The Dilemma: You’ve just sidled up to someone very attractive at an art museum. She asks you if you like the Impressionists. You think she means Darryl Hammond.

People You Can Impress: art collectors, fans of water lilies, ghostly guys screaming on bridges

The Quick Trick: If it looks like something recognizable but not too detailed, it’s Impressionism. If it doesn’t look like much of anything, it’s Expressionism. If it really doesn’t look like anything, it’s Abstract Expressionism.

The Explanation:
Fact is there is no such thing as a cut-and-dried art movement. For the most part, the labels we give ’em just represent the trends that influence artists at a particular time. Which means movements are basically fluid and they always overlap. But knowing that, take a look at a few broad “strokes” to be aware of.

Impressionism arose around the mid-19th century as painters began to realize that they no longer needed to represent reality in stark detail; after all, photography had taken care of that. Instead they began painting their subjects more vaguely, with more emphasis on light and feeling than on detail—in short, capturing the impression the subject made on artist and viewer. For the most part, they used thickly textured paint to connote movement and a spirit of spontaneity. Despite the fact that Impressionism was in part a reaction to photography, it also ended up borrowing from the medium, mainly mimicking photography’s composition, motion, and candor. Frequently working outdoors, Impressionists often painted the same subject in different lights (Monet’s series of Venice, for example). Interestingly enough, “impressionism” was originally used as a pejorative. But artists quickly hijacked the intended insult and wore it proudly. Naturally, the Impressionists were followed by the Postimpressionists, who weren’t so much copycats as artists that pushed the limits even farther, taking greater and greater license with conventional representation. Giants of Postimpressionism include Seurat, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and a fella named Van Gogh.

About the only things Impressionism and Expressionism have in common is that they both included paint and they kind of rhyme. While Impressionism was all about the effect of the subject on the viewer, Expressionism was the artist expressing his or her own interior. It arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and brought us artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Edvard Munch, whose works convey raw feelings, angst, or movement. It also gave us writers like Franz Kafka and composers like Arnold Schoenberg. As for blurring the lines, some regard Van Gogh as a proto-Expressionist because of his enormous influence on the movement.

Keeping It Abstract
As for America’s modern contribution to the arts, it didn’t arrive until after World War II, with Abstract Expressionism. It’s abstract because the art was about pure feeling and less about representing the subject, if there even was one.