20th-century and Contemporary Art: Avant-gardes to the Present
Twentieth-century and contemporary art is examined as a sequence of avant-garde programmes: each movement is a position on what art is for, and the exam expects you to name the programme, its date bracket and its formal consequences.
Core rules and concepts
- Fauvism (Salon d'Automne, 1905): colour freed from description; Matisse, Derain.
- Cubism (1907–14): the analytic phase dissolves the object into facets seen from several viewpoints, using near-monochrome to avoid illusion; the synthetic phase rebuilds it through collage and lettering (Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912). Picasso, Braque, Gris. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is the entry point, with Iberian and African references.
- Futurism (Marinetti's manifesto, 1909): speed, simultaneity, the machine; Boccioni.
- Expressionism: Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter; colour as inner state.
- Abstraction: Kandinsky's non-objective painting, Mondrian's neoplastic grid, Malevich's Suprematism.
- Dada (Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916): anti-art, chance, photomontage, the readymade - Duchamp's Fountain (1917) shifts the question from making to choosing.
- Surrealism (Breton's manifesto, 1924): automatism and dream; Dalí's paranoiac-critical method, Miró's biomorphic signs, Magritte's visual puns.
- After 1945: abstract expressionism (Pollock's drip), pop art (Warhol's Brillo Boxes, 1964), minimalism, conceptual art, land art and the globalised present.
- Architecture: the Bauhaus (1919–1933), Le Corbusier's five points and the Unité d'Habitation, Mies van der Rohe's steel and glass.
Worked example
Guernica (1937): identify - oil on canvas, about 3.5 × 7.8 m, painted for the Paris International Exposition. Describe - a grey, black and white palette resembling press photography, a triptych-like structure, a bull, a horse, a fallen soldier, a mother with a dead child, a woman holding a lamp. Interpret - no bombs or aircraft appear, so the image becomes a general emblem of massacre; the electric bulb works as a modern sun and eye. Context - the bombing of the Basque town and the Spanish Civil War, with Cubist fragmentation used as reportage.
Traps that cost marks
- Cubism is not Futurism: one analyses space, the other celebrates motion and modernity.
- Dada is not Surrealism, although Surrealism inherits its procedures.
- Do not describe Guernica as a realistic battle scene.
- A readymade is not "a sculpture of a urinal"; it is a chosen object and a proposition about authorship.