My content
area is art and I focused on a unit on Modern
Art (Modernism) for 10th grade students. To supplement and enrich this unit, I
will be incorporating the
following three trade books and two websites; Gauguin (Spence,
2010), Cezanne (Spence, 2010), A is for Art (Johnson, 2008),
‘Modernism’ (Damjanovic, 2005) and ‘Gauguin’ (2003). Modernism includes art
works created during period from 1860s to the 1970s. During the era, many
artists escaped from traditional way and experimented new ways of seeing and
creating art. Dominant movements include impressionism, expressionism and
cubism. Through these movements, artists such as Cezanne and Gauguin influenced
to avant-garde and many modern artists.
The supplemental text from
the books and websites will be used for the grade 11th level or
below the grade level. Usually in high
school art curriculum, classes are managed by the students’ level of knowledge
and interest in art rather than by grade. Usually, Art I is required and from
Art II to Advanced art, it is up to their choice. Therefore, it is very likely
that an art class consist of all students from grade 9 to 12. For this reason,
I choice two books that their readability estimate are age 14-17. Third book
mostly consist of wonderful colorful images with much less text to help their
understanding through visual that indicates its text readability for the age 10
or below.
First, I
chose a trade book, Gauguin (Spence, 2010) for my
students to read for this particular unit of Modernism. The contents are divided into three chapters:
The artist and his times, The artist’s life, and The artist’s vision. The first
chapter begins with childhood of Gauguin; when he was born, where he spent time
in his early years moving around from Paris to Peru. It also tells about the
world of Gauguin; what was going on politically and socially during his times
and art of his day which influences his early works as an artist. The next
chapter, The artist’s life, introduces about his family and how his family
background influenced and developed him. After he spent his youth in South
America, he really missed happy memories there. He was desperate to bring some
change in his life. He couldn’t bring any money from his paintings and even
after going to Panana, his money ran out soon. Since he starts painting, the
book describes his life as Wanderlust. He moves around place to place and meet
many other people like Vincent van Gogh. He experimented with new ways of
painting and abandoned traditional techniques of color variations and
perspectives. This is where third
chapter comes and describe how his paintings begin to deal with ‘imaginary and
symbolic subject matter’ (Spence, 2010).
When learning modernism,
impression is definitely a big part to cover up and students can learn a lot
through studying on famous impressionist’s life and art work such as Gauguin.
Book covers not only about his art work but also arts of his day. As a teacher,
I will open an introduction briefly explaining about how they came up with
movement, Impressionism and showing various examples of paintings that the
modern artist experimented during the era.
I will let student begin reading on the first two chapters which can
give them general idea of who he is and what was changing in art of his day. Students will understand how they came up with
Modern art and have smooth transition to impressionism. In classroom, students
will begin to make their own painting in their interpretation of impressionism
throughout couple weeks. They continue
to read the remaining about his art works.
Another
trade book I chose is Cezanne by the same author, David Spence. It starts
with his background as well. Rather than family, his close friends influenced
his early age more. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer but his best friend,
Zola encouraged him to go to Paris together and do Art. He copied the great
masters and learned how to paint.
Cezanne met the modern and adventurous painters in Paris and discussed
their ideas about art. He focused on
landscape painting. Spence (2010) said, ‘he set up his canvas to paint the
rural landscape, especially the view along the valley toward the flat-topped
mountain. He sought to create images that represented the subject as color and
tone together, that is to identify a color that could represent the tone of an
object and in this way build something solid out of color alone without the
need for line or shade’. The book further explains in detail how his paintings
were made in matter of the structure in his landscape and still life paintings.
Before I
let my student read the text, I will give them a vocabulary guide. When studying about Cezanne and Cubism,
student have often struggle with understanding of vocabularies for Element of
Art. Cubism deals mainly with color,
tone, and plane. I will go over art vocabularies giving them definition and
examples of each in terms of art. Then,
students will begin reading. There are much to read about him changing as an
artist and how cubism was created in his work. Thus, I will let them skip the
chapter about his family background and his friend’ story. As it explains the techniques and structures
of Cubism painting in detail, students will experiment with a choice of
techniques mentioned from the book with still-life I provide in classroom.
Another
trade book I will use is A is for Art (Johnson, 2008). Stephen Johnson
is the author of the book as well as an artist. He said, ‘I wanted to move out
of what I perceived to the confines of realism to explore the more open, expansive,
experimental possibilities inherent in abstract.’ He has created wide range of
abstract, experimental pieces of paintings, collages, installations, and
sculptures. He describes his passion and hope for children and young artist to
be inspired by his dynamic works and generate creative ways of exploring and
experimenting art. Each page has one
image of his art work with couple sentences of description. High quality image takes almost two third of
the page and its description follows below image. There are 25 pages consist of
25 images of his work and description. Each description talks about different
things according to the media of each work, but generally, all description has
mediums he used, ways of using colors or structure, subject matters and method
of composition.
This book can be used for student effectively
before they start creating their art work. It works as great inspiration tools.
Reading the description and connecting to the image, they can envision how
their concepts and idea will be carried to the real image. For example, on
page4, the description has a phrase, ‘Densely distributed dominoes, divided by
dark and light dots on dual panels, disappears…’ and a corresponding image. If
a student wanted to make an artwork in multi panels or multiple pieces, he will
get the general idea or picture of how it will look in actual painting or at
least get some inspiration through the image and text.
‘Modernism –Modernism Art’ (2007) is a great website
for student to access. The content of the article consist of entire period of
Modernism. The author divided Modern period by small time period from middle of
nineteenth century through twentieth century. It tells a lot from geographical
and historical content to make better connection with art movement in the
period. It explains why such movement happened and how they linked to another
movement in which particular place in Europe.
The
article is very detailed and explained thoroughly about modern period. Students
often get confused with many art movements that overlap in time and style.
Sometimes there are two different name of the movement for very similar concept
and style. The articles are described well in detail in timely manner so students
can organize the movement in sequence and understand how they spread and linked
to another. They will sometimes find
some art-related terms that they are not familiar with. All the movement and
terms are bold text that allows readers to click on and it provides the whole explanation
with helpful images. Students can also use search engines. They can click on
the dropdown button to find more information. Search engines are categorized by
artist, movement, and theme.
‘Gauguin’ (2003) is another website for
students to explore. The biography article begins with a quote “Do not finish
work too much” by Paul Gauguin. It tells
about his family background and Impressionist exhibitions he participated
between 1879 and 1886. Then it tells his life as a full-time painter after he
returned to Paris. It focuses on his interest of subject matter which is
primitive cultures. It also tells about his later life and illness.
Through
this website, students can learn much about Gauguin that they couldn’t get through
books. It is hard to have links and numerous high quality images in books. Whereas,
the website provides each section for viewing images of Gauguin art works,
biography, related book and films, and links. Besides reading the text, website
enables visual students to be more engaged with supplemented images and films.
Bibliography
Spence,
David. Gauguin. New York
City: Newforest, 2010. Print.
Spence,
David. Cezanne.
New York City: Newforest, 2010. Print.
Johnson,
Stephen T. Gauguin. New
York City: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman, 2008. Print.
“Modernism
–Modernism Art.” Museum
Quality. Huntfor, Ed. Damjanovic. 2007.
Web. 2 Apr. 2012. <http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/c19th/modernism.htm>.
