Multiple Styles

Works that deliberately combine clearly different styles in one piece, such as cartoon line over a classical figure or abstraction beside realism.

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About

Most pictures hold to a single visual language; these switch between several on purpose. Mixed hands were common in earlier workshops. Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder painted The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man (c. 1617) together, Rubens's broad figures set among Brueghel's finely detailed animals and foliage, but there the aim was harmony.

Modern artists made the clash itself a method. Francis Picabia's Transparencies of the late 1920s lay outlines of classical heads over one another. Sigmar Polke's paintings of the 1980s put cartoon drawings on top of printed fabrics, dot screens and poured resins, and David Salle sets unrelated images side by side, each in its own manner, so that no single style rules the canvas. Look for the seams, where one kind of drawing, colour or finish stops and another begins, and for what the contrast says about how pictures borrow.