Early 20th-Century Avant-Garde Movements
This domain covers the avant-garde from about 1905 to 1939. The PAU tests formal innovation, the role of manifestos and exhibitions, and the difference between movements that look similar. You should be able to explain what each group rejected and what it proposed, not just list names.
Color and form
- Fauvism (Salon d'Automne, 1905): arbitrary, non-descriptive color and loose handling; Matisse treats color as structure and emotion at once.
- Cubism: analytic (c. 1907–12) breaks objects into facets and multiple viewpoints, narrowing the palette; synthetic (c. 1912–14) reintroduces color, texture and collage (papier collé). Picasso, Braque and Gris.
- Cubism is not abstract: it remains tied to recognizable subjects, even when they are hard to read.
Expression and abstraction
- Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911) use harsh color and distorted form for psychological intensity; Kandinsky moves to non-objective painting, arguing for color and form as direct spiritual language.
- Futurism: Marinetti's 1909 manifesto demands speed, technology and rupture with the past; Boccioni's sculpture and painting show simultaneous motion.
- Constructivism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus turn abstraction into design and social program.
Anti-art and the unconscious
- Dada (from 1916) attacks artistic institutions; Duchamp's readymades, notably Fountain (1917), relocate the artwork in the artist's choice and the exhibition context.
- Surrealism (Breton's manifesto, 1924) seeks the unconscious through automatism and dream imagery: Dalí's illusions, Magritte's visual puns, Miró's signs.
Worked example: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Start with subject: five women in a brothel interior, two with African-mask-like heads and three with Iberian-sculpture faces. Form: the space is fractured into shallow, angular planes; the still life at the bottom is tipped toward the viewer; there is no single vanishing point. Context: Picasso was working through Cézanne and non-Western sculpture while competing with Matisse. Interpretation: the painting is not yet analytic Cubism, but it destroys Renaissance perspective and narrative, making the viewer's stable position impossible. That is the argument to make.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling Cubism abstract.
- Confusing Dada's anti-art strategy with Surrealism's interest in the unconscious.
- Mixing Fauvism and Expressionism; the former is French and color-led, the latter German and psychologically harsh.
- Ignoring manifestos and exhibition contexts, which the exam frequently rewards.