Art Exam Assignment | Online Assignment

Choose one of the following questions and write a two-page essay (double spaced). You can submit it through the Assignments tab or you can email it to me.

1. In the Russian Avant-Garde (Suprematism and Constructivism) an idea to merge art and life motivated many artists. As a result, they made both paintings and fabric designs, both sculpture and functional objects, and extended “art thinking” into many new areas of practice, and appealed to many new kinds of audiences. Workers’ clubs, information kiosks, sportswear for women, set designs for theater, tea pots, etc. This thinking also surfaced in de Stijl with furniture and architecture, and was also at the center of the philosophy of the Bauhaus–that every consumer deserved good design. Write an essay giving three artists who were involved in this unprecedented expansion in art.

2. American artists of the early part of the 20th century were very involved with the lively scene in New York City and made art about the city in virtually every medium. Painting, sculpture, and importantly photography figured in the efforts of many to represent NYC in response to its new immigrant populations, its increasing industrialization, and the new architecture that was changing the city’s skyline, and everyday life. What pictures of the city did they create? Discuss three different artists whose works focus on the city and its newly modern environment.

3. Abstract Expressionism, as the name of this movement suggests, embraced the emotive potential of art to express and explore through the device of abstraction, almost impossibly big ideas, whether we deem them metaphysical or existential, that had to do with meaning in life. Some found gestural abstraction to provide access to Jungian and Freudian concepts of the unconscious. Others used color field abstraction to create meditative spaces and to explore personal psychologies. Discuss two artists of this movement and how they sought to create an art that somehow was intended to “go beyond” everyday experience.