HA3091

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

Summer Examinations: 2001/2002

MODERN AMERICAN ART I

Time allowed: 3 hours.

Candidates must answer THREE questions.

Read carefully the instructions on the answer book and make sure that the particulars required are entered on each answer book.

1. Writing in 1939, Clement Greenberg observed that American culture was characterised by two significant forces - avant-garde art and `kitsch'. Is it possible to understand contemporary American art and culture in these terms?

2. What developments in the American art world between 1913-1935 provided the conditions for the`reception of European Abstract art?

3. How did Alfred Barr and the Museum of Modern Art in New York `contribute to the redefinition of the concept of Modernism' (Christoph Grunenberg)?

4. What were the dominant characteristics of Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s?

5. Discuss the art historical significance of the work of Andy Warhol.

6. Were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg Pop artists?

7. What aspects of American Pop art are of interest from the point of view of the sociology of art?

8. What is `phenomenology', and how did it provide the terms of the debate on Minimal Art between 1965-69?

9. Is the term `Conceptual Art' an oxymoron?

10. What aesthetic objectives characterised Land Art between 1966-75?

11. Has the work of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger provided a feminist critique of contemporary culture?

12. Were postmodernist `pastiche' and `appropriation' critical artistic strategies or merely symptoms of the growing commodification of art?

End