1. AP Art History

2. Big Ideas
1. Artists manipulate materials and ideas to create an aesthetic object, act, or event.
2. Art-making is shaped by tradition and change.
3. Interpretations of art are variable.

3. MoMA Learning: AP Art History
Van Gogh, Vincent. The Starry Night Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art,
New York, New York.
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In 1886, van Gogh moved to Paris, where he encountered the works of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, and the Pointillist compositions of Georges Seurat. Inspired by these artists’ harmonious matching of colors, shorter brushstrokes, and liberal use of paint, he brightened his own palette and loosened his brushwork, emphasizing the physical application of paint on the canvas. The style he developed in Paris and carried through to the end of his life became known as Post-Impressionism, a term encompassing works made by artists unified by their interest in expressing their emotional and psychological responses to the world through bold colors and expressive, oftensymbolic images. In a letter to his sister Willemien, touching upon the mind and temperament of artists, van Gogh once wrote that he was “very sensitive to color and its particular language, its effects of complementaries, contrasts, harmony.”
The Starry Night is based on van Gogh’s direct observations as well as his imagination, memories, and emotions. The steeple of the church, for example, resembles those common in his native Holland, not in France. The whirling forms in the sky, on the other hand, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae. At once balanced and expressive, the composition is structured by his ordered placement of the cypress, steeple, and central nebulae, while his countless short brushstrokes and thickly applied paint set its surface in roiling motion. Such a combination of visual contrasts was generated by an artist who found beauty and interest in the night, which, for him, was “much more alive and richly colored than the day.”
MoMA Learning: AP Art History

4. MoMA Learning: AP Art History
Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles D'Avignon Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
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Picasso was known for his fascination with so-called “Primitive” art, a term typically referring to African masks and statuary, which for Picasso also encompassed ancient carvings from the Iberian Peninsula, the landmass that eventually would be divided into present-day Spain, Andorra, and Portugal. The blocky, pared-down forms and forceful, angular planes of Primitive art ignited the artist’s imagination. Its striking shapes and contours made their way into his own compositions and contributed to his radical restructuring of the formal characteristics and visual impact of the work of art. Together with fellow artist Georges Braque, Picasso pioneered Cubism, a visual language of geometric planes and compressed space that splintered subjects—like the human figure, a landscape, or a still life scene—into multifaceted pieces, causing them to appear partially abstracted, flattened, and fragmented, as if reflected in a shattered mirror.
As his preparatory studies reveal, Picasso initially conceived of the figure at the left of the painting as a male medical student, in the act of entering the brothel. Deciding that such a narrative detail would interfere with the work’s visual impact, he ultimately transformed the figure into a fifth prostitute. The women emerge from brown, white, and blue curtains that look like shattered glass, their bodies thrust forward toward the viewer by the scene’s lack of depth. Their eyes—enormous and almond-shaped, and inspired by African and Iberian carvings—are fixed daringly on the viewer. Near their feet sits a small arrangement of fruit, with a scythe-like sliver of melon set behind a bunch of grapes, an apple, and a pear, and which, like the women’s bodies, seems too sharp to touch.
MoMA Learning: AP Art History

5. MoMA Learning: AP Art History
Oppenheim, Meret. Object Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
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Women were largely regarded as the subjects and muses of the men who dominated Surrealism, among them Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and René Magritte. So, it is notable that painter and sculptor Meret Oppenheim (German-Swiss, 1913–1985) made a place for herself as one of Surrealism’s central artists and produced some of its most powerful works. In 1932, she moved to Paris, the center of the movement, and was soon participating actively in their meetings and exhibitions. By 1936, she had her first solo exhibition. Assuming she, like her artistic peers, must be male, critics and admirers of her work often mistakenly referred to her as “Mr. Oppenheim.”
It began with a joke over lunch. In 1936, Meret Oppenheim was at a Paris café with Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, who noticed the fur-lined, polished metal bracelet she was wearing and joked that anything could be covered with fur. “Even this cup and saucer,” Oppenheim replied and, carrying the merriment further, called out, “Waiter, a little more fur!”2 Her devilish imagination duly sparked, the artist went to a department store not long after this meal, bought a white teacup, saucer, and spoon, wrapped them in the speckled tan fur of a Chinese gazelle, and titled this ensemble Object. In doing so, she transformed items traditionally associated with decorum and feminine refinement into a confounding Surrealist sculpture. Object exemplifies the poet and founder of Surrealism André Breton’s argument that mundane things presented in unexpected ways had the power to challenge reason, to urge the inhibited and uninitiated (that is, the rest of society) to connect to their subconscious—whether they were ready for it or, more likely, not.
MoMA Learning: AP Art History

6. MoMA Learning: AP Art History
Lawrence, Jacob. The Railroad Stations in the South Were Crowded with People Leaving for the North Casein tempera on hardboard. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
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Though he came of age before the Civil Rights Movement brought African Americans the rights they had long been denied, Jacob Lawrence (American, 1917–2000) forged a prominent career as an artist, chronicling the story of black life in America through his paintings. Born in New Jersey and raised from the age of thirteen in Harlem, New York City, this Northeast native had southern roots. He was the child of migrants who moved, together with millions of other African Americans, from the impoverished rural South to urban, industrialized Midwestern and Northeastern cities during the mass relocation known as the Great Migration (1915–1950s). Lawrence maintained that he was “a child of the Great Migration,” which shaped the course of his own and his fellow African Americans’ lives.
Lawrence focused on the people at the heart of the Great Migration, breaking apart this mass relocation of millions into intimate vignettes, often centered upon human figures. Each one is spare, in keeping with the artist’s belief that a lot of information could be conveyed through limited visual means. In the panel titled In the North the Negro had better educational facilities, for example, three young girls stand side-by-side facing a chalkboard, their right arms outstretched as they practice writing numbers. The scene is composed of geometric shapes, with rectangles forming the gray chalkboard and the brown walls of the classroom, triangles forming the girls’ braids, and a combination of these shapes forming their pastel-colored dresses. Like these girls, Lawrence benefitted from the better education made possible by his elders’ migration north. Through it, he educated others—black and white—when he embarked upon the making of Migration Series as both an artist and a teacher.
MoMA Learning: AP Art History

7. MoMA Learning: AP Art History
Lam, Wifredo. The Jungle Gouache on paper mounted on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
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In 1943, Wifredo Lam was in the midst of re-acquainting himself with his native Cuba, especially its population of African descent. “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the black spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks,” he once said. “I knew I was running the risk of not being understood. … But a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work even if it takes time.”
The figures seem to simultaneously emerge from and merge with a dense wall of vegetation composed of thick, banded stalks suggestive of the sugarcane that grew in the fields the slaves worked. The rightmost figure holds a pair of shears, a possible reference to harvesting, while the leftmost figure, with its horse-like features, could be seen to hint at one of the spirits in Afro-Cuban mysticism. Since Lam chose a color palette of blues and greens, with touches of yellow and white, this could be read as a moonlit night scene, or as taking place during the day, under the cover of the deep shade of the jungle.
MoMA Learning: AP Art History

8. MoMA Learning: AP Art History
De Kooning, Willem. Woman, I Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.
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By the 1940s, with the world embroiled in World War II and the center of creativity shifting from Paris to New York City, de Kooning had come to prominence as an artist. Although he frequently worked in an abstract style throughout the course of his career—exploring, for example, biomorphic shapes,gesture, abstracted landscapes, and pared-down forms—he continually returned to the figure. The female figure was an especially fertile subject for the artist, whose paintings of women were among his most controversial works during his lifetime and remain much discussed to this day. At the center of this six- feet-high by five-feet-wide painting sits the woman of its title: a figure composed of an amalgam of sweeping brushstrokes in hues of white, gray, yellow, orange, green, blue, and pink. Rough black outlines incompletely distinguish her form from the vigorous brushstrokes surrounding her. Broad- shouldered and ample-bosomed, she faces forward, with wide-open eyes taking up almost a third of her face and a virtually lipless mouth bearing long teeth. Despite such heft, she appears flattened out, pressed up against the painting’s surface.
De Kooning once summarized the history of female representations as “the idol, the Venus, the nude.” In Woman, I, he both alludes to and subverts such conventions, while possibly referencing the long-held societal ambivalence between reverence for and fear of the feminine.
MoMA Learning: AP Art History

9. MoMA Learning: AP Art History
Sherman, Cindy. Untitled # Chromogenic color print. Museum of Modern Art,
New York, New York.
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Cindy Sherman was living in Rome when she began her series of “History Portraits” (1988–90), a suite of intentionally peculiar images through which she investigates the representation of individuals in Old Master and other historical varieties of portrait paintings. Though she had access to many iconic works of art in Italy, she chose not to see them in person. As she explained: “I was living in Rome but never went to the churches and museums there. I worked out of books, with reproductions. It’s an aspect of photography I appreciate, conceptually: the idea that images can be reproduced and seen anytime, anywhere, by anyone.”
Among these pictures is Untitled, Number 228 (1990), a full-length portrait of the artist as the biblical heroine Judith, who is said to have rescued the Israelites from the invading Assyrian general Holofernes by seducing and beheading him. Judith was a popular and frequently depicted subject, and Sherman based her own portrait on paintings by numerous Renaissance and Baroque artists. In keeping with the grand scale and forceful visual impact of these earlier paintings, Sherman’s photograph is nearly seven feet high by four feet wide and filled with richly patterned, color-saturated fabrics. Filtered through the lens of the camera, these fabrics seem sumptuous, but they are, in fact, cheap knockoffs from secondhand stores. As the artist described: “I would go to a Salvation Army and look for certain kinds of costume-y things. But so much of it was junky stuff.
MoMA Learning: AP Art History