Identifying Artists, Works, and Schools of 2D Visual Art from the Twentieth Century - CLEP Humanities

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like fellow Pop Artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, Jasper Johns used familiar symbols and images, but reshaped and transformed them to present them in new ways. Unlike his fellow Pop Artists, who preferred commercial and pop culture symbols, Johns largely used icons of Americana, most notably the American flag and maps of the United States. One of Johns' most well known paintings is of an American flag that is completely in white.

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.

Dada was an art movement that grew out of abstract and modernist movements in the early twentieth century. One of the most famous dadaist artists was Marcel Duchamp, a frenchman who began his career in a cubist vein, but then sought to make art that was less "retinal," or simply pleasing to the eye. Duchamp's art work challenged the very notion of what was "art," as in his 1917 "Fountain," a urinal Duchamp placed in the middle of a gallery space and only attributed as "R Mutt."