# What is the most influential art movement in history?

> Movements that changed what a picture is allowed to look like. One of them was named by a critic who meant it as an insult.

*By YPB Team · Published September 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-most-influential-art-movement-in-history*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Renaissance** — score 1000/1000
   Perspective, anatomy and the rediscovery of antiquity in fifteenth-century Italy.
2. **Baroque** — score 822/1000
   Drama, movement and hard light, from Caravaggio to Bernini.
3. **Expressionism** — score 768/1000
   Distorted colour and form to carry feeling, from Munch to Kirchner.
4. **Minimalism** — score 685/1000
   Industrial materials and repetition, stripped of gesture.
5. **Post-Impressionism** — score 621/1000
   Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne pushing past the Impressionists' surfaces.
6. **Pop Art** — score 464/1000
   Soup cans, comic panels and the collapse of the line between art and advertising.
7. **Impressionism** — score 464/1000
   Named from a Monet canvas by a critic who meant it as an insult in 1874.
8. **Ukiyo-e** — score 464/1000
   Japanese woodblock prints that reshaped European painting after 1860.
9. **Romanticism** — score 464/1000
   Feeling, weather and the sublime over rules, from Turner to Delacroix.
10. **Bauhaus** — score 464/1000
   A German school that taught design to serve manufacture, and shaped modern buildings and objects.
11. **Surrealism** — score 365/1000
   Dreams and the unconscious, from Dali's clocks to Magritte's pipe.
12. **Cubism** — score 365/1000
   Picasso and Braque breaking objects into simultaneous viewpoints, taken up across the 1912 Salon.
13. **Abstract Expressionism** — score 0/1000
   Post-war New York, from Pollock's drips to Rothko's fields.
14. **Dada** — score 0/1000
   Anti-art born of the First World War, and the reason a urinal hangs in museums.

Tags: europe, painting, art, art movements