What constitutes a culturally different context?

Generally speaking, any artworks that come from different cultures and time periods are considered to be from contrasting contexts. If you chose artworks from different eras, like Middle Ages, Baroque, and Contemporary, obviously there is no question of these being too similar. Likewise, if you choose works from different geographic regions such as Africa, America and Asia they will naturally be from different contexts. Even European countries with close proximity can have plenty of cultural differences, too.

A Cultural Context can also refer to religious art, tribal art or to a subculture such as Punk or Outsider Art.

However, it gets trickier when some work is selected from within a similar time frame or cultural/geographic tradition. In this case, works would be considered culturally contrasting provided if the contextual backgrounds of the works have shaped the cultural significance of the work in different ways.  

If that sounds confusing I'll try to illustrate with an example:

Here are 2 landscape paintings both made in France only a few years apart... and yet they represent different cultural and art historical contexts.

 

Marc Chagall, Rain, 1911

1. Marc Chagall ( b. 1887, Vitebsk, Russian Empire (now Belarus); d. 1985, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France) grew up in a Hasidic Jewish community in what is today Belarus and he moved from Russia to Paris in the summer of 1910. Chagall's early work is characterized by a neo-primitive style derived primarily from Russian icons and folk art. This painting Rain, 1911, can be considered exemplary of this folk art style and it's associations with nostalgia and story telling.

Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque, 1908

2. Georges Braque's painting Houses at l'Estaque, 1918, owes much to Cezanne and aligns itself with the emerging Cubism movement and its interest in reducing everything, places and figures and houses, to geometric schemas, cubes, rectangle. There is no story telling nostalgia here! Braque is inching towards a world of pure distilled forms and and shapes, while still embracing the layered perspective of a landscape.

Now we need a third artwork to complete our Comparative Study. This third work could be another piece by one of these same two artists, or something entirely different... what would you chose to a make this an interesting comparison? I'm going to look for something from the other side of the world but from a similar time period.....

Grant Wood, Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931

3. This seems an interesting and appropriate choice to compare to the other two: It's another village scene, this time depicting an scene from the history of the New England colonies by Grant Wood (USA) painted in 1931. Wood uses a kind of decorative geometric approach, more akin to Art Deco than Cubism, however. The subject has a distinctively storybook treatment, with the bird's eye view and graphic scenery. The intent is a reinterpretation of a national legend, based on the artist's conviction that America had a rich literature, worthy of preservation and appreciation.

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