Twentieth-Century Art: Avant-Gardes and Later Movements
The twentieth-century section moves from the historical avant-gardes (c. 1905-1939) to post-1945 movements and Modern Movement architecture. The exam wants precise movement definitions, the ability to place a work in a manifesto or exhibition, and a clear account of what each avant-garde rejected.
Core rules and vocabulary
- Fauvism (1905). Salon d'Automne label; arbitrary, saturated colour freed from description: Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain.
- Cubism (1907-1914). Picasso and Braque; Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Iberian and African sources; analytic phase (fragmented facets, monochrome) then synthetic phase (collage, papier colle, letters).
- Futurism (1909-). Marinetti's manifesto; speed, machine, urban violence; Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913); Italian nationalism.
- Expressionism and abstraction. Die Brucke (Dresden, 1905), Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911); Kandinsky's move to non-objective painting; Malevich's Black Square (1915), Suprematism; Mondrian and De Stijl (1917); Bauhaus (1919, Gropius).
- Dada and Surrealism. Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich 1916; Duchamp's readymades (Fountain, 1917). Breton's manifesto 1924; automatism versus veristic dream illusionism (Dali, Magritte, Miro); Picasso's Guernica (1937).
- After 1945 and architecture. Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Rothko), Pop Art (Hamilton 1956, Warhol, Lichtenstein), Minimalism, Conceptual art, Land art; Le Corbusier's five points (Villa Savoye, 1929), Mies's Barcelona Pavilion (1929), Wright's Guggenheim (1959), later High-tech and Deconstructivism (Guggenheim Bilbao, 1997).
Worked example
Prompt: analyse Guernica. Reasoning: painted 1937 for the Paris International Exposition; huge mural scale (about 349 x 776 cm); monochrome greys evoke press photography; Cubist fragmentation compresses bull, horse, lamp, mother and dead child into one shallow space; there is no battlefield, only victims, so the meaning is anti-war and universal. Picasso kept it outside Spain until democracy returned.
Traps that cost marks
Confusing analytic and synthetic Cubism; treating Dada and Surrealism as the same; placing Futurism in France; describing Pop Art as uncritical celebration; calling all post-1945 art 'contemporary' without naming the movement.