Post-1945 Art and Contemporary Trends: Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Conceptual, Postmodernism
What this domain tests
Post-1945 art is examined as a series of challenges to the object: painting as action, the ordinary object as icon, the idea as artwork, and the museum itself as material. Questions ask you to place a work on that ladder and to justify the placement with evidence about medium, authorship and site.
Core rules and concepts
- Abstract Expressionism: action painting (Pollock's drip technique, 1947–50) versus colour field (Rothko, Newman); large scale, all-over composition; European equivalents - Art Informel, Tachisme, Art Brut (Dubuffet).
- Spanish Informalism: El Paso group (Madrid, 1957) - Saura, Millares, Feito; Tàpies' matter painting; Chillida's iron and Oteiza's emptied forms in sculpture.
- Pop Art: Hamilton's collage of 1956 names the trend; Warhol's Brillo Box and Marilyns, Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots, Rauschenberg's combines, Oldenburg; in Spain, Equipo Crónica and Arroyo.
- Minimalism: Judd's "specific objects", Morris, Stella; industrial materials, serial repetition, the viewer's bodily relation to the piece.
- Conceptual and after: Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1965); Fluxus and Beuys; Land Art (Smithson's Spiral Jetty), Body Art, performance, video.
- Postmodernism: pluralism and appropriation (Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman); Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction (1966); architecture as spectacle - Pompidou (Piano and Rogers, 1977), Guggenheim Bilbao (Gehry, 1997).
Worked example
Prompt: "Distinguish Minimalism from Conceptual art using one work each." Reasoning: a Judd stack is still a manufactured object whose meaning lies in serial form and placement in the room; Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (a chair, its photograph, its dictionary definition) replaces the object with propositions. Minimalism asks what an object is; Conceptual art asks what an artwork is. The criterion is where the work resides - in the thing or in the idea.
Traps that cost marks
Treating "postmodern" as a synonym for "contemporary"; confusing action painting with colour field; describing Pop Art as pure celebration without noting its irony; dating the Guggenheim Bilbao to the 1980s; ignoring Spanish Informalism when the question explicitly asks about post-war Spanish art.