Chapter 3: Art of the world

Art after 1945

From Pollock's drips and Warhol's soup cans to Op Art, Minimalism, land art and street art, with Kusama, Bourgeois, Ai Weiwei, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Koons.

17 min read16 topics2 PYQs See the pictures on the board

In one minute

6 facts to know

After 1945 the centre of the art world moved from Paris to New York. Abstract Expressionism came first: Jackson Pollock dripped paint onto canvas on the floor, and Mark Rothko painted soft, glowing blocks of colour.
Pop Art (from the late 1950s) borrowed from adverts, comics and supermarkets: Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Roy Lichtenstein's comic-strip paintings full of printed-looking dots. CEED 2026 labelled Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl as Pop Art.
Op Art (1960s) uses sharp patterns that seem to flicker and move: Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. UCEED 2018 asked students to tell Op Art from Pop Art.
Minimalism (plain boxes), conceptual art (the idea matters most) and land art (Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970) took art beyond painting.
Street art: Keith Haring's dancing figures, Jean-Michel Basquiat's crowns and skulls, and Banksy's stencils.
Names to know: Yayoi Kusama (polka dots and pumpkins), Louise Bourgeois (the giant spider Maman), Ai Weiwei (Sunflower Seeds), Christo and Jeanne-Claude (wrapped and draped landscapes) and Jeff Koons (Puppy).

What changed after 1945

The Second World War ended in 1945. Many European artists had fled the war to the United States, and New York took over from Paris as the place where new art happened. Over the next few decades, artists kept asking the same question: what can art be?

The answers kept getting bigger. First came huge abstract paintings. Then artists painted soup cans and comic strips. Others made plain boxes, or work that was mostly an idea. Some left the gallery altogether, to build in the desert, wrap whole buildings or paint on city walls. Almost all of these works are still in copyright, so most pictures here are shown small.

Abstract Expressionism: paint as action

Abstract Expressionism was the first big American movement. It grew in New York in the late 1940s, and its artists are also called the New York School. Their paintings are abstract: they show no people or objects. They come in two kinds. Action painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning attacked the canvas with energy. Colour field painters such as Mark Rothko covered it with large, calm areas of colour.

A very wide canvas covered edge to edge in a tangle of black, white and brown lines and splashes of dripped paint on a pale beige ground. — Picture: Jackson Pollock. Copyright Pollock-Krasner Foundation, shown for teaching.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
When: 1950
Who: Jackson Pollock (1912 to 1956)
Style: Abstract Expressionism (action painting)
Made with: Paint poured and dripped onto unprimed canvas, more than 5 metres wide

Pollock laid his canvas flat on the floor of his studio and walked around it, pouring, flicking and dripping paint from cans, sticks and stiff brushes. There is no top, bottom or centre; the whole surface is one web of lines. Photographs of him at work made the process famous, and a critic, Harold Rosenberg, called this kind of art "action painting", because the painting is a record of the artist's movements. Pollock died in a car crash in 1956.

Spot it by

Tangled webs and drips of paint over the whole canvas, no shapes or objects, no single focus, often very wide.

Remember

Pollock didn't paint the picture; he danced it, with dripping paint.

Don't confuse

Willem de Kooning, the other great action painter, used big, slashing brushstrokes and kept a hint of a figure, as in his Woman I (1950 to 1952, MoMA). Pollock's paintings have no figures at all.

A tall canvas with three soft-edged horizontal blocks of colour stacked on a blue ground: dark rust red at the top, a bright blue band in the middle and deep brown-purple at the bottom. — Picture: Mark Rothko. Copyright Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, shown for teaching.

No. 61 (Rust and Blue)

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
When: 1953
Who: Mark Rothko (1903 to 1970)
Style: Abstract Expressionism (colour field painting)
Made with: Oil on canvas, nearly 3 metres tall

Rothko painted large canvases with two or three soft rectangles of colour that seem to float and glow. He built them up in thin layers, so the colour seems to shine from inside. He wanted people to stand close and feel something strong, even sadness, rather than just look. His last big project was the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, a quiet room for people of all faiths, lined with his dark paintings.

Spot it by

Two or three blurry-edged rectangles stacked on top of each other, glowing colour, no lines or objects, very large.

Remember

Rothko's rectangles glow; stand close and let the colour fill your view.

Don't confuse

Mondrian's grids also use rectangles, but with hard black lines and flat primary colours. Rothko's edges are soft and smoky.

Yayoi Kusama: dots without end

Pumpkin

Where: Naoshima island, Japan, on a pier at the Benesse Art Site
When: 1994 (remade and put back in 2022)
Who: Yayoi Kusama (1929 to 2026)
Style: Kusama fits no single movement; she is linked with Pop Art, Minimalism and installation art
Made with: A sculpture about 2 metres tall
Key works: Infinity Net paintings; Infinity Mirror Rooms; pumpkins

Kusama grew up in Matsumoto, Japan, and moved to New York in 1958, where she worked alongside the Pop artists. Since childhood she had seen hallucinations of dots and nets, and she turned them into her art: endless nets of tiny loops on canvas, mirror rooms that seem to go on forever, and pumpkins covered in polka dots. She went back to Japan in 1973. In August 2021 a typhoon swept this pumpkin into the sea; a stronger new one was put back on the pier in 2022. Kusama died in Tokyo in August 2026, aged 97.

Spot it by

Polka dots on everything, bright yellow or red with black, pumpkins, mirrored rooms full of lights.

Remember

Kusama equals dots: dots on pumpkins, rooms, clothes and herself.

Don't confuse

Lichtenstein's dots copy printed comics and are small and even. Kusama's dots are big, hand-painted and cover whole objects and rooms.

Pop Art: art from the supermarket

Pop Art took its images from popular culture: adverts, comics, film stars and things you can buy in shops. It started in London in the 1950s with the Independent Group, artists such as Richard Hamilton who met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and it took off in New York in the early 1960s. The British painter David Hockney (1937 to 2026) is often linked with Pop: his A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate) shows a bright California swimming pool with a splash of white water.

Campbell's Soup Cans

Where: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
When: 1962
Who: Andy Warhol (1928 to 1987)
Style: Pop Art
Made with: 32 canvases, one for each flavour of soup Campbell's sold at the time
Key works: Campbell's Soup Cans (1962); Marilyn Diptych (1962, Tate, London)

Warhol had worked as an advertising illustrator. In 1962 he showed 32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans, one for each flavour, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. They look almost identical, like goods on a supermarket shelf. People asked whether this could be art at all, which was exactly the point. Warhol went on to print the faces of film stars such as Marilyn Monroe over and over with silkscreens, a printing method, in his New York studio, which he called the Factory.

Spot it by

Everyday brands or celebrities, the same image repeated in rows, flat bright colour, a printed, machine-made look.

Remember

Warhol painted what everyone bought: soup, cola and film stars.

Don't confuse

Duchamp's Dada readymades (1910s) also used everyday things, but to mock art. Pop Art enjoyed popular culture rather than attacking art.

A comic-strip painting of a crying woman with dark blue hair sinking in a swirling wave, with a thought bubble saying she would rather sink than call Brad for help; her skin is made of small red dots. — Picture: Roy Lichtenstein. Copyright Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, shown for teaching.

Drowning Girl

Where: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
When: 1963
Who: Roy Lichtenstein (1923 to 1997)
Style: Pop Art
Made with: Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Key works: Drowning Girl (1963); Whaam! (1963, Tate, London)

Lichtenstein copied single panels from cheap comic books and blew them up to the size of a big painting. He even copied the tiny coloured dots that printers used to make skin tones, called Ben-Day dots. This one comes from a romance comic: a heartbroken girl would rather drown than ask her boyfriend for help. The melodrama is meant to be funny. His Whaam! shows a fighter plane blowing up another in a cartoon explosion.

Spot it by

Thick black outlines, flat primary colours, rows of printed-looking dots, a speech or thought bubble with comic lettering.

Remember

Lichtenstein painted comics, dot by dot.

Don't confuse

CEED 2026 showed this painting next to Mondrian, Manet, Vermeer and a Jugend magazine cover; the answer was Pop Art. Op Art also uses dots and lines, but as abstract patterns with no story.

Op Art: paintings that seem to move

Op is short for optical. Op artists used sharp black and white patterns or clashing colours that make the eye see flickering, bulging or movement on a flat surface. The name came into use in 1964, and the next year a big exhibition at MoMA in New York, The Responsive Eye, made the style famous. The Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely is often called its father; his striped Zebras date from the late 1930s.

A black and white chequerboard whose squares squeeze into thin strips towards the middle, so the flat surface seems to fold and bend inwards. — Picture: Bridget Riley. Copyright Bridget Riley, shown for teaching.

Movement in Squares

Where: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
When: 1961
Who: Bridget Riley (born 1931), England
Style: Op Art
Made with: Paint on board, about 1.2 metres square

Riley started making black and white paintings around 1960. Here she took an ordinary chequerboard and made the squares narrower and narrower towards the middle, so the flat picture seems to fold in on itself. She called it the start of her breakthrough into abstract art. Her work was a highlight of The Responsive Eye in 1965. Later she moved on to stripes and curves in bright colour.

Spot it by

Sharp black and white geometric patterns, repeated squares, stripes or waves, a flat surface that seems to ripple, bulge or flicker.

Remember

Op Art plays tricks on your eye: look long enough and it moves.

Don't confuse

Pop and Op sound alike. Pop Art shows things from everyday life, such as soup cans and comics. Op Art is abstract and is all about optical effects.

Less and less: Minimalism and conceptual art

In the 1960s some American artists reacted against the drama of Abstract Expressionism. Minimalists made simple, geometric objects from industrial materials, often built by factories, with no hidden meaning: what you see is what there is. Conceptual artists went further and said the idea behind a work matters more than the object.

A large open-ended box made of plain grey concrete slabs stands on gravel in a garden, with trees and a low stone wall behind it. — Picture: Talmoryair. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Untitled (concrete box)

Where: Billy Rose Art Garden, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
When: 1988 to 1991
Who: Donald Judd (1928 to 1994)
Style: Minimalism
Made with: Concrete

Judd made boxes, again and again, in concrete, metal, plywood and coloured plexiglass. He did not want them to stand for anything or to show the artist's hand, so many were made in factories to his plans. He called them "specific objects" rather than sculptures. Standing next to one, you notice the space, the light and your own body.

Spot it by

Plain boxes or repeated units in rows, industrial materials, no decoration, no subject, often placed straight on the floor.

Remember

Minimalism: what you see is all there is.

Don't confuse

Minimalism in design, as in Dieter Rams's Braun products, means useful objects with nothing extra. Minimalist art has no use at all; it is just shape, material and space.

A gallery wall with a life-size black and white photo of a wooden folding chair on the left, the real chair standing in the middle, and a printed dictionary definition of the word chair on the right. — Picture: Photo by Gautier Poupeau; artwork by Joseph Kosuth. Copyright Joseph Kosuth, shown for teaching.

One and Three Chairs

Where: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, owns one version
When: 1965
Who: Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), United States
Style: Conceptual art
Made with: A real chair, a photograph of it, and an enlarged dictionary definition of "chair"

None of the three parts is Kosuth's own handiwork. What he made is the idea: set an object, a picture of it and the word for it side by side, and ask which one is really "a chair". He left instructions: each time it is shown, the museum picks a chair and photographs it in place, so the work changes but the idea stays the same. Conceptual art says the idea is the art; the objects are only a way to carry it.

Spot it by

Words, labels, instructions, photographs and ordinary objects, often with little to admire for skill or beauty, and a puzzle to think about.

Remember

In conceptual art, you think first and look second.

Don't confuse

Duchamp's Dada readymades, such as Fountain (1917), are the ancestors of conceptual art. The difference is time: Dada is the 1910s and 1920s, conceptual art the 1960s and 1970s.

Out of the gallery: land art and wrapping

A long spiral path of dark rocks coils out into a pale, salt-white lake under a grey sky, seen from a hillside above the shore. — Picture: Photo by Soren.harward; artwork by Robert Smithson. Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation, shown for teaching.

Spiral Jetty

Where: Rozel Point, on the north-east shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, United States
When: April 1970
Who: Robert Smithson (1938 to 1973)
Style: Land art (also called earthworks)
Made with: Black basalt rocks and earth, about 460 metres (1,500 feet) long

Land artists made works out in the landscape, from earth, rock and water, too big for any gallery and impossible to sell. Smithson used bulldozers and trucks to build a coil of rocks that winds anticlockwise into a pink-tinted salt lake. For decades it vanished under the water and reappeared as the lake rose and fell; it has stayed visible since 2002. Since 1999 it has belonged to the Dia Art Foundation.

Spot it by

A huge shape built in a real landscape, earth and rock, seen from the air or a hill, often in a desert or by a lake.

Remember

Land art is the size of the land.

Rows of tall gates hung with saffron-orange fabric curve along a path past a stone bridge and a pond in Central Park in winter, among bare trees. — Picture: Photo by Carol M. Highsmith; artwork by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Copyright Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, shown for teaching.

The Gates

Where: Central Park, New York (taken down after 16 days)
When: 12 to 27 February 2005
Who: Christo (1935 to 2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935 to 2009)
Style: Environmental art and land art
Made with: 7,503 gates, each about 5 metres tall, hung with saffron-coloured fabric
Key works: Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin (1995); The Gates, New York (2005)

The married couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude made huge works that lasted only days or weeks. For The Gates they lined the paths of Central Park with orange fabric gates, and about four million people came to walk through them. In 1995 they wrapped the Reichstag, Germany's parliament building in Berlin, in silver fabric tied with blue rope. They paid for their projects themselves, and when each one ended, everything was taken away.

Spot it by

Whole buildings, coastlines or parks wrapped, draped or lined with fabric, one bold colour, and a work that disappears after a short time.

Remember

Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the world, then took the wrapping away.

Street art

Graffiti, painting or writing on walls without permission, grew up in New York in the 1970s, on subway trains and city walls. Some street artists moved into galleries; others stayed outside and became famous anyway.

A large mural on the outside wall of a church, packed with brightly coloured cartoon-like figures with thick black outlines, linked together and dancing, under a bell tower. — Picture: Photo by Guglielmo Giambartolomei; artwork by Keith Haring. Copyright Keith Haring Foundation, shown for teaching.

Tuttomondo

Also called All the World

Where: Back wall of the church of Sant'Antonio Abate, Pisa, Italy
When: June 1989
Who: Keith Haring (1958 to 1990)
Style: Street art and Pop
Made with: Paint on the outside wall of the church

Haring first became known in New York in the early 1980s for quick white chalk drawings on the black paper that covered empty advertising spaces in subway stations. His simple figures, crawling babies, barking dogs and dancing people, are drawn with bold, unbroken outlines. Tuttomondo, a mural about peace and harmony painted in Pisa, is one of the last public works he made before he died of AIDS-related illness in 1990.

Spot it by

Simple cartoon figures with thick black outlines, lines that show movement, bright flat colours, figures filling every bit of space.

Remember

Haring drew people dancing, in one bold line.

A painting of a large head like an X-ray skull, with a grid of teeth, staring eyes and scribbled lines, in black, yellow, red and blue against a sky-blue and pink background. — Picture: Jean-Michel Basquiat. Copyright Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, shown for teaching.

Untitled (Skull)

Also called Untitled (Head)

Where: The Broad, Los Angeles
When: 1981
Who: Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988)
Style: Neo-Expressionism, rooted in street art
Made with: Acrylic and oilstick on canvas

Basquiat began as a teenager in New York, spray-painting short poems and jokes on walls under the tag SAMO. Within a few years he was a star of the art world and worked with Andy Warhol. His paintings mix scribbled words, crowns, skulls and body parts in raw, energetic colour, and deal with race, power and history. He died in 1988, aged 27. In 2017 a similar skull painting from 1982 sold for 110.5 million US dollars, then a record at auction for an American artist.

Spot it by

Scribbled words and crossed-out text, three-pointed crowns, skull-like heads, rough brushwork, bright colour, a childlike but angry energy.

Remember

Basquiat's crown and skull: from wall graffiti to record prices.

Don't confuse

Haring's figures are neat, cheerful and outlined. Basquiat's are messy, crowded with words and full of tension.

A black stencil of a small girl on a grey concrete wall, reaching out towards a red heart-shaped balloon floating away from her. — Picture: Banksy. Copyright Banksy (Pest Control Office), shown for teaching.

Girl with Balloon

Where: First stencilled on walls in London; none of the street versions remain there
When: From 2002
Who: Banksy, an anonymous British artist
Style: Street art (stencil graffiti)
Made with: Spray paint through a cut stencil

Banksy has never officially said who he is. He sprays stencils on walls, often with a political or funny message, and has worked in cities from London to the West Bank and Ukraine. In October 2018, a framed Girl with Balloon was sold at Sotheby's in London, and moments later a shredder hidden in the frame cut half of it into strips. Banksy renamed it Love Is in the Bin. In 2021 the shredded work sold again for about 18.6 million pounds.

Spot it by

Black and white stencils with one spot of colour, children, rats, police or soldiers, a short witty or political message, often on a real wall.

Remember

Banksy's balloon girl shredded herself at auction.

Big sculpture, big ideas

A giant bronze spider on thin, bending legs, taller than the buses and people below it, stands in a city square in front of a church with two tall spires. — Picture: John Talbot. CC BY 2.0.

Maman

Where: This cast outside the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; others in cities including Bilbao and Tokyo
When: 1999
Who: Louise Bourgeois (1911 to 2010), a French-born American artist
Style: Contemporary sculpture
Made with: Bronze, stainless steel and marble, more than 9 metres tall

Maman is French for "Mum". Bourgeois made the spider as a tribute to her mother, who repaired tapestries: like a spider, she wove, mended and protected. The spider carries a sac of white marble eggs under its body. It was first shown in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London in 2000. The original was made in steel, and six bronze casts now stand outside museums around the world.

Spot it by

A spider far taller than a person, on long, thin, knobbly legs, with a sac of eggs under its belly.

Remember

Maman means Mum: a spider that spins, mends and protects.

Sunflower Seeds

Where: First shown in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London; this part was photographed at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
When: 2010
Who: Ai Weiwei (born 1957), China
Style: Conceptual art and installation
Made with: About 100 million porcelain seeds, each shaped and painted by hand

Ai Weiwei had about 1,600 craftspeople in Jingdezhen, China's ancient porcelain city, make 100 million seeds by hand, and spread them across the floor of Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall. From a distance they look like a grey carpet; up close every seed is different. The work makes you think about the individual and the crowd, and about "Made in China". Ai Weiwei is also an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, and he worked as a consultant on the design of Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Olympics.

Spot it by

Huge numbers of one small hand-made thing, a simple idea at a vast scale, often with a political message.

Remember

One hundred million seeds, and every one made by a person.

Puppy

Where: Outside the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (since 1997)
When: 1992
Who: Jeff Koons (born 1955), United States
Style: Neo-Pop
Made with: A stainless steel frame filled with soil and covered in thousands of living flowering plants, about 12 metres tall
Key works: Puppy; Balloon Dog (shiny stainless steel sculptures that look like party balloons)

Koons makes giant, shiny, cheerful versions of everyday things: inflatable toys, balloon animals and greeting-card puppies. Puppy is a cute dog the height of a four-storey building, covered in real, living flowers. Like Pop Art, it mixes high art with kitsch, things that are cheap, sweet or tacky. His works sell for huge prices, and people argue about whether they are brilliant or empty.

Spot it by

Huge, glossy or cute everyday objects, balloon animals in mirror-polished steel, bright colours, a sense of fun.

Remember

Koons turns a balloon or a puppy into a monument.

Movements at a glance

Movement	When and where	Spot it by	Names to know
Abstract Expressionism	New York, late 1940s and 1950s	Big abstract canvases: drips and slashes, or glowing blocks of colour	Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko
Pop Art	London from the 1950s, New York in the 1960s	Brands, comics, film stars, repeated images, flat bright colour	Warhol, Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Hockney
Op Art	Europe and the US, 1960s	Sharp black and white or colour patterns that seem to move	Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely
Minimalism	United States, 1960s	Plain geometric boxes and units, industrial materials	Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin
Conceptual art	From the mid-1960s	Words, instructions, photos and ordinary objects; the idea is the work	Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt
Land art	United States, late 1960s and 1970s	Huge shapes built from earth and rock in the landscape	Robert Smithson
Street art	New York from the 1970s, then everywhere	Graffiti, stencils and murals on real walls	Keith Haring, Basquiat, Banksy

Timeline

1950
Jackson Pollock paints Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
1953
Mark Rothko paints No. 61 (Rust and Blue)
1958
Yayoi Kusama moves from Japan to New York
1961
Bridget Riley paints Movement in Squares
1962
Andy Warhol shows his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans in Los Angeles
1963
Roy Lichtenstein paints Drowning Girl and Whaam!
1965
Joseph Kosuth makes One and Three Chairs; The Responsive Eye makes Op Art famous
1967
David Hockney paints A Bigger Splash
1970
Robert Smithson builds Spiral Jetty in Utah
1981
Jean-Michel Basquiat paints Untitled (Skull)
1989
Keith Haring paints Tuttomondo in Pisa
1992
Jeff Koons makes Puppy
1994
Kusama's yellow Pumpkin is placed on Naoshima island
1995
Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap the Reichstag in Berlin
1999
Louise Bourgeois makes Maman
2002
Banksy stencils the first Girl with Balloon in London
2005
Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates fill Central Park
2010
Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds cover the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern
2018
Girl with Balloon shreds itself at a Sotheby's auction

Test yourself

Question 1 of 8

Which art movement does this painting belong to?

Question 2 of 8

Which of these is Op Art?

Question 3 of 8

Which of these is by Jackson Pollock?

Question 4 of 8

Who made this giant spider?

Question 5 of 8

This pumpkin stands on a pier on Naoshima island in Japan. Who made it?

Question 6 of 8

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), a coil of rocks in the Great Salt Lake, is an example of which kind of art?

Question 7 of 8

Joseph Kosuth showed a chair, a photograph of the chair and a dictionary definition of "chair" side by side. What kind of art is this?

Question 8 of 8

What happened to Banksy's Girl with Balloon at a Sotheby's auction in 2018?

From past papers

Real exam questions on this topic, each with a full solution.

Finished this note?

Mark it as studied to track your progress through the course.

Was this note useful?

Each picture is credited underneath it. Pictures of works still in copyright are shown small, for teaching only. If you hold the rights to a picture and want it removed, tell us through the contact page and we will take it down.