Twentieth-Century Art: Avant-Gardes and Later Movements
This independent art-history module develops modern and contemporary art and architecture. Study the named works, compare their materials and formal features, and explain how artistic choices relate to function, patronage and context. These examples support shared subject foundations; they do not establish the regional examination’s official prescribed works, question pattern or regional marking criteria.
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.