1924, defined it as "pure psychic automatism", the attempt to express real, unfiltered thought without reason or aesthetic judgment getting in the way first.
In practice, surrealist painters look for strange beauty in the unexpected, the dreamlike, and the overlooked. A surrealist painting often reads like a dream you half remember: recognizable objects, arranged in a way that could not happen in waking life.
Source: Tate, "Surrealism"
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Fine Art
Fine art is the loosest term on this list, and it is worth being honest about that instead of forcing a false precision on it. Broadly, it means work made mainly for its aesthetic or intellectual value rather than for a practical function, painting, drawing, sculpture, and fine art photography are the core forms. Pottery, weaving, and metalwork sit in a separate category, decorative art, because they combine creative expression with a functional use.
"Fine" here is not a quality judgment. It refers to the discipline and tradition behind the technique, not to whether a specific piece is good.
Source: EBSCO Research Starters, "Fine Art"
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Portraiture
A portrait represents a specific, identifiable person, meant to capture their likeness, their personality, or both. That is a wider definition than most people expect. A portrait does not have to be photorealistic. It can be literal and detailed, or it can be interpretive and symbolic, using colour, gesture, or setting to say something about the subject beyond their face.
What makes a painting portraiture is the intent to represent one particular person, not a generic figure or an anonymous body in a scene.
Source: MoMA, "Portrait"
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Contemporary Art
Contemporary art describes a time period, not a look or a technique. The Museum of Modern Art defines it as art made in the present and the recent past, generally understood as roughly 1980 to today. A contemporary painting can be abstract, figurative, or photorealistic, the label only tells you when it was made, not what it looks like.
This is the term to reach for when you want current work by living artists, as opposed to modern art (roughly the 1880s through the 1970s) or historical periods further back.
Source: MoMA, "Contemporary art"
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