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

Galicia PAU History of Art: Art from the mid-20th century to the present

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

All guide sections

Art from the mid-20th century to the present

The post-1945 domain tests the shift from the object to the idea, and from the studio to the institution, the market and the landscape. The exam usually asks you to characterise a movement and place one work inside it.

Lines of development

  • Abstract Expressionism (New York, 1940s–50s): action painting (Pollock's drips make the canvas the record of an event) and colour field (Rothko's hovering rectangles, Newman's 'zip').
  • Informalism / Art Informel in Europe: matter, gesture, existentialism (Fautrier, Dubuffet, Tàpies).
  • Pop Art (Britain in the late 1950s, USA in the 1960s): Hamilton's collage Just what is it… (1956); Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg. Mass media, commodity, silkscreen, removal of the artist's hand.
  • Minimalism (1960s): Judd, Morris, Stella - industrial materials, serial repetition, the viewer's body in the room; 'what you see is what you see'.
  • Conceptual art (late 1960s): the idea precedes and can replace the object (Kosuth, LeWitt, Art & Language).
  • Body, performance, land, institutional critique: Abramović, Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), Haacke, Chicago's The Dinner Party (1979).
  • Postmodernism (from the late 1970s): quotation, plurality, return of figuration and ornament - Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Pompidou Centre (Piano and Rogers, 1971–77), Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao (1997, titanium), neo-expressionism, relational and participatory practice after 1990.

Worked example: Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

  1. Identify - 32 canvases, one per flavour then on sale, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas; first shown at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, July 1962.
  2. Describe - identical scale and format, hung like goods on a shelf; registration slips and uneven ink.
  3. Reason - the technique is the argument: silkscreen lets an image be repeated mechanically, so authorship becomes selection and supervision. A supermarket item painted at portrait size collapses the hierarchy between advertising and art.
  4. Interpret - Pop neither attacks nor celebrates consumer culture; it adopts the shared visual language and asks what sincerity can mean inside it. Warhol's wish to be a machine is an intention, not a description of the work.

Traps

  • Treating Minimalism as merely 'empty' or Conceptualism as 'unskilled': both are arguments about the conditions of art.
  • Confusing Pop with Dada: Dada negates, Pop circulates.
  • Wrong location: Spiral Jetty is at Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah.
  • Describing Gehry's Bilbao as concrete; its skin is titanium panels.
  • Forgetting that photography and video are the primary media of much of this period.