Dada
Dada: anti-art, readymades, nonsense — born from WWI disillusionment. Duchamp's Fountain (urinal, 1917).
Dada
The movement that declared anything could be art — or nothing could be
WWI horror → nihilism → anti-art. Zurich, 1916 (Cabaret Voltaire). Marcel Duchamp: readymades — selected mass-produced objects as art. Fountain (1917): signed urinal submitted to exhibition. Hannah Höch: photomontage critiquing Weimar society. Man Ray: rayographs (cameraless photography). Kurt Schwitters: collage from garbage (Merz). Dada legacy: conceptual art, performance art, the entire tradition of challenging 'what is art?'
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism: New York 1940s–50s. Action painting (Pollock's drips) + Color field (Rothko's blocks).
Abstract Expressionism
America's first major art movement — gestural painting on an enormous scale
Two wings: Action painting — Jackson Pollock (drip painting, all-over composition), Willem de Kooning (violent brushwork), Franz Kline (black/white gestural). Color field — Mark Rothko (luminous color rectangles, spiritual), Barnett Newman (zip paintings), Helen Frankenthaler (staining). Key ideas: automatic gesture, unconscious expression (Surrealist influence), heroic scale. Clement Greenberg: critic who championed flatness, medium specificity. New York replaced Paris as world art center after WWII.
Pop Art
Pop Art: mass media + consumer culture. Warhol (Campbell's soup, Marilyn). Lichtenstein (comic Ben-Day dots).
Pop Art
Art that embraced consumer culture — blurring high and low, art and advertising
Britain: Richard Hamilton collage 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' (1956) — first Pop work. USA: Andy Warhol (silkscreened celebrities, Campbell's Soup Cans — repetition critiques consumerism), Roy Lichtenstein (enlarged comic strips, Ben-Day dots), Jasper Johns (flags, targets), Robert Rauschenberg (Combines). Key ideas: mass reproduction, celebrity, consumer goods as subject. Challenged Abstract Expressionism's emotional seriousness. Influenced by Duchamp's readymades.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism: no grand narratives, appropriation, irony, pluralism. Cindy Sherman, Basquiat, Koons.
Postmodern Art
The rejection of modernism's utopian certainty — and what replaced it
Characteristics: appropriation (quoting existing images), pastiche, deconstruction of originality, political identity, pluralism. Key artists: Cindy Sherman (Untitled Film Stills — questions feminine identity), Jean-Michel Basquiat (graffiti-derived, race/power), Jeff Koons (kitsch commodities elevated), Barbara Kruger (text/image critique), Sherrie Levine (re-photographed famous photos — questions authorship). Theory: Baudrillard (simulacra), Derrida (deconstruction), Foucault (power/knowledge). 'The Pictures Generation' artists questioned representation itself.
Conceptual Art
Conceptual Art: the idea IS the art — execution optional. Sol LeWitt: instructions as artwork. Kosuth: 'Art as Idea.'
Conceptual Art
When the concept matters more than the object — Duchamp's legacy taken to its extreme
Sol LeWitt (1967): 'In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect.' Wall drawings executed by assistants — artist provides instructions only. Joseph Kosuth: 'One and Three Chairs' (chair + photo + definition) — art as philosophical inquiry. Lawrence Weiner: language pieces. On Kawara: date paintings. Yoko Ono: instruction pieces. Performance art: body as medium. Land art: Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty). Dematerialization of the art object — challenged galleries, markets. Influence: all contemporary art.
Surrealism
Surrealism: unconscious mind, dreams, irrational. Dalí (melting clocks), Magritte (visual paradoxes), Ernst, Kahlo.
Surrealism
The movement that mined the unconscious for art — hallucination as artistic method
André Breton: Surrealist Manifesto (1924) — automatic writing, dream imagery. Two modes: illusionistic (hyperreal dream scenes) — Dalí (The Persistence of Memory, melting watches), Magritte (The Treachery of Images — 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'); abstract — Ernst (frottage, grattage), Miró (biomorphic forms). Exquisite corpse: collaborative automatic drawing. Frida Kahlo: often associated (rejected label — called her work 'reality'). Freudian influence: id, unconscious, sexuality. Fled to New York in WWII → influenced Abstract Expressionism.
Minimalism
Minimalism: pure geometric form, industrial materials, no illusion, no expression. 'What you see is what you see.'
Minimalism
Art stripped to its absolute essentials — form, material, space
Frank Stella: 'What you see is what you see.' Donald Judd: 'specific objects' — industrial fabrication, stacks, boxes. Carl Andre: floor pieces (bricks, metal plates). Dan Flavin: fluorescent tubes. Robert Morris: gestalt forms. Key ideas: no representation, no illusion, no emotion — presence of object in real space. Emphasis on viewer's bodily experience. Reaction against Abstract Expressionism's psychological claims. Critics (Michael Fried): 'theatricality' — art that requires a viewer to complete it. Influenced installation art, architecture.
Expressionism
German Expressionism: Die Brücke (Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff) and Der Blaue Reiter (Kandinsky, Marc).
German Expressionism
Two German groups that used distortion and color to express inner emotional states
Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1905, Dresden): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde. Raw color, harsh outlines, psychological tension, urban alienation. Influenced by African and Oceanic art. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, 1911, Munich): Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee. More spiritual, abstract — Kandinsky toward total abstraction. Both groups suppressed as 'degenerate art' by Nazis (Entartete Kunst exhibition, 1937). Edvard Munch (The Scream) precursor. Expressionism as style recurs throughout 20th century (Neo-Expressionism, 1980s).
Cubism
Cubism: multiple viewpoints simultaneously on flat surface. Analytic (monochrome) → Synthetic (collage).
Cubism
The movement that shattered single-point perspective — one of art history's most radical breaks
Picasso and Braque, Paris, 1907–1914. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Picasso, 1907): African masks, fractured space — proto-Cubist. Analytic Cubism (1908–1912): monochromatic, fragmented planes, all perspectives shown simultaneously. Synthetic Cubism (1912+): collage — newspaper, wallpaper, wood grain; bolder color. Juan Gris: geometric clarity. Influence: abstraction, collage, architecture (De Stijl), design. African art influence (controversial): Picasso saw it in the Trocadéro ethnography museum. Cubism made clear that representation ≠ reality.
Futurism
Futurism: speed, machines, violence, dynamism. Marinetti's Manifesto (1909). Boccioni, Balla. Later linked to Fascism.
Futurism
Italy's radical embrace of modernity — speed, machines, and the destruction of the past
Filippo Marinetti: Futurist Manifesto (1909) — glorified speed, technology, violence, patriotism; rejected museums as 'cemeteries.' Umberto Boccioni: 'States of Mind' triptych, 'Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.' Giacomo Balla: 'Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.' Represented motion through multiple sequential positions. Influenced Russian Constructivism, Vorticism (UK). Dark side: Marinetti's Manifesto celebrated war and scorn for women. Many Italian Futurists later aligned with Mussolini's Fascism. Despite politics, formally innovative in representing time and motion.
Neo-Expressionism
Neo-Expressionism (1980s): figurative, painterly, raw. Basquiat, Schnabel, Kiefer — reaction against Minimalism and Conceptualism.
Neo-Expressionism
The 1980s return to gestural, figurative painting — and the explosive art market that followed
Reaction against Minimalism and Conceptualism's cool intellectualism. Germany: Anselm Kiefer (heavy, mythological, confronting Nazi past), Georg Baselitz (inverted figures), Sigmar Polke. Italy: Arte Povera predecessors. USA: Jean-Michel Basquiat (graffiti-origin, race/identity/death), Julian Schnabel (broken crockery canvases), Eric Fischl. UK: School of London (Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff). 1980s art market boom: paintings selling for record prices. Galleries: Leo Castelli, Mary Boone. Postmodern critics vs traditional painting defenders.
Performance and Video Art
Performance art: body as medium (1960s). Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović. Video art: Nam June Paik.
Performance and Video Art
When the event is the artwork — and when the screen became a canvas
Happenings (Allan Kaprow, 1959): participatory, unrepeatable events. Fluxus (1960s): George Maciunas, Yoko Ono — anti-art events, instruction pieces. Body art: Vito Acconci, Chris Burden (shot himself). Marina Abramović: endurance and presence (The Artist is Present, 2010 — 736 hours). Nam June Paik: video art pioneer — TV sets as sculpture, satellite broadcasts. Bill Viola: video installations exploring consciousness, death. Documentation problem: how to collect and exhibit ephemeral work. Tino Sehgal: 'constructed situations' — refuses all documentation.