The technique of screen printing involves taking a stamp, covering it with cotton mesh, and inking the stamp onto a canvas to produce an exact image from the stamp. The technique, first developed in the early twentieth century, allows an artist to reproduce the same image repetitively on different pieces of art. This ability was used by Pop Artists like Andy Warhol to create similar images onto canvases which he then painted in a variety of colors to make similar, yet highly diverse, series of images.

Surrealism was inspired by the work of pioneering psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and used odd, dreamlike imagery in realistic lines and shapes. Its most famous figure was Salvador Dalí, who was the archetypical surrealist. Dali's painting often featured familiar images juxtaposed with strange objects in barren and off-putting landscapes.

Grant Wood lived almost his entire life in the state of Iowa, teaching at schools and supporting organizations in the state. His painting reflected this attachment to his native region, and were articulated by Wood, along with Thomas Hart Benton, into an artistic style known as "regionalism." Wood's most famous work "American Gothic," featuring a farming couple in an honest, empathetic, yet slightly off perspective, is emblematic of the style.

Cubism, the style of art both these paintings fall under, sought to reimagine and redefine art by exploring geometric shapes and mathematical concepts. In order to reimagine the very concept of painting, cubists approached traditional styles of art in new ways. Each of these paintings is a portrait, deconstructed. The painting on the left is of a poet, (Le Poéte) by Pablo Picasso. The painting on the right is a portrait of Picasso by Juan Gris.

Figure 1: Le Poéte by Pablo Picasso (1911)

Figure 2: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

A color photographic negative is still black and white, and the color is only brought to the photograph in the development process. Layers of red, green, and blue all filter into particular shades of gray to determine color in traditional color photography. Thus, a photographer can imbue the photo in slightly different ways by developing a photograph in a particular manner.

Chuck Close's painting method begins with photographs, typically portraits, which he then copies onto huge, wall-size canvases. Close's intial works in the late 1960s and 1970s were extremely realistic, looking like photographs from across a room. As Close kept changing his method, he still worked from photographs, but would add more abstract painting methods to produce his images.

Drip painting is most closely associated with the twentieth-century American painter Jackson Pollock, whose signature works involved Pollock splattering, splashing, and slowly dripping paint directly onto canvasses that were laid on the ground. The technique was used almost contemporaneously by the artist Janet Sobel, and has been consistently used by a small cadre of artists from the 1950s to the present.

Ansel Adams is well known for two related things: his sweeping black and white photographs of the American West and his many books and classes teaching photography. Most significant in relation to the latter is his development of the "Zone System." The Zone System set down specific parameters to achieve the optimal light, focus, and composition in the development of the film.

The "Ashcan School" referred to a loosely connected group of artists in the early twentieth century in Philadelphia and New York. John Sloan, Everett Henri, and George Luks were among the prominent artists associated with the movement. The movement, while fairly loosely associated, was largely united through a devotion to presenting scenes of urban life in a gritty, realistic manner.

The Marilyn Diptych was created shortly after Marilyn Monroe's death in 1962. In order to create the work, Andy Warhol used only one publicity still of the actress, and repeated the image fifty times. Warhol used silk-screening, a process where a wooden stencil pushes ink-covered mesh onto a medium, to repeat the image. The left side of the diptych is painted over in bright, pastel colors, while the right side features only black and white images of the actress.