2D Art - AP Art History

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.

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.

The Impressionists are most famous for their particular painting style, which used obvious brushwork to make a less-than-realistic depiction of a scene in order to portray movement and emotion. At the time of their emergence, the Impressionists were shocking to the academic French art world in their persistent use of everyday scenes and common items. Impressionists often showed people at cafés or in parks, and even their landscapes were usually quite small compared to previous images.

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.

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.

The Hudson River School was arguably the first well-known, distinctive American art movement, beginning in the 1820s and remaining influential through the post-Civil War Era. Thomas Cole was the progenitor of the style, as his trips through the Hudson River Valley encouraged him to paint sweeping landscapes in a realistic depiction of the sites. The Hudson River School's use of light and frequent inclusion of extreme weather showed their debt to the ideas and theories of romanticism.

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.

Impressionism grew out of the desire of nineteenth-century Parisian artists to move away from the outdated works of the Salon de Paris. Their work moved against tradition and was rejected by the Salon, causing a movement to form in response.

Seurat's ...La Grande Jatte is the most iconic work in the pointillist style. Leger's works had more in common with cubism than pointillism and Bosch's works were created during the Renaissance.

Given the intense brush style and treatment of landscape and subject, this piece is a van Gogh. Manet and Monet were impressionists, and this work is post-impressionist. Schiele does not fit the time period or the style.

Van Gogh's Cypresses was painted in 1889 and Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? was painted in 1897.

Dorothea Lange was a 20th century photographer. Georgia O'Keefe was a Precisionist known for her paintings of flowers and bones. Berthe Morisot is a French Impressionist. Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania and moved to Europe to study art, where she met Degas and other Impressionists.

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.