Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art
This domain runs from the historical avant-gardes to the present. The exam tests your ability to define a movement by its stated aims rather than its look, to explain the theory behind abstraction and the readymade, and to place works within political and institutional contexts.
The historical avant-gardes
- Fauvism (1905): Matisse, unnatural colour released from description; the term was a critic's insult.
- Cubism: Picasso and Braque, African mask forms, analytic fragmentation then synthetic collage and papier collé.
- Futurism: Marinetti's manifestos, speed and technology, Boccioni's unique forms of continuity in space.
- Expressionism: Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, Kandinsky's path to abstraction in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
- Dada: Duchamp's readymades, Fountain (1917), photomontage, anti-art as institutional critique.
- Surrealism (Breton's manifesto, 1924): automatism, dream imagery, Dalí, Magritte, Ernst, Miró.
- Constructivism, Suprematism (Malevich's Black Square), De Stijl, Bauhaus: art as design for a new society.
After 1945
- Abstract Expressionism: Pollock's drip, Rothko's colour fields, action versus colour-field.
- Pop: Hamilton's collage, Warhol's Brillo boxes and silkscreens, mass media as subject.
- Minimalism, Conceptual art, Land art, Feminist art, Postmodernism and appropriation.
- Picasso's Guernica (1937): cubist syntax, newspaper monochrome, explicit political denunciation.
Worked example. A white porcelain urinal, laid on its back, signed R. Mutt and dated 1917, submitted to an exhibition that claimed to accept all works and was rejected. Reasoning: the object is manufactured, not made by the artist; the choice and repositioning constitute the work; the signature and title parody artistic authorship; the rejection exposes the jury's hidden hierarchy of taste. Terms: readymade, institutional critique. Identify as Duchamp, Fountain.
Traps. Treating all abstraction as non-representational or apolitical; confusing Surrealism with Expressionism; describing Duchamp only as a painter; using postmodern as a catch-all without definition; ignoring manifesto texts; dating Guernica to the Spanish Civil War without noting the 1937 Paris commission.