Art History, Criticism, and Appreciation
Art history questions reward chronology and attributable style, not trivia. Learn each movement as a bundle: dates, aims, and formal signature.
Prehistory (Lascaux, Venus of Willendorf) → ancient Near East and Egypt (frontality, registers, hieratic scale) → Greece and Rome (idealized proportion, contrapposto) → Byzantine (gold ground, flat iconic space) → Romanesque and Gothic (rounded vs. pointed arches, flying buttresses, stained glass) → Renaissance (linear perspective, humanist proportion) → Baroque (dramatic light, diagonal energy) → Rococo (pastel, decorative) → Neoclassicism (crisp outline, moral subject) → Romanticism (emotion, sublime landscape) → Realism (ordinary labor) → Impressionism (broken color, optical light) → Post-Impressionism (structure and expressive color; Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat) → Cubism (fragmented multiple viewpoints; Picasso, Braque) → Fauvism (arbitrary non-natural color; Matisse) → Dada (readymades, anti-art; Duchamp) → Surrealism (dream logic) → Abstract Expressionism (gestural scale; Pollock) → Pop (mass-culture imagery; Warhol) → Minimalism and contemporary practice.
Criticism: use Feldman’s four steps in order - description (what is there), analysis (how it is organized), interpretation (what it means), judgment (how well it works). Traps: confusing Neoclassicism with Romanticism; labeling any bright color “Fauvist”; mistaking Dada irony for Surrealist dream imagery; and answering from subject matter alone.
Rule of thumb: attribute by brushwork, palette, and handling of space before subject. Flat gold ground signals Byzantine; broken complementary shadow signals Impressionism; a grid of repeated commercial images signals Pop.
Worked example: A prompt describes a portrait whose face is simultaneously frontal and profile, built from faceted planes. Subject matter could fit many periods; the simultaneous viewpoints and flat facets point to Analytic Cubism (Picasso, Braque, c. 1910). “Fauvism” fails because the distortion is structural, not color-driven.