From a live Smarthistory webinar: Dr. Thomas Folland on Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Dr. Tom Folland
Minimalism privileges a creative thought process, on the part of both viewer and artist, over the making of objects
Carl Andre, Lever
On the cusp of the decade of the 1960s, his art embraced the machine, if only as a symbol of the demise of the modern world or at least as another example of the disillusionment with it on the part of many artists.
Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York
In the 1990s, as artists searched for new alternatives, many considered conceptual art of the 1970s an unfinished project.
Tracey Emin, My Bed
Kruger’s art is characterized by a visual wit sharpened in the trenches of the advertising world.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the ...
Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions explored modernist architecture and urban decay.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting
When an artist erases another artist's drawing, is it still a drawing, and whose? This work challenges the art definitions and contexts of its time.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing ...
The idea of sculpture was the subject of Antin’s work, which interrogates beauty, gender, and “traditional” art.
Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture
Conceptualism questions art’s role as a showcase for the creative genius and technical abilities of the artist.
Conceptual Art: An Introduction
Kosuth wrote that “being an artist now means to question the nature of art.” Take a seat to find out how he did it.
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs
Painted for a divided US, people from North and South could identify with this image—others remain marginalized.
War News from Mexico
Manet decided to replace the idealized female nude with the image of a known prostitute. It didn’t go so well.
A-Level: Édouard Manet, Olympia
As the European public grew increasingly hard to scandalize, Duchamp crossed the Atlantic to stir up more trouble.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No ...
Krasner severed the link between art and the everyday world, making important breakthroughs in abstraction.
Lee Krasner, Untitled
Dumas paints from photographs, and deliberately makes her pictures strange, unsettling, and ugly.
Marlene Dumas, Models
Painted for a divided US, people from North and South could identify with this image—others remain marginalized.
Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico
Manet decided to replace the idealized female nude with the image of a known prostitute. It didn’t go so well.
Édouard Manet, Olympia
Clothing, paper, a paint tube, photographs, and a stuffed bald eagle—but it’s more than an accumulation of debris.
Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon
Gonzalez-Torres evokes absent bodies in his works, which bring gay identity and the AIDS crisis into public view.
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