Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Art
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century art covers avant-garde movements, modernism, postwar abstraction, pop, conceptual, performance, installation and digital practice. The exam tests movement definitions, medium and audience, and the theoretical claim behind the work.
Core rules
- Fauvism: Matisse, Derain; non-natural colour, liberated surface.
- Cubism: Braque and Picasso; analytic fragmentation, then synthetic collage; multiple viewpoints.
- Futurism: Marinetti; speed, technology, war; Balla, Boccioni.
- Expressionism: Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter; distortion for psychological intensity.
- Dada: anti-art, readymade, photomontage; Duchamp.
- Surrealism: Breton; automatism, dream, uncanny; Dalí, Ernst, Magritte.
- Constructivism/Bauhaus: art into design and architecture.
- Postwar: Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual, performance, video, installation, identity and post-internet practice.
Worked example
A 1907 painting shows five women, flattened planes and mask-like faces. Identify and explain. Answer: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, proto-Cubist. Reasoning: the compressed space, fractured bodies and Iberian/African mask references break Renaissance perspective; the brothel subject confronts the viewer. It is not Fauvism, which uses colour rather than faceted form, and not yet analytic Cubism, which develops after 1908.
Traps
Modern art is not all abstract; much remains figurative. Dada is not Surrealism: Dada attacks art institutions, Surrealism explores the unconscious. Pop Art is not straightforward celebration; it is ambivalent about mass culture. Conceptual art does not lack skill; it relocates skill to the idea. Do not collapse postmodernism into modernism: institutions, media and authorship are questioned.