Annotated Bibliography

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 11^th 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>.

 "P. Gauguin."  2003. Web. 16 Apr. 2012. <http://www.gauguin.com>.

Links to the books on Barnes & Noble

1. Spence, D. (2010). Gauguin. New York: Newforest Press
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gauguin-david-spence/1101752398
2. Spence, D. (2010). Cezanne. New York: Newforest Press
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cezanne-david-spence/1102245341?ean=9781848983151&itm=1&usri=cezanne+david+spence
3. Johnson, S.T. (2008). A Is for Art: An Abstract Alphabet. New York: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/is-for-art-stephen-t-johnson/1100630979?ean=9780689863011&itm=1&usri=an+abstract+alphabet