Gauguin, Les Alyscamps, (1888), Musée d’Orsay, Paris
How art education intersects with ideas, concepts and problems for artistic production
Pedagogy – “to lead a child” –
So now it generally means the study of being a teacher or teaching
- Paul Gaugin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French post-Impressionist artist who was not well appreciated until after his death. Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, his work becoming popular after his death. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. His bold experimentation with color led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art, while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral.
Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, 1888
van Gogh, Breton Women and Children, November 1888 (watercolor after Bernard).
Symbolism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_(arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.
The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name “symbolist” itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art. Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism of art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jeunes Filles au Bord de la Mer (Young Girls on the Edge of the Sea), 1879, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Victor Vasnetsov, The Knight at the Crossroads, 1878
Synthesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetism
The Talisman; Paul Sérusier
Synthetism is a term used by post-Impressionist artists like Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin (during the late 1880s and early 1890s) to distinguish their work from Impressionism.
Earlier, Synthetism has been connected to the term Cloisonnism, and later to Symbolism.
The term is derived from the French verb synthétiser (to synthesize or to combine so as to form a new, complex product).
Synthetist artists aimed to synthesize three features:
- The outward appearance of natural forms.
- The artist’s feelings about their subject.
- The purity of the aesthetic considerations of line, colour and form.
In 1890, Maurice Denis summarized the goals for synthetism as,
- It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
The term was first used in 1877 to distinguish between scientific and naturalistic impressionism. The confusing title has been mistakenly associated with impressionism. Synthetism emphasized two-dimensional flat patterns, thus differing from impressionist art and theory.
Cloisonnism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloisonnism
Paul Gauguin, The Yellow Christ (Le Christ jaune)
1889, oil on canvas
Cloisonnism is a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours. The term was coined by critic Edouard Dujardin on the occasion of the Salon des Indépendants, in March 1888.
The name evokes the technique of cloisonné, where wires (cloisons or “compartments”) are soldered to the body of the piece, filled with powdered glass, and then fired.
In The Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential cloisonnist work, Gauguin reduced the image to areas of single colors separated by heavy black outlines. In such works he paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of color — two of the most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting.
The cloisonnist separation of colors reflects an appreciation for discontinuity that is characteristic of Modernism
Primitivism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitivism
Henri Rousseau, In a Tropical Forest Combat of a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908-1909,
Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin’s inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics.
The term “primitivism” is often applied to other professional painters working in the style of naïve or folk art like Henri Rousseau, Mikhail Larionov, Paul Klee and others.
Paul Gauguin. Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso
- Academy Model – art that can he ‘taught’ and ‘learnt’. Art as a completely different (conservative) model that is a different activity from ‘craft’
- Art System – Private (RA) 1769 and Public (UAL) Henry Cole
- Arts and Crafts Movement (William Morris and John Ruskin)
- Vkhutemas (1920-30) Moscow – Communist
- Bauhaus (1919-1933) Berlin, Weimar and Dessau
At a time of polarisation of politics
- Bauhaus Manifesto – did not believe art cold be taught (includes arts, crafts and architecture in a single housed dwelling) – believes that schools must return to the workshop
Converging Theories/Belief Systems:
- Modernism – Rethinking last traditions
- Expressionism – Art that can change the world
- Pedagogy – Rudolf Steiner (child education)
- Mysticism – Theosophy (Cult Activity)
Prelmininary Course – Itten at Bauhaus (1919-22) – links to the modern ‘Foundation Course’
- Kandinsky – the artist as a prophet
Composition VII (1913)
One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process.
Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist’s inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representative canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color. Kandinsky’s art and ideas inspired many generations of artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.
- Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
- Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the “inner necessity” of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.
- Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art – musicians could evoke images in listeners’ minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.
Composition VII (1913) analysis:
Employs a rejection of pictorial representation through a swirling hurricane of colors and shapes. The operatic and tumultuous roiling of forms around the canvas exemplifies Kandinsky’s belief that painting could evoke sounds the way music called to mind certain colors and forms. Even the title, Composition VII, aligned with his interest in the intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized Kandinsky’s non-representational focus in this work. As the different colors and symbols spiral around each other, Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and laid bare the different abstracted glyphs in order to communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all cultures and viewers.
- Klee – Pedagogical Sketchbook
Black Mountain College (1933) – John Dewy
- Beuys – “to be a teacher is my greatest work of art” (Four Blackboards, 1972)
- Kaprow – “…’Happening’ it s a neutral word, with no associations of either art or professionalization”
- The educational turn on contemporary art practise – only containing aesthetics of padegogy
- Education as a cheap option when it comes to making work, but produces spaces of participation with the potential for a collective subject
- Relational conviviality (the quality of being friendly and lively) that is better housed in other forms of art education
- VIdokle – triggering cultural production – ‘UNITEDNATIONSPLAZA’
Characteristics of Educational Turn: Kristina Lee Podevska (Phillip Review, Issue 6)