Identifying artists, works, or schools of twentieth- and twenty-first-century 2D art - AP Art History

Utilizing large canvases featuring only one or two bold colors in large blocks, Mark Rothko deconstructed the principles of Abstract Expressionism to their simplest form. Beginning in 1949, Rothko's "multiforms" became his chief artistic format, and made him a world-famous artist.

Diego Rivera began his artistic career in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century as a cubist influenced by Picasso. On moving back to his native Mexico in the 1910s, Rivera began embracing revolutionary politics, more direct figures, and native Mexican culture, as well as painting massive murals on the sides of buildings. These murals made Rivera much more successful, and produced many different commissions around the world.

Cubism burst onto the art scene in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, with various artists creating avant garde images based more on representative shapes and symbols rather than strict representations. Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Braques, and Fernand Leger were among its most notable proponents. Amedeo Modigliani was a contemporary of the cubists, but worked in modernist approaches to portraits that featured elongated lines and dark colors.

During the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco's nationalist forces were supported by the German military led by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. In one of the more notable aspects of the war, the German Air Force bombed the Spanish, Republican-held town of Guernica in 1937. That same year, Pablo Picasso made a massive canvas, entirely in black and white, that used gruesome abstract shapes and symbols to convey war's horrors and tragedies. The painting was instantly famous, and caused Picasso to be unable to travel to Franco's Spain.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was a famous photographer and technical innovator who developed a process of developing film known as "the Zone System" and used the newest photographic technology of his time. The ability of Adams and his technology was seen through his many photographs of National Parks, particularly in the American West. Adams' photographs were most well known for their sharp focus and deep shading in black and white.

Fabergé is known for his ceramic eggs, also known as "Fabergé eggs," which were given as gifts to the Russian nobility during the early twentieth century.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to Franco's fascist Spain.

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch artist who belonged to the artistic movement known as De Stijl ("The Style" in Dutch.) The principles of De Stijl were to reduce artistic forms to their simplest, most functional forms. Mondrian's specific form, which he developed in Paris between the World Wars and called "Neo-plasticism," featured mostly white canvases, which were bisected at various parts by perpendicular black lines and had fields of color only in the three primary colors.

Salvador Dali's works were defined by realistic-looking objects placed in strange landscapes and weird positions. All of these are hallmarks of surrealism, which was influenced by the burgeoning field of psychotherapy, and drew on dreamlike imagery and situations. Dali helped pioneer surrealism, and remains one of its best-known artists.

Wassily Kandinsky was the most influential expressionist of the early twentieth century. Kandinsky's style, which was dominated by abstract forms, expressive lines, and flowing brushstrokes, would prove to be immensely popular among fellow artists, while his theoretical writing, which connected art to music, also proved influential. Kandinsky had to flee both the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Nazis in the 1930s because of his controversial artwork.

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.

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.