Answering other questions about twentieth-century 2D art - AP Art History

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.

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.

The Post-Impressionists developed out of the movement of Impressionism, but felt it necessary to more systematically examine the properties and expressive qualities of line, pattern, form, and color. Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cezanne were leaders of this movement.

Klimt rebelled against the established Viennese conservative artists society and formally banded with other artists to create the Vienna Secession. This group created their own exhibition program and called for greater integration between art objects and the surrounding interior environment.

While Expressionism, of which Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier is emblematic, was highly significant and powerful in the 1920s' Weimar Republic, political changes also changed artistic tastes. When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in the 1930s, they targeted this kind of art for its association with bohemian lifestyles, intellectualism, and Jewish culture. In 1938, this piece of art was included in a famous exhibition of "Degenerate Art" put on by the Nazis. With such persecution, Kirchner's consistent mental health issues again came to the fore, and he committed suicide in 1938 by gunshot.

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

The Goldfish is, fitting with Henri Matisse's work generally, an abstract piece, but one whose general forms and shapes are somewhat representational. Heightening the slight abstraction of the painting's shapes is the choice of color palette made by Henri Matisse. The bright, almost unnatural colors create a different perspective for the viewer and match more closely to other forms of abstract art.

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.

Marilyn Diptych (1962) gets its form from early Christian diptych paintings that presented two images side by side. It was created using silkscreening, a method not used by early Christian painters. None of Warhol's Marilyns were made in the mosaic, relief, or fresco styles.

This portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer resembles The Kiss and other famous Klimt works. The rest are other Austrian artists.

Work is in the public domain, image accessed through WikiArt: http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/portrait-of-adele-bloch-bauer-i-1907-1

German forces seized the painting and, after the war, Adele Bloch-Bauer's husband Ferdinand sought to have it returned to his nieces and nephews. A long court battle followed, and it was only in 2006 that Austria returned it to the family.

Work is in the public domain, image accessed through WikiArt: http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/portrait-of-adele-bloch-bauer-i-1907-1

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)