Art History: Modern and Contemporary Art
What this domain tests
Chronology of twentieth-century movements and the ideas behind abstraction, the readymade, and postmodern critique. Expect questions that ask what a work challenges, not only what it looks like.
Core movements
- Fauvism: non-natural color (Matisse).
- Cubism: analytic fragmentation then synthetic collage (Picasso, Braque).
- Futurism: speed and technology; Expressionism: distorted color and form for emotion.
- Dada: anti-art, photomontage, the readymade (Duchamp's Fountain).
- Surrealism: dream imagery and automatism (Dalí, Miró, Oppenheim).
- Bauhaus: integration of craft, design, and industry.
- Abstract Expressionism: action painting (Pollock) and color fields (Rothko).
- Pop: mass media and commodity imagery (Warhol, Lichtenstein).
- Minimalism, Conceptual art, feminist and identity-based practices, installation, video, relational and digital work.
Worked example
Duchamp's Fountain is a manufactured urinal signed with a pseudonym and submitted to an exhibition. Reasoning: the work's meaning lies in selection, context, and institutional framing, not in manual craft. It attacks the assumption that art requires originality of making and raises the question "who decides what counts as art?" That is a Conceptual argument, not a claim about beauty.
Traps
Calling all abstraction "non-objective" (some abstraction still derives from observed form); using "modern" and "contemporary" interchangeably; assuming conceptual work has no visual decisions; and memorizing isms without linking them to specific evidence.