Prescribed references: artists, movements and key works of modern and contemporary drawing
Prescribed references: modern and contemporary drawing
This domain tests whether you can place drawing practices in a plausible lineage and, more importantly, use references to justify visual decisions. The exam favours accurate visual description over name-dropping: identify medium, mark-making, composition and spatial idea, then link to a movement.
Core references and concepts
- Post-Impressionism: Seurat's conté studies for Bathers at Asnières show tonal massing; Van Gogh's reed-pen drawings use directional marks; Cézanne's pencil-and-watercolour studies build form through repeated, parallel strokes.
- Expressionism: Käthe Kollwitz's charcoal and lithographic self-portraits compress form into emotional light; Egon Schiele's contour lines are nervous and spatial.
- Cubism: Picasso and Braque dissolve single viewpoint; Picasso's studies for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica show drawing as research, not decoration.
- Surrealism and Catalan lineage: Miró's Constellations use line, colour and sign; Dalí's precise illusionism; Tàpies' mixed-media matter; Barceló's expressive materiality.
- Bauhaus and abstraction: Klee's pedagogical sketches and Kandinsky's line-point-plane ideas; Matisse's Jazz cut-outs as drawing with scissors.
- Contemporary: Hockney's iPad drawings, Kentridge's animated charcoal, Mehretu's layered architectural lines, Sol LeWitt's instruction-based wall drawings.
Worked example
Compare Seurat's tonal conté study with Schiele's self-portrait line. Seurat: edges are soft, values grouped into few masses, anatomy simplified for light. Schiele: line is continuous and pressured, foreshortening sharp, negative space active. If asked to relate your own drawing, say which device you borrowed-for example, 'I used Seurat's value grouping to keep the figure readable at a distance, then Schiele's broken contour to mark the shoulder'-and point to a specific area.
Traps that cost marks
- Listing names without describing a mark, medium or compositional effect.
- Treating a painting as if it were a drawing; the exam asks about drawing-specific qualities.
- Inventing works or dates; if unsure, describe the approach rather than the title.
- Reducing Cubism to 'geometry' or Surrealism to 'dreams' without visual evidence.
- Using references as decoration rather than as justification.