The two most common subjects in art are food and naked ladies. These symbolize man's survival instinct, and sex drive. In fact, you will find that there are more paintings of food than there are of naked ladies. This does not mean that the survival instinct is stronger than the sex drive. It's just easier to get food to pose for you. A few of the truly great masters were able to combine these grand themes. The French painter Edouard Manet, for example, painted the famous Dejeuner sur l'herbes, depicting a naked lady eating lunch.
Most of 20th Century art is a reaction to photography. In the mid-19th Century, photography began to replace painting as a means for capturing realistic images. Art said, ``The heck with this. I'm outta here.'' So artists begin to experiment with ways to make their paintings look different from photographs. Georges Seurat painted entire pictures just out of little points of color. This technique is is called pointalism. Jackson Pollack, on the other hand, painted large canvasses with just blobs of paint, a technique known as blobism. Some other 20th Century art movements are cubism (painting just with little tiny cubes), fauvism (painting with little fauves), and post-impressionism (painting with little yellow sticky pieces of paper from note pads).
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