History of Western Art Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The painter of Maids of Honour (Las Meninas, 1656) is Diego Velasquez, the court painter to Philip IV of Spain. The canvas shows the young Infanta Margarita with her attendants and the painter himself at his easel, and is among the best known works of Spanish Baroque painting.

Francisco de Goya was a later Spanish court painter (his works include The Third of May 1808), Caravaggio was an Italian master of dramatic light and shadow, and Peter Paul Rubens was the Flemish Baroque painter of large religious and mythological scenes. None of them painted this work.

Answer: C

The sculptor linked to powerful, muscular female figures in action is Maillol. His Action in Chains (1905-06), a striding female torso with arms bound, is a well known example of a strong female body shown in movement.

Rodin modelled vigorous figures, but he is best known for male and expressive nudes such as The Thinker and The Kiss. Bernini was a Baroque master of dramatic marble groups such as Apollo and Daphne, with graceful rather than muscular women. Duchamp is a painter and creator of ready-mades such as the Bicycle Wheel, not a sculptor of figures.

Answer: D

The action painter is Jackson Pollock, who in the 1940s and 1950s dripped and poured paint onto canvases laid on the floor, so the act of painting itself became the subject. The term action painting, coined by Harold Rosenberg, is tied to him and to the Abstract Expressionists.

James Ensor was a Belgian painter of masks and fantasy, and Degas was a French Impressionist known for dancers and scenes of modern life. Neither used gesture as the main content of the picture, and the third name is not an action painter.

Answer: A

The Age of Innocence (about 1788) was painted by the English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was the first president of the Royal Academy. It shows a young child seated outdoors and is among his best known child portraits.

Renoir was a French Impressionist, Picasso a Spanish artist of Cubism and many other styles, and Constable an English landscape painter. None of them painted this picture.

Answer: A

Henry Moore was influenced by Maya and Aztec sculpture, in particular the reclining figure of the Mexican Chacmool, which he saw in the British Museum and which shaped his reclining figures and his belief in truth to material and direct carving.

He also looked at African and Etruscan art, but the influence the key credits as the main one is Mesoamerican, so the other three options are not the keyed answer. Indian sculpture was not a major source of his style.

Answer: C

Both are correct. The Greeks knew the arch and the dome but built mostly in post and lintel (trabeated) construction, as in the Parthenon, so (A) is correct. The reason is that arch and dome seem to rise upward either to reach other-worldly goals or to dominate the beholder, and these motives were incompatible with Greek values of balance and human scale. So (R) is also correct.

The options calling either statement incorrect, or both incorrect, contradict this account.

Answer: B

Both are correct, as keyed. Picasso's Bull's Head (1942) was made from the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle, which together form the head of a bull, a third image from two found objects, so (A) is correct. It reacts against the conventional sculptural methods of carving and modelling, and it expresses emotion through assemblage, so (R) is correct.

The options saying that (A) is correct and (R) is not, that both are incorrect, or that (R) alone is correct do not follow the key.

Answer: A

The artists in order of the movements they belong to are Courbet (Realism, mid 19th century), Degas (Impressionism, from the 1870s), Cezanne (Post-Impressionism, 1880s and 1890s) and Braque (Cubism, from about 1907). So the sequence is Courbet, Degas, Cezanne, Braque.

The options that start with Braque or Cezanne, or put Degas before Courbet, place a later movement before an earlier one.

Answer: B

Edgar Degas is linked with Impressionism (iii), Matisse with Fauvism (i), Braque with Cubism (iv), and Picabia with Dadaism (ii). The code is a-iii, b-i, c-iv, d-ii.

The other codes pair them wrongly. For example, i iii ii iv gives Degas to Fauvism and Braque to Dadaism, and iv ii i iii gives Degas to Cubism, which is wrong.

Answer: C

Notre Dame at Paris is a cathedral. It is the Gothic church begun in the 1160s that serves as the seat, the cathedra, of the Archbishop of Paris, and that role is what makes a church a cathedral. A chapel is a small place of worship attached to an institution or a larger church, which Notre Dame is not. A basilica is a church given that rank for its architectural form or by papal grant, and it is not the description that identifies Notre Dame in the usual classification. A plain church is true in a loose sense but is the less precise answer, so the keyed choice is cathedral.