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Galicia PAU History of Art study materials
Galicia PAU History of Art study resources

Galicia PAU History of Art: Modern art: early 20th-century avant-gardes and architecture

Galicia PAU History of Art · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Modern art: early 20th-century avant-gardes and architecture

This domain covers roughly 1905–1945: the historical avant-gardes and the birth of modern architecture. The PAU expects you to place a movement within about five years, name its manifesto or key exhibition, and state its formal rule.

The movements

  • Fauvism (Salon d'Automne, 1905): colour freed from description - Matisse, Derain.
  • Expressionism: Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905), angular and raw; Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911), where Kandinsky moves toward non-objective painting (1910–13) and colour becomes spiritual vibration.
  • Cubism (1907–1914): Picasso and Braque; the analytic phase dissolves the object into facets and multiple viewpoints; the synthetic phase (1912) rebuilds it with collage and papier collé, introducing letters and everyday signs.
  • Futurism (Marinetti's manifesto, 1909): speed, machine, simultaneity.
  • Dada (Zurich, 1916): anti-art; Duchamp's readymades (Bicycle Wheel, Fountain, 1917) move the question from making to naming.
  • Surrealism (Breton's manifesto, 1924): dream, automatism, the marvellous; Dalí's paranoiac-critical method, Magritte's visual puns, Miró's signs.
  • Russian avant-garde and De Stijl: Malevich's Black Square (1915), Mondrian's grid.

Architecture

Wright's Prairie houses and organic plan; the Bauhaus (Gropius, Weimar 1919, Dessau 1925) joining art and industry; Le Corbusier's Five Points - pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, roof garden - realised in the Villa Savoye (1929–31); Mies's 'less is more'; the 1932 MoMA 'International Style' exhibition that packaged the movement for export.

Worked example: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso, 1907

  1. Identify - oil on canvas, about 2.44 x 2.34 m; set in a Barcelona brothel on the Carrer d'Avinyó; not publicly exhibited until 1936.
  2. Describe - five figures and a still life of fruit in a shallow, unstable space; no single vanishing point; the two right-hand faces are mask-like.
  3. Reason - two sources: Iberian stone sculpture (faces at left) and African masks seen at the Trocadéro (right). Picasso takes their structural logic - the face as carved plane - not their ritual meaning.
  4. Interpret - the picture is the laboratory for Cubism, and it breaks the nude tradition from Titian onward by refusing to offer the body as a coherent object of pleasure.

Traps

  • Calling Cubism abstract; it stays tied to objects, especially in the analytic phase.
  • Confusing the date of Fountain (1917) with the surviving object: the original is lost and later replicas are authorised.
  • Mixing Bauhaus directors (Gropius, then Meyer, then Mies).
  • Giving the Villa Savoye to Gropius.
  • Treating Fauvism as an organised group with a manifesto: it is a critic's label from one exhibition.