Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century 2D Art - AP Art History

Andy Warhol's 1962 series Campbell's Soup Cans was 32 separate screen-printed paintings of cans of Campbell's soup, each one depicting one of the different varieties Campbell offered at the time. The work featured many of Warhol's hallmarks, including screen-printing, repetition, and the use of commercial imagery. The work was Warhol's first well known piece, and helped launch his career, which would see him as a painter, filmmaker, art theorist, and screen-printer.

Georgia O'Keefe developed a unique, instantly recognizable style that focused on flowers presented in vivid colors in an extreme close-up perspective. This style grew out of Modernism and its use of bright color and different perspective. O'Keefe proved influential in her ability to capture nature and natural images in paintings in a striking manner.

Pop Art as a general movement sought to bring post-World War II American popular culture into high art. One of the more famous approaches to this was Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic book imagery. Lichtenstein painted all of his canvases by hand, but would copy one frame from a comic, including shaded dots, dialogue bubbles, and weak colors, onto a large canvas.

The Persistence of Memory, completed in 1931 and hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, is widely considered Salvador Dali's masterpiece. The canvas features many of Dali's surrealist hallmarks, with a strange landscape as the background of an image of clocks that appear to be melting over branches and ledges. Dali's work is considered emblematic of surrealism, which drew on Jungian dream theory to create strange images in artwork.

Regionalism was an art movement that sprung up after World War I in America that sought to paint naturalistic scenes of regional America. Foremost among the Regionalists was Thomas Hart Benton, who was inspired by politically conscious muralists like Diego Rivera to make large-scale works about his native Midwest. Benton's work often had political overtones that supported left-wing positions, and he was influential as an art teacher.

Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is largely considered one of the first cubist paintings. As such, Picasso broke with traditional forms of representation, but did so by including many different influences, particularly impressionists like Paul Cézanne and trends toward a primitivism in art. Picasso also began creating the piece after seeing an exhibition on tribal art that included African masks like those portrayed in the painting.

Nighthawks was painted in 1942 by Edward Hopper, who sought to capture the inherent loneliness and suffocation of the "new" urban society as well as the effects of wartime.

The Mexican painter Diego Rivera first started his artistic career in the 1910s in Paris as a conventional Cubist. On the urging of the Mexican ambassador to France, Rivera began painting murals back in Mexico, which were large, symbolic, and drew on Mexican history and culture. This made Rivera an internationally famous artist, and he was commissioned to paint murals across the world.

Drip painting is most closely associated with the twentieth-century American painter Jackson Pollock, whose signature works involved Pollock splattering, splashing, and slowly dripping paint directly onto canvasses that were laid on the ground. The technique was used almost contemporaneously by the artist Janet Sobel, and has been consistently used by a small cadre of artists from the 1950s to the present.

Cubism was a modernist art movement that developed in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century, by a community of multinational artists. The painters Pablo Picasso and George Braques first created the style, which featured images built out of harsh geometric shapes and used representational images to create broken depictions made up of peculiar shapes. Other important cubists included Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, and Henri Le Fauconnier.

Like fellow Pop Artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, Jasper Johns used familiar symbols and images, but reshaped and transformed them to present them in new ways. Unlike his fellow Pop Artists, who preferred commercial and pop culture symbols, Johns largely used icons of Americana, most notably the American flag and maps of the United States. One of Johns' most well known paintings is of an American flag that is completely in white.

Andy Warhol sought to make art that directly engaged and confronted popular culture in unique and surprising ways. Warhol also liked to experiment with methods that had a sense of automation, such as screenprinting. Both of these aspects of Warhol's work were shown in a series of paintings he did in the 1960s, which had images of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean reprinted in bright pinks, blues, and greens.

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch artist who was the leading figure among a group of artists in different media who sought a style that was elemental in its construction, known as De Stijl, or "The Style." Mondrian's painting developed into featuring thick black lines intersecting the canvas at right angles to form rectangles on the painting. Inside these rectangles were blocks of color only in the three primary colors.

The twentieth century saw an explosion in artistic forms that both presented non-realistic images, especially Abstract Expressionism and Cubism, or depicted elements of everyday life or lower culture, as Pop Art did. In this, one of the key forerunners to these movements was the late-nineteenth-century movement known as Impressionism. Impressionism had vivid brushstrokes that made images look less realistic, and intentionally depicted scenes of everyday life, like farmwork, cafés, and parks.

The movement known as Pop Art was developed in the post-World-War-II era, taking inspiration from various elements of low culture and popular culture. Often, artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Raushenberg used advertising images in subversive ways, or as the actual artwork itself. Jasper Johns used images of Americana like the American flag in odd ways, while Roy Lichtenstein copied images from comic books.

Amedeo Modigliani was a Jewish painter born in Italy in 1884, but who gained fame in Paris in the 1910s. Embracing many aspects of modernism through associating with fellow modernists in the Montparnasse section of Paris, Modigliani established a unique form of portraiture which featured elongated shapes and empty black eyes. Modigliani died of tuberculosis at the age of 35 in Paris in 1920.

Abstract Expressionism was developed in the immediate post-World War II era as a specific genre of painting that featured non-realistic shapes and took inspiration from free-form styles of music like jazz. Earlier artists like Wassily Kandinsky were pulled into the movement, which was further pushed by artists like Jackson Pollack, with his "drip method," and Willem de Kooning, whose odd figures and textural paintings were archetypical of the movement.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who took up painting after a horrific bus accident at the age of eighteen in 1925 and her marriage to the European-trained muralist Diego Rivera. Kahlo painted almost entirely self portraits, typically close ups of her own face, to which she added in the background indigenous native imagery, surrealist symbols, and references to her own troubled life. Her stormy marriage to Rivera was well known, and combined with her ill health contributed to a sense of loneliness and alienation in her work.

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.