AP Art History : 2D Art

Study concepts, example questions & explanations for AP Art History

varsity tutors app store varsity tutors android store

Example Questions

Example Question #71 : Twentieth And Twenty First Century 2 D Art

Which of the following groupings of artists lists Cubists?

Possible Answers:

Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris

Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet

Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Joan Miró†

Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol

Jackson Pollack, Wassily Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning

Correct answer:

Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris

Explanation:

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.

Example Question #43 : Identifying Artists, Works, Or Schools Of Twentieth And Twenty First Century 2 D Art

Which of the following artists was most well known for painting murals?

Possible Answers:

Frida Kahlo

Paul Cézanne

Pablo Picasso

Joan Miró

Diego Rivera

Correct answer:

Diego Rivera

Explanation:

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.

Example Question #44 : Identifying Artists, Works, Or Schools Of Twentieth And Twenty First Century 2 D Art

Who was the Pop Artist well known for using images of flags and maps of the United States in his work?

Possible Answers:

Andy Warhol

Diane Arbus

Roy Lichtenstein

Jackson Pollack

Jasper Johns

Correct answer:

Jasper Johns

Explanation:

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.

Example Question #31 : Identifying Artists, Works, And Schools Of 2 D Visual Art

Which twentieth-century artist focused her career largely on self portraits?

Possible Answers:

Georgia O'Keefe

Frida Kahlo

Diane Arbus

Louise Bourgeois

Lee Krasner

Correct answer:

Frida Kahlo

Explanation:

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.

Example Question #45 : Identifying Artists, Works, Or Schools Of Twentieth And Twenty First Century 2 D Art

Nighthawks, a famous painting that shows three customers and a bartender at a well-lit bar late at night from a distance, was made by which artist?

Possible Answers:

Joseph Stella

Mark Rothko

Norman Rockwell

Edward Hopper

Georgia O'Keefe

Correct answer:

Edward Hopper

Explanation:

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.

Example Question #32 : Identifying Artists, Works, And Schools Of 2 D Visual Art

The French artist Marcel Duchamp helped to create what artistic movement?

Possible Answers:

Cubism

Impressionism

Abstract Expressionism

Pop Art

Dada

Correct answer:

Dada

Explanation:

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."

Example Question #411 : 2 D Art

210px-juan_gris_-_portrait_of_pablo_picasso_-_google_art_project

The painting is a portrait of __________.

Possible Answers:

Pablo Picasso

James Joyce

Henri Matisse

Albert Einstein

Correct answer:

Pablo Picasso

Explanation:

The Spanish Juan Gris arrived in Paris in 1906 and helped develop the style known as Cubism with fellow young artists Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, and under the influence of Gris' fellow Spaniard, Pablo Picasso. Fittingly, one of Gris' signature cubist portraits is of Picasso himself, with a clear depiction of the painter that also features a cubist deconstruction of his clothing and surroundings.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Example Question #412 : 2 D Art

210px-juan_gris_-_portrait_of_pablo_picasso_-_google_art_project

The style this painting uses was influential in the development of __________.

Possible Answers:

Expressionism

Post-impressionism

Impressionism

Futurism

Correct answer:

Futurism

Explanation:

Cubism, the style employed by Juan Gris in the painting seen here, was part of the broader trend of modernism, which was concerned with technological innovation, new ways of thinking, and breaking with tradition. A style which took many of modernism's and cubism's precepts even further was the Italian movement known as Futurism. As much a political movement as an artistic one, Futurism embraced machine age technology, progress, and activity in a cross-artistic style heavily indebted to cubism's breakthroughs.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Example Question #413 : 2 D Art

Roy Lichtenstein's art can be classified as "Pop Art" because ___________.

Possible Answers:

it shows how art changed in the nineteenth century

it examines three-dimensional forms from multiple viewpoints

it rejects typical or common forms of expression

All of the answers are correct.

it takes everyday, mass media visuals (like comic book images) and shows them in a new light

Correct answer:

it takes everyday, mass media visuals (like comic book images) and shows them in a new light

Explanation:

Pop Art was a twentieth-century art movement defined by the way it repurposed and engaged with everyday, common forms of art, like advertisements and comic books. The other answer describes elements of cubism (viewing  three-dimensional shapes from different perspectives at once).

Example Question #414 : 2 D Art

Which of the following works of art belongs to the Dada school?

Possible Answers:

Fountain, Marcel Duchamp (1917)

Guernica, Pablo Picasso (1937)

Self-Portrait with Monkey, Frida Kahlo (1938) 

L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1876) 

 No. 61 (Rust and Blue), Mark Rothko (1953) 

Correct answer:

Fountain, Marcel Duchamp (1917)

Explanation:

The Dada school developed during the last years of World War I. Duchamp acted as a major contributor to the Dada school, and his work Fountain was one of the movement's best-known and most controversial works of art. 

Learning Tools by Varsity Tutors