Diego Velazquez was an idiosyncratic painter who became the offical court painter for the Spanish king Philip IV. Velazquez's unique composition style, love of odd subjects, and expressive portrait style found its culmination in Las Meninas, a 1656 painting that shows the daughters of the King with their attendants and the painter in a large room with people coming and going. The painting was so remarkable that Pablo Picasso made a cubist version of it in the twentieth century.

Diego Velazquez was an idiosyncratic painter who became the offical court painter for the Spanish king Philip IV. Velazquez's unique composition style, love of odd subjects, and expressive portrait style found its culmination in Las Meninas, a 1656 painting that shows the daughters of the King with their attendants and the painter in a large room with people coming and going. The painting was so remarkable that Pablo Picasso made a cubist version of it in the twentieth century.

Nighthawks was painted in 1942 by Edward Hopper, who sought to capture the inherent loneliness and suffocation of the "new" urban society as well as the effects of wartime.

Pop Art as a general movement sought to bring post-World War II American popular culture into high art. One of the more famous approaches to this was Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic book imagery. Lichtenstein painted all of his canvases by hand, but would copy one frame from a comic, including shaded dots, dialogue bubbles, and weak colors, onto a large canvas.

Like fellow Pop Artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, Jasper Johns used familiar symbols and images, but reshaped and transformed them to present them in new ways. Unlike his fellow Pop Artists, who preferred commercial and pop culture symbols, Johns largely used icons of Americana, most notably the American flag and maps of the United States. One of Johns' most well known paintings is of an American flag that is completely in white.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to Franco's fascist Spain.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to Franco's fascist Spain.

Nighthawks was painted in 1942 by Edward Hopper, who sought to capture the inherent loneliness and suffocation of the "new" urban society as well as the effects of wartime.

Pop Art as a general movement sought to bring post-World War II American popular culture into high art. One of the more famous approaches to this was Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic book imagery. Lichtenstein painted all of his canvases by hand, but would copy one frame from a comic, including shaded dots, dialogue bubbles, and weak colors, onto a large canvas.

Like fellow Pop Artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, Jasper Johns used familiar symbols and images, but reshaped and transformed them to present them in new ways. Unlike his fellow Pop Artists, who preferred commercial and pop culture symbols, Johns largely used icons of Americana, most notably the American flag and maps of the United States. One of Johns' most well known paintings is of an American flag that is completely in white.