Intro to Modernism: Second Quiz Instructions: Select and answer three of the following questions.

1.Picasso’s “breakout” picture Les Demoiselles d’Avignon has acquired an almost mythical status in modern art as “the first Cubist painting,” and as a highly expressive picture about sex and violence.Cubism has also been linked to Picasso’s love of the cinema, and his desire to respond to the new technology.Write a brief essay discussing the evolution of this painting.What are the viewpoints of Chave and the commentators in the documentary film Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies?Do you agree with them?

2.The juxtaposition of “primitive” and modernist art works was common practice among the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, and a method used in many surrealist exhibitions, including the exhibition held in Mexico City in 1940. Beyond the continuation of Gauguin’s call to engage in “dialogues with the past,” what other meanings—aesthetic and political—did this style of art exhibition-making entail?

3.Select two art works of Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism or Surrealism that you observed in the galleries at LACMA and the Norton Simon Museum.Make sure that your selection represents different avant-garde modernisms (for example, one Cubist and one Expressionist picture).Write an essay in which you compare the two works, focusing on issues of style, form, and art historical meanings.The essay should draw upon your on-site notes in addition to class notes and relevant readings.Feel free to go beyond the assigned readings, but be sure to include a bibliography of sources.

4.“Can a photograph have the significance of art?,” Alfred Stieglitz wrote in 1922.Briefly explore this question within the broader context of the history of photography, and more specifically through the work of Man Ray.What techniques did Man Ray and other like-minded artists employ to establish the photographic medium as an art form?

5.Duchamp’s many declarations on his artistic method and the multiple meangins of The Large Glass centered on the notion that humans were becoming more machine-like.He believed that “the twentieth century is to be still more abstract, more cold, more scientific.”Of the 19^th-century artists covered in this class, who would you compare him to, and why?