2D Art - AP Art History

Jackson Pollock began his career as a rather "normal" abstract artist, using paint and brushes conventionally. After World War II, he developed his "drip method," which saw Pollock lay a canvas on the floor of his studio, take a paintbrush, and splatter the canvas with the paint from above it. This "drip method" created vivid paintings of different colors and textures that had no traditional forms.

Rene Magritte began his career as a surrealist, but as he grew older began moving from strange shapes to placing familiar images in odd poses. By the 1950s and 1960s, Magritte was focusing on specific images again and again, such as men in suits and bowler hats and green apples. These came together in his most famous work, The Son of Man, which is a straightforward portrait of a man in a black suit and bowler hat, but with an apple obscuring his face.

Futurism arose from the destruction of World War I and the advances of the machine age as an artistic movement that championed modernism, speed, and technology. Its principles were set forth in the Futurist Manifesto, written by the Italian artist Filippo Tommasso Marinetti. The movement was primarily Italian, with a few prominent Russian adherents, and had an unfortunate close relationship with the Fascist movement in Italy under Benito Mussolini.

Claude Monet's massive Water Lilies (in French, Nympheas) series are masterpieces of impressionist painting, showing light and color in his subject through painting on a giant scale, which allows the viewer to see the brushstrokes in the painting. Monet made dozens of paintings in the series, all of which have no horizon or obvious markers of space not covered by water lillies. The most famous examples are housed in the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, in a round room specially constructed and lit to contain only four mural-sized paintings.

In its earliest form in the late nineteenth century, photography was a modern invention that was usually used to capture modern images, such as cities, war, and machines. One notable exception was the American photographer Ansel Adams, whose work focused on the landscapes of the American West, particularly the new national parks. Adams developed the "Zone System" in order to be able to create contrast in his final print to allow for the proper look in his landscape photography.

Diane Arbus believed that a camera had an ability to bring truth out in people due to its inherent awkwardness. Arbus' photographs were exclusively in black and white, and typically portrayed "odd" people of various kinds in New York City. Diane Arbus was a mildly successful newspaper and magazine photographer who only achieved artistic fame after her suicide in 1971.

Edward Hopper's painting style was realist to the point of being almost simple, with plain depictions and colors. Where Hopper proved singular was in the way he framed his compositions, revealing an inner depth and detachment to the people in his paintings. Hopper as extremely reclusive and introverted, rarely giving any interviews or clues to any deeper meaning in his work.

The Spanish Juan Gris arrived in Paris in 1906 and helped develop the style known as Cubism with fellow young artists Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, and under the influence of Gris' fellow Spaniard, Pablo Picasso. Fittingly, one of Gris' signature cubist portraits is of Picasso himself, with a clear depiction of the painter that also features a cubist deconstruction of his clothing and surroundings.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Cubism, the style employed by Juan Gris in the painting seen here, was part of the broader trend of modernism, which was concerned with technological innovation, new ways of thinking, and breaking with tradition. A style which took many of modernism's and cubism's precepts even further was the Italian movement known as Futurism. As much a political movement as an artistic one, Futurism embraced machine age technology, progress, and activity in a cross-artistic style heavily indebted to cubism's breakthroughs.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Cezanne's desire to play with shapes, colors, and form in both his still-life and landscape paintings was influential to the artists who developed cubism in the early twentieth century. The cubists' use of geometry and mathematics have a clear forerunner in Cezanne's examination of the various geometric shapes present in his still-life paintings. Additionally, Cezanne's ability to convey an image that was not perfectly realistic showed the possibilities in abstract art.

Dada was an art movement that grew out of abstract and modernist movements in the early twentieth century. One of the most famous dadaist artists was Marcel Duchamp, a frenchman who began his career in a cubist vein, but then sought to make art that was less "retinal," or simply pleasing to the eye. Duchamp's art work challenged the very notion of what was "art," as in his 1917 "Fountain," a urinal Duchamp placed in the middle of a gallery space and only attributed as "R Mutt."

Frida Kahlo entered the international art world thanks to her marriage to the older painter, Diego Rivera, in 1929. Because of her immense artistic talent and Rivera's appreciation and promotion of her work, Kahlo soon became well known in her own right as a painter. Most of Kahlo's work was self-portraits, featuring only her head, but which she would often surround with indigenous Mexican imagery, allusions to literature, or references to her turbulent marriage and troubled life.

Jean Dubuffet coined the term "art brut" to describe his own personal style, which focused on "low culture" and eschewed traditional culture. While initially inspired by abstract art, such as cubism and expressionism, Dubuffet pushed the boundaries of abstract art to make it be more visceral. Dubuffet believed authentic art was that which engaged directly with humanity, outside of intellectual theorizing.

Mark Rothko essentially took abstract art to a logical place, creating massive canvases that featured only a few large swaths of color. While seemingly simple, these "colorforms," Rothko's own term, feature multi-layered paint and subtle gradations. Rothko developed the style shortly after World War II, and the creation of these paintings made Rothko world famous.

Robert Raushenberg began creating mixed media paintings he called "Combines" in the mid-1950s, after he began collecting found objects and pieces of trash on the streets of New York City. Rauschenberg's use of consumer products lumped him in with "Pop Art" as a pioneer of the genre, while his use of sculptural forms pioneered modern art forms that departed from traditional sculpture or canvas.

One of the most remarkable things about Pablo Picasso's career is that he had so many different stages and styles, and he first gained recognition for his "Blue Period" in the first decade of the twentieth century. Named for the predominant hue Picasso employed, these post-impressionist paintings owed much to Post-Impressionists, like Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, as well as the Renaissance Spanish master El Greco. This work was completely different from Picasso's later abstract and cubist works.

Faith Ringgold, born in 1930, taught art at the high school and college levels, and sought in her own work to blur the lines between craft and high art. Her main medium has been traditionally-made quilts, which feature high art images that reflect the African-American experience. Ringgold's work has been important for creating more widespread appreciation of both African-American folk art and professional artists.

Marc Chagall was born in Belarus in 1887, and worked in France and the Soviet Union, before having to leave for the United States after the Nazi occupation of Paris. Chagall had worked in various modernist styles, like cubism and expressionism, and his background made him even more prominent after World War II. Remarkably, Chagall was commissioned to create replacement stained glass windows in French churches that had been damaged by German bombing.

Pop Art exploded in the 1950s and 1960s, with artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein producing works that touched on mass cultural themes and used new techniques of mass production. Pop Artists were influenced by the questions raised by Abstract Expressionism about the nature of art, but also were tuned into popular culture in a way the previous generation of artists hadn't been.