Wall Art Guide

Wassily Kandinsky is often called the father of abstract art, and his circles, lines and triangles are some of the most recognisable forms in modern design. On the wall, though,...

William Morris designed wallpaper and textiles, not pictures. Yet his patterns — thrushes stealing strawberries, honeysuckle climbing through willow, tulips in a tight repeat — have become some of the...

Street art was made to be seen by people who weren't looking for it — on a subway platform, a bridge, the side of a building. Bringing it indoors changes...

Some of the most copied images in modern interiors were made with scissors by a man in his seventies. Henri Matisse's paper cut-outs — blue nudes, coral fronds, stars and...

For most of the twentieth century, the story of abstract art started with Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Then the paintings of a Swedish woman who had died in 1944 started...

A colour field painting has almost nothing in it: two or three soft-edged rectangles of colour floating on a ground of another colour. That is exactly why it works on...

Scandinavian style is routinely described as minimalism with better wood, and that is the wrong way round. Minimalism is a reduction: take away until only one thing is left. Scandinavian...

Pop art took its subjects from the things nobody considered subjects: soup tins, comic panels, advertising, film stills, packaging. The argument was that mass production had already decided what images...

Klee is the Bauhaus master whose work does not look like the Bauhaus. Where his colleagues built with circles and primaries, he built with small squares of colour laid side...

The Bauhaus existed for fourteen years, moved city three times and was closed under political pressure in 1933. In that time it produced furniture, buildings, textiles and typography, but the...

Bauhaus as a style is easy to recognise and easy to get wrong. Three shapes — circle, square, triangle. Three colours — red, yellow, blue — plus black, white and...

Minimalism is not a colour scheme and it is not the absence of effort. It is reduction: taking things away until what remains cannot lose anything else without collapsing. One...