How to use Class Tours
In Class Tours you will be able to find the objects most often used
for Curriculum tours in the Ackland. The left hand bar, which scrolls
down, contains the images
of these objects with the artist and titles below. Click on any of these
objects and an image accompanied by background information will
appear in the main frame. If you click on the image on this page, a larger
image will load. Beware: these larger images files are over 200k, so they
may be
slow to load. If you go to the bottom of the background information page,
you will find a link called Issues to Consider. This will take you
to another page which offers suggestions on how to contextualize the work
and questions which may help you to begin a paper. Some of these contain
highlighted
links to other works of art offered for comparison. The words which
are highlighted, but do not refer to an art work, are links to a glossary
of art terms.
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Writing about Art
If you are unfamiliar with writing about art, you may want to look
at a sample art history paper, offered below. This is a paper from an
introductory art history survey course, so it is very basic. The
concentration here is on the three ways in which art is usually discussed:
style, composition, and iconography.
A simple way to tackle an art paper is to first write a brief
description of the work. Basically, write what you see. State in which
medium
the work was produced- painting, sculpture,etc. Very briefly describe the
subject.
You should concentrate on just what you see, rather than drawing any
conclusions from it. Next, concentrate on the style of the work. First,
decide what really strikes you about the work, and then try to describe
how the artist achieved this effect. For instance, if it is an expressive
sculpture that seems to capture a sense of movement, is the surface smooth
and even or rough and mottled, did the sculptor model the figure in clay
or carve it out of a block of stone? If it is a painting which conveys a
particular emotion, is this emotion conveyed through the use of color-
(bright or dark colors), line- frenetic, curvilinear, geometric, the way a
figure is depicted, or a combination of all of these elements? An artist's
style is usually connected to a contemporary movementi.e. Impressionism.
If you have trouble
describing a style, you may want to read about the general movement in one
of the survey books listed in the Suggested Bibliography. The next issue,
composition, is basically a description of how the forms of the work are
set out. The composition of a piece is an intentional design with which
the artist attempts to guide your eye around the canvas or sculpture or
building, etc. The description of this component may be difficult. Try
looking at the work as if it hadn't a subject and was instead just lines,
forms,and color; where are the diagonals, the horizontals and the
verticals, do
they affect where your eye travels? Or you could look at the work and note
where your eye goes first and where it is attracted next, etc. Next you
may want to try to compare the work to an artistic movement. For this you
could consult one of the surveys in the Bibliography to find out the major
characteristics of the movement the artist is usually connected with.
Remember though, not every artist or art work can be easily categorized,
in that case, you can compare and contrast the work to a movemement that
is most similar or contemporary.
For the Iconography, you should do some basic research. Basically,
you should tell the story of the work and how this story is portrayed; an
iconography is a pictorial tradition of this story. For instance, biblical
stories often have a fairly standard iconography in different periods. For some
works, this may be difficult because of a lack of an obvious subject, in that case you would want to concentrate on the idea that the artist was trying to convey to the viewer. You
can usually find this information in a survey of the period.
Finally, you may want to include in your discussion of a work the reason for your interest in the work. This could be expanded into your thesis statement for a connection with or aspect of the work not previously explored.
Sample Paper