Realism [UR], for instance, involves the artist directly depicting their aesthetic insight exactly as they perceive it (e.g., the ancient Greeks in sculpture, Henry James in fiction, Charles Bukowski in poetry, Roberto Rossellini in film, and Modest Mussorgsky in music).

Impressionism [LL] involves depicting an aesthetic perception more suggestively, in softer tones, sometimes with minimal execution (e.g., Edgar Degas in sculpture, Stephen Crane in fiction, Arthur Symons in poetry, Jean Vigo in film, and Claude Debussy in music).

Expressionism [UL] almost always conveys a kind of struggle, sometimes a ravishment, a highly charged emphasis or exaggeration (e.g., Ernst Barlach in sculpture, Kafka in fiction, Rumi in poetry, Fritz Lang in film, Beethoven in music).

And symbolism [LR] is an even further abstraction, where an artist uses symbols as means of referencing their aesthetic insight (e.g., Max Klinger in sculpture, George Orwell in fiction, Robert Frost in poetry, Ingmar Bergman in film, and Erik Satie in music). (Rentschler, 2006b, p. 54) 

…the power of art lies in its ability to express something: namely some intuition, vision, impulse, or feeling of the artist. Likewise, this expressivist theory reverberated throughout the practice of art. Artists from this  school predominantly used art not as a means of merely imitating an objective reality or focusingon the purely formal elements of their medium but as a vehicle for expressing some interior state. These “expressionists” included such artists as Van Gogh, Kandinsky, and Pollock in painting;

Formal approaches, fueled by an emphasis on scientific materialism and rationalism, argued that the true locus of art lies not in the artist’s original intent (which they dubbed “the intentional fallacy”) but rather in the structural integrity of the artwork itself. In art practice, formalist approaches enjoyed a major influence. Artists using this approach turned their focus away from the expression of feeling and concentrated on a more “realistic” attitude, usually recording exterior events as objectively as possible. These formalists included Balzac, Zola, and George Eliot in literature; and Monet, Renoir, and Courbet in painting.

Reception and response approaches, of course, also influenced the practice of art. Whereas many of the artists from the formalist and expressivist approaches regarded art as a largely autonomous  or solitary affair, with little attention paid to the receptive audience, the majority of postmodern artists used their art as a means of facilitating a response in the viewer. In other words, artists using this approach tend to emphasize the multiplicity of interpretations and responses availableto an artwork. They include John Cage in music, Umberto Eco in literature, and Robert Venturi in architecture.

The symptomatic approach found its way into art creation as well. Artists focused less on a particular feeling, or the formal aspects of their craft, and more on the depiction of social identities and social inequalities (e.g., economic, gender, political, ecological). As a result, their artwork became symptomatic of, say, what it is like to be black, to be a woman, to be gay, to live here or there, to be from a certain class-background. Some examples of artists using this approach are Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and John Irving in literature; Cindy Sherman in photography; and Andy Warhol in painting. (2006a, p. 41-45)