College week 6/1 10th October Art History

Another really interesting session with Jo Kear.  This morning she looked at on-line research resources including brilliant videos and short films on the Tate Channel on the Tate website, link here.

We looked at one on Measuring the Universe,  a summer project at Tate St Ives, inspired by every family's habit of measuring the height of their children against the kitchen wall.  Also a brilliant video about John Wood and Paul Harrison who make installation and performance art based at Spike Island in Bristol: the link is here..

There is also lots of fantastic material on the V and A site (link is  here), and lots of other London galleries including the Saatchi, the National Gallery, etc, etc.

I also have found and used the websites for MoMA New York here , the Guggenheim link here, the Louvre (link here), etc, etc.

Too much information !

There is so much available one could spend an entire life just rummaging through and looking at on-line material and images. So selectivity becomes a new core skill, which I am beginning to learn.

The main subject of Jo's lecture was a case study in really looking at a picture, and understanding how to de-code it in terms of its form  (medium, form, size, subject matter, colour, technique, style, etc etc) and context (artist, time, historical, social and political contexts, etc, etc).  We looked at a huge painting which I had never heard of before, The Raft of the Medusa painted in 1819 by the French artist Theodore Gericoult (1791-1824).  It is massive, 23 ft long and 16 ft high, and hangs currently in the Louvre.

Jo unfolded the context of the painting (the controversial wreck of a French Government sponsored boat carrying settlers to Senegal, and the subsequent loss of most of the steerage passengers in dreadful circumstances at sea).  We understood how the painting was read by the public and the government, and how it fitted into the French political scene in the years immediately following the death of Napoleon and the downfall of the First Republic.

We looked at some other works by Gericault, and by Delacroix, a contemporary French painter, and talked more generally about the Romantic style, and how artists used it to focus on big emotions and passionate human responses.

A really useful session, I learnt a lot about how to unpack a painting and look for the context and related information to turn what at first sight seems like a huge, dark , rather over-blown picture into a fascinating statement about the artist and his world.  Another great Jo Kear morning!