AP® Art History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/art-history/units/4/4-1)
Unit 4 · Topic 4.1
4.1 Interactions Within and Across Cultures in Later European and American Art
Between 1750 and 1980, artists borrowed constantly: from ancient Rome and medieval Europe, from Japanese prints, and from African, Pacific and Caribbean cultures, often through the uneven lens of colonialism. This topic covers fourteen works that show those borrowings and how to write about them critically.
Key terms
- Rococo
- Neoclassicism
- Romanticism
- Orientalism
- Impressionism
- Cubism
How this unit's notes are split
The CED suggests 26 of Unit 4's 54 works for this topic, and doesn't assign Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? to any topic. These notes cover fourteen here, including Gauguin, and move the rest to 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 to keep each page manageable. All 54 are required.
Reviving the past
Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Miguel Cabrera; c. 1750; oil on canvas). Sor Juana, a nun in New Spain, was a famous poet and scholar. Painted decades after her death, she sits in her library with books, an inkwell and the large badge nuns wore, posed like European portraits of learned men. The portrait celebrated the intellectual life of New Spain.
Monticello (Virginia; Thomas Jefferson; 1768–1809; brick, glass, stone and wood). Jefferson based his house on the Italian architect Palladio and on Roman temples, adding a columned portico and a low dome. Neoclassicism, the revival of Greek and Roman forms, linked the new American republic to ancient Rome. Monticello was a plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, which complicates its ideals of liberty.
The Oath of the Horatii (Jacques-Louis David; 1784; oil on canvas). Three Roman brothers swear to fight for Rome while their sisters collapse in grief. Straight lines, three arches and crisp contours express duty over emotion. Painted for the royal government, it was later read as a call to patriotic sacrifice in the French Revolution.
George Washington (Jean-Antoine Houdon; 1788–1792; marble). Houdon traveled to Mount Vernon to measure Washington. He wears his uniform, not a toga, but stands in classical contrapposto, resting on fasces (a bundle of rods, here 13 for the states) with a plow behind him. The plow recalls Cincinnatus, a Roman leader who returned to his farm after saving the republic.
Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) (London; Charles Barry and Augustus W. N. Pugin; 1840–1870; limestone masonry and glass). Rebuilt after an 1834 fire in Gothic Revival style, which evoked England's medieval past and national identity. Pugin designed the Gothic details.
Looking east and south
La Grande Odalisque (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; 1814; oil on canvas). An odalisque is a woman of a harem. Her back is impossibly long, her skin smooth, surrounded by a turban, a peacock fan and a pipe. This is Orientalism: European fantasies of the Middle East and North Africa as exotic and sensual, made without real knowledge of them.
The Starry Night (Vincent van Gogh; 1889; oil on canvas). Painted at an asylum in Saint-Rémy, partly from memory: swirling sky, a flame-like cypress and a sleeping village. Thick impasto (paint laid on heavily) and strong contours show his study of Japanese prints, which he collected.
The Coiffure (Mary Cassatt; 1890–1891; drypoint and aquatint). After a large 1890 exhibition of Japanese ukiyo-e prints in Paris, Cassatt made a color print series of women's private routines. Flat areas of color, patterned surfaces and crisp outlines borrow from Japanese printmaking.
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Paul Gauguin; 1897–1898; oil on canvas). Painted in Tahiti, then a French colony, it reads right to left, from a baby to an old woman, around a blue idol. Gauguin presented Tahiti as an unspoiled paradise, a colonial fantasy that ignored the island's reality.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Pablo Picasso; 1907; oil on canvas). Five women in a brothel are broken into sharp planes and seen from several viewpoints. The faces on the left recall ancient Iberian sculpture; the masklike faces on the right respond to African masks Picasso saw in Paris. Calling such art 'primitive' reflected colonial attitudes.
Goldfish (Henri Matisse; 1912; oil on canvas). Bright orange fish against green leaves, with the tabletop tipped up and the bowl seen from the side. Matisse painted goldfish after time in Morocco, where he saw people calmly contemplating fish bowls.
The Jungle (Wifredo Lam; 1943; gouache on paper mounted on canvas). Lam, of Afro-Cuban and Chinese descent, worked with Picasso and the Surrealists before returning to Cuba. Masklike hybrid figures crowd stalks of sugar cane, the crop of Cuba's slave economy. He turned Cubist borrowing around, using it to assert Afro-Cuban culture.
The Valley of Mexico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel (Jose María Velasco; 1882; oil on canvas). A vast, detailed panorama of the valley, with Mexico City and its lake in the distance. Trained in European landscape painting, Velasco made the land itself a symbol of Mexican national identity.
Postmodern borrowing
House in New Castle County (Delaware; Robert Venturi, John Rauch and Denise Scott Brown; 1978–1983; wood frame and stucco). Postmodern architecture rejected the plain boxes of modernism and quoted history with wit. This house has flat, cutout arches and columns, historical forms used like stage scenery.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Writing critically about borrowing
Explain how Les Demoiselles d'Avignon reflects Picasso's contact with art from other cultures.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Identify: Pablo Picasso, 1907, oil on canvas.
- Step 2: Name the sources: Iberian sculpture and African masks seen in Paris collections.
- Step 3: Use visual evidence: the masklike faces, fractured planes and multiple viewpoints.
- Step 4: Add critical context: European artists valued these objects for form while ignoring their meanings, within colonial attitudes.
Answer: Model answer: In Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso gave the two women on the right masklike faces with long, striated features that respond to African masks he saw in Paris collections, while the faces on the left recall ancient Iberian sculpture. He combined these influences with sharp, flattened planes and several viewpoints at once, breaking with Renaissance perspective. Picasso valued African art for its form, but he knew little of its original meanings, and labeling it 'primitive' reflected the colonial attitudes of his time.
Common mistakes
- Describing Orientalist paintings as accurate records. They are European fantasies.
- Saying Houdon dressed Washington in a toga. He wears his own uniform; the classical references are the pose, the fasces and the plow.
- Dating Monticello to a single year. Jefferson built and rebuilt it from 1768 to 1809.
- Calling Gauguin's Tahiti untouched. It was a French colony when he painted there.
On the exam
- Questions on interactions reward naming the specific source (Palladio, ukiyo-e prints, African masks) and the visual feature that shows it.
- For essays, Picasso, Lam and Cassatt make strong cross-cultural examples. Mention colonial context when it's relevant.
Connected topics
- Unit 44.2 Purpose and Audience in Later European and American Art
- Unit 44.3 Materials, Processes, and Techniques in Later European and American Art
- Unit 22.2 Interactions Within and Across Cultures in Ancient Mediterranean Art
- Unit 1010.3 Interactions Within and Across Cultures in Global Contemporary Art
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4 questions on 4.1 Interactions Within and Across Cultures in Later European and American Art. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
A brick house on a Virginia hilltop has a white columned portico with a triangular pediment and a low octagonal dome. Its architect, a statesman, revised the design after years in France, drawing on ancient Roman buildings and on the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. The plantation was built and run by enslaved people.
The portico, pediment and dome show Jefferson's interest in
For many Americans of Jefferson's time, classical architecture expressed
Rebuilt after a fire in 1834, Britain's Parliament building stretches along the River Thames with a long, symmetrical facade covered in pointed arches, pinnacles, tracery and carved stone panels. Tall towers, including a clock tower, rise above it.
The architects chose the Gothic Revival style for the Palace of Westminster mainly to
A vast, sunlit panorama looks down from a hillside across the Valley of Mexico toward distant lakes, Mexico City and snow-capped volcanoes. Plants and rocks in the foreground are painted with careful, almost scientific accuracy.
Velasco's grand views of the Valley of Mexico were valued in the late 1800s mainly because they
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