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Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements study materials
Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements study resources

Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements: Contemporary Art and Culture, 1945 to the Present

Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Contemporary Art and Culture, 1945 to the Present

Contemporary Art and Culture from 1945 to the present tests whether you can distinguish movements by their operating rules rather than by medium or date. The paper rewards precise links between a practice and the institution, market or politics it responds to.

1945-1960

  • Abstract Expressionism: action painting (Pollock) and colour field (Rothko); scale and the canvas as arena.
  • Informalism in Europe: matter painting, gesture, scarified surfaces (Fautrier, Dubuffet, Tàpies).
  • El Paso (Madrid, 1957): Saura, Millares, Feito, expressive abstraction as an anti-Franco cultural statement.

The 1960s

  • Pop: Hamilton's collage Just what is it... (1956) as founding statement; Warhol's silkscreen repetition, Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots; mass media becomes the subject.
  • Nouveau Réalisme (1960, Restany): Klein, Arman.
  • Minimalism: Judd's specific objects, industrial materials, seriality, the viewer's body in the room (Morris, Serra).
  • Conceptual art: the idea over the object (Kosuth's One and Three Chairs, 1965; LeWitt's Sentences, 1967-69); Beuys's social sculpture.
  • Land art (Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970), Arte Povera (1967, Merz), performance and body art, video (Paik).

After 1970

  • Institutional critique (Haacke), appropriation and the Pictures generation (Levine), postmodern pastiche; installation, photography and the market; participatory practice after the 1990s.
  • Spanish: Equipo Crónica (1964) political Pop; Antonio Saura (Huesca, 1930); José Manuel Broto (Zaragoza, 1949) abstract painting; Pablo Serrano (1908-1985), whose work anchors the IAACC in Zaragoza; the CDAN in Huesca for art and nature.

Worked example

Separate Minimalism from Conceptual art with a test. Judd's galvanised metal boxes are objects: meaning lies in materials, proportion and the room. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is a proposition: photograph, dictionary definition and chair together ask what chair means. If removing craft does not change the argument it is Minimalism; if the argument is the artwork it is Conceptual.

Traps

  • Conflating Pop with Dada, which had different historical targets.
  • Using contemporary as a style word rather than a period marker.
  • Forgetting that El Paso is Spanish and political, not a local branch of Abstract Expressionism.
  • Naming artists without saying which rule their practice follows.