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

As an example of cubism, this painting deeply engages with various forms of advanced mathematics, especially geometry. Cubism broke down forms to various geometric shapes, and rendered them in crystalline forms based on those shapes. Cubism could be taken to different lengths; certain works may have a difficult underlying shape to discern, but Gris' Portrait of Pablo Picasso surrounds a rather conventional human form with geometric shapes.

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

The De Stijl movement grew out of the work of a select group of Dutch modernists in the 1890s, who all focused on basic shapes and form over function in design. Piet Mondrian, whose Tableau I is displayed here, was the foremost painter of the De Stijl movement. Mondrian's chief visual markers—primary colors, simple geometric forms, and thick black lines—are all hallmarks of the De Stijl movement more generally.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

Mondrian's use of geometric shapes and simple lines gave him the opportunity to create abstract art that nonetheless borrowed from familiar forms. The abstract expressionists, who flourished in the two decades after World War II in New York City, similarly used bold expressions of color and shapes to create abstract forms. Many of the abstract expressionists, most notably Mark Rothko, similarly used large blocks of color on sizable canvasses.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

While Piet Mondrian, the creator of this painting, is well known as an abstract artist, he actually used essentially no abstract shapes in his paintings. Instead, Mondrian placed together thick black lines to create geometrical patterns, almost entirely in squares and rectangles, and then used large blocks of primary colors to create different images.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) was painted in response to the Fascist bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The black-and-white cubist painting uses animal imagery to denote brutality and darkness, as well as a women with a torch to symbolize freedom.

Henri Matisse and the Fauve movement where primarily interested in intense, unadulterated color as a formal element to convey meaning. The colors in this painting imbue it with deep emotional intensity.

Self-Portrait as a Soldier was painted in 1915, just after the artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had volunteered for service in World War I and quickly been discharged for mental health reasons. The alienation and detachment is shown by the off color in the main subject's skin tone and his missing hand, while his pride of being a soldier is evident in the prominence of the military uniform. With the general abstractness and surreality of the expressionists present before World War I, the horrors and frustrations of the conflict made post-war expressionism much darker in both color and subject.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kirchner\_-\_Selbstbildnis\_als\_Soldat.jpg

Piet Mondrian was a part of the Dutch artistic movement known as De Stijl, Dutch for simply "The Style," a group of painters working before the First World War who attempted to distill art to its basic elements. Between the World Wars, Mondrian pushed ahead with similar work in Paris he termed "Neoplasticism." Mondrian's hallmarks from this period were thick black horizontal and vertical lines across a white canvas, while inside some of the resultant rectangular shapes were large blocks of primary colors.

The letters “D BAL” are stenciled in the upper right corner of Portuguese, placed there by Georges Braque seemingly separately from the rest of the painting. As a cubist artist, Braque’s intention was to deconstruct the very concept of representation and clear imagery and present art in a new manner. Including the stencilled letters further reinforces the way in which the work of art intentionally separates itself from the traditional expectations of painting.

Georges Braque intentionally picked a monochromatic palette for his cubist works to highlight the way he deconstructed his images into framents. With a monochromatic palette, the viewer would have to focus on Braque’s lines and geometric shapes, rather than be distracted by blocks of saturated color or sharp contrasts between light and dark elements.

All of these are features of Rothko's work with rectangles except the notion that his works were monochromatic -in fact, the colors he employed varied over the course of his career, beginning as bright contrasting hues and moving toward darker maroons and blacks.

During the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco's nationalist troops destroyed the Basque city of Guernica in a massive bombing campaign assisted by Nazi German and Italian Fascist troops. The painter Pablo Picasso made a massive black and white painting depicting the event in cubist and abstract imagery conveying sorrow and devastation. After Franco took over the reins of state in Spain in 1938, Picasso was not allowed in his native Spain.

Like many other pop artists, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) used familiar symbols in odd or surprising ways to invert the expectations and conventions of high vs. low art. Instead of utilizing commercial products or elements of low culture, however, Johns preferred images of Americana, like the American flag. Johns' series of paintings on the American flag include an all-white flag, a pastiche of multiple sized flags, and flags where the colors are smudged and running into each other.

The eclectic, improvisational nature of jazz had a wide influence in other artistic forms. In particular, visual artists sought to take some of jazz's extemporaneous elements and apply them to painting and sculpture. This idea greatly influence Jackson Pollock's "drip method" and other aspects of Abstract Expressionist art from the 1940s and 1950s.

Juan Gris' Portrait of Pablo Picasso from 1912 is an example of the artistic movement known as cubism. Cubism was developed by a variety of painters living in Paris around 1910, including the Spaniards Picasso and Gris, but also the Frenchmen Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. Cubism is defined by its deconstruction of its images to geographic shapes and mathematical forms.

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

In one sense, cubism seemed to appear as a radical new take on modern art, using geometric shapes to create strange and disturbing images that conformed little to what came before. An important influence, however, was the impressionist Paul Cézanne, whose still lifes and landscapes were less than direct representations of what he painted. Cézanne, like the cubists, used abstract ideas to create more emotionally realistic and biting images.

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

The Virgin of Guadalupe was an apparition of The Virgin Mary, which appeared to an indigenous Mexican named Juan Diego, in 1531. This was widely promulgated as the impetus for mass conversions among native Mexicans, and it became a national symbol of Mexico. The Virgin of Guadalupe, identifiable through her blue cloak, pose in prayer, and the light emanating around her, is one of the most widely used images in Mexican folk art.

"The Factory" became known in the 1960s for the parties thrown there by its owner, Andy Warhol, but in all of its locations in Manhattan, Warhol used it as a working art studio. Due to Warhol's fascination with screen printing and other mechanical forms of reproduction, the name was fitting, as it featured many apprentices making various works. Warhol also gathered a variety of people there to make art in a variety of types.

In 1937, planes from Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe, on behalf of the Francoist forces, bombed the Basque city of Guernica, a Republican stronghold. As one of the largest-scale atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, the Guernica bombing made Pablo Picasso feel compelled to commemorate the event. The result was a gigantic wall mural in Picasso's signature cubist style, but with references to war and a black and white color palette, neither of which were common to his work. The work was simply titled Guernica.