Later Europe and Americas: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
40 flashcard terms for AP Art History Unit 4, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 21-question quiz — free, no account needed.
CED Unit 4: c. 1750–1980 — Rococo through Postmodernism; revolutions, industry, photography, and the avant-garde remake art's purposes.
Rococo
Early 18th-century aristocratic style of pastel colors, playful eroticism, and ornamental curves — epitomized by Fragonard's The Swing (1767).
The Swing
Fragonard, 1767. A young woman kicks off her shoe above her hidden admirer — frothy Rococo pleasure commissioned by the lover himself.
Neoclassicism
Late 18th-century return to classical clarity and civic virtue, fueled by Pompeii's excavation and Enlightenment ideals.
Oath of the Horatii
David, 1784. Three brothers swear to Rome before their grieving women — rigid geometry and stoic sacrifice as pre-Revolutionary moral lesson.
Romanticism
Early 19th-century movement prizing emotion, nature's sublime power, the exotic, and contemporary tragedy over classical reason.
Y no hai remedio (And There's Nothing to Be Done)
Goya, c. 1810. Etching from The Disasters of War confronting executions during Napoleon's invasion of Spain — unflinching antiwar witness.
Liberty Leading the People
Delacroix, 1830. Allegorical Liberty strides over barricade corpses with the tricolor — Romantic color and fervor for the July Revolution.
The Oxbow
Thomas Cole, 1836. Hudson River School landscape splitting storm-dark wilderness from cultivated valley — America debating its land's destiny.
Realism
Mid-19th-century commitment to unidealized modern life — laborers and ordinary people at monumental scale, as in Courbet's Stone Breakers (1849).
The Stone Breakers
Courbet, 1849 (destroyed 1945). Two anonymous road workers painted life-size, faces hidden — labor's monotony given history-painting dignity.
Photography's Impact
Daguerre's 1839 process challenged painting's documentary role, pushing painters toward what cameras could not do — color, subjectivity, abstraction.
Impressionism
1870s French movement painting fleeting light and modern leisure en plein air with broken brushwork — Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Cassatt.
The Coiffure
Mary Cassatt, 1890–1891. Drypoint and aquatint of a woman at her toilette, its flat planes and contours inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints.
Japonisme
The late 19th-century European craze for Japanese prints, whose flat color, cropping, and diagonals reshaped Degas, Cassatt, and van Gogh.
Post-Impressionism
1880s–90s responses to Impressionism: Seurat's optical order, Cézanne's structure, van Gogh's expressive color, Gauguin's symbolic flatness.
The Starry Night
Van Gogh, 1889. Swirling impasto sky over Saint-Rémy — inner turbulence rendered through color and directional brushwork rather than observation alone.
Mont Sainte-Victoire
Cézanne, 1902–1904. The mountain built from patches of color that flatten and structure space at once — the bridge toward Cubism.
Picasso, 1907. Five fractured nudes with faces influenced by Iberian and African masks — the detonation that opened the way to Cubism.
Cubism
Picasso and Braque's fracturing of form into shifting geometric planes with multiple simultaneous viewpoints, c. 1908–1914.
Fauvism
c. 1905 movement of arbitrary, liberated color — Matisse's Goldfish (1912) uses vivid hue for joy, not description.
German Expressionism
Early 20th-century movements (Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter) distorting form and color to convey psychological and spiritual states.
Improvisation 28
Kandinsky, 1912. Near-abstract canvas equating color and line with music's direct spiritual effect — a step to pure abstraction.
Dada
WWI-era anti-art of absurdity and chance protesting the rational culture that produced the war — Duchamp's readymade Fountain (1917).
Fountain
Duchamp, 1917. A signed urinal submitted to an open exhibition, asking whether choice and context alone can make something art.
Surrealism
1920s movement mining dreams and the unconscious via Freud — Dalí's meticulous hallucinations, Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup (Object, 1936).
The Persistence of Memory
Dalí, 1931. Soft melting watches in a barren landscape — irrational dream imagery painted with academic precision.
De Stijl / Mondrian
Dutch movement reducing art to vertical/horizontal lines and primary colors seeking universal harmony, as in Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930).
Bauhaus
German design school (1919–1933) uniting art, craft, and industry; its steel-and-glass functionalism seeded the International Style.
Villa Savoye
Le Corbusier, 1929, Poissy. Machine-age house on pilotis with ribbon windows, open plan, and roof garden — his five points of architecture.
Fallingwater
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1936–1939. Cantilevered terraces over a Pennsylvania waterfall — organic architecture fusing dwelling and site.
Migrant Mother
Dorothea Lange, 1936. FSA photograph of Florence Owens Thompson — Depression documentary that became a national icon of endurance.
Harlem Renaissance / Aaron Douglas
1920s–30s Black cultural flowering; Douglas's silhouetted, concentric-circle murals (Aspects of Negro Life, 1934) narrate African American history.
The Two Fridas
Frida Kahlo, 1939. Double self-portrait with exposed, connected hearts — Mexican identity and personal pain in Surrealist-adjacent language.
Mexican Muralism
State-sponsored public painting by Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros teaching revolutionary history to mass audiences on public walls.
Abstract Expressionism
Post-WWII New York movement of large-scale abstraction: Pollock's poured action painting, Rothko's hovering color fields.