The medium didn't matter, but the object meant everything. Whether he was using his canvas for a Cubist experiment or his camera for an avant-garde digression, Fernand Leger always placed the object at the center of his work. Leger was the only French Cubist to devote himself, throughout his c

Avant-garde film, Clever, Collage, Cubism, Futurism, Illusive, Pioneering, Sophisticated, Subtle

The black and white tile piazzas of Italy inspired the work for which Riley is most famous -- an Op Art succession. Caught in a downpour, she noticed how the appearance of the checkerboard tiles shifted and blurred as the water streamed over them. From that point on, she explored the act of looking.

Event, Illusive, Intense, Op art, Physical force, Psychedelic

Craig Raine has an extraterrestrial sensibility. His 1979 volume, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," established a new school of poetry -- for those who experience this world as if it were Mars. Writing from the unfamiliar perspective of a space alien living in modern England, Raine forces his reader

Clever, Dense, Distorted, Illusive, Postmodern poetry, Quirky

Descartes isolated himself in a cabin, set a ball of wax in front of himself, and set about determining what he could know. Martin Heidegger, some 300 years later, saw this thought experiment as all wrong: Descartes should have picked up the wax, used it, molded it. For Heidegger, the truth is reveal

Contemplative, Deconstruction, Ecstatic, Illusive, Phenomenology, Repetition, Spectral, Spiritual