About the Paintings
About the Paintings
Redon spend the majority of his life painting in black and white, and only began to paint with color after discovering pastels and oils in his fifties. For me, this painting represents the journey of the artist and art itself. First and foremost, self-discovery and expression (like creative writing) are life-long journeys that require experimentation; we are never locked into an identity no matter how long we live.
This portrait of his friend Ker-Xavier Roussel (which he did at the age of 72) is also an interesting combination of the abstract and real. Roussel's face is clearly visible and distinct, but the explosion of color and expression around it showcases reflects an identity that goes beyond the literal. This painting feels experiential, as if the product is self-discovery and the process, rather than accuracy.
For these reasons, I love this painting for creative writing.
Laocoön was a Trojan priest who warned Trojan leaders that the wooden horse was a trick. In response, the gods (who preferred the Greeks) sent serpents to destroy him and his sons before he could reveal the Greeks' plans. Laocoön's story is one of tragedy because it lead to his demise through no fault of his own. It resonates with me personally for life, at times, demands that our correct actions lead to our demise.
For English 12 Honors, I felt this painting to be particularly fitting as students in this class are often in the position of Laocoön: loyal, observant, and attempting to do the right thing. However, the Gods of this world often dictate that they suffer and fall for their compliance to morality or their own observation. After all, how often are students punished or reprimanded for revealing the poor coping mechanisms of an adult, or revealing the arbitrary nature of education, or revealing the compliance-based reward system that is grading and exams?
For me, Laocoön is someone to be admired. His end was tragic, but his intention and actions were admirable. Should he have not attempted to save his own city, he would have still been destroyed in the conquoring of Troy. At times, our fates are sealed, and the universe and the gods have already pre-determined our demise. There is a reason we read Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning to start this course:
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer suffcient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way" (62).
This unassuming painting seems like it was misplaced for the cover of English 9 Ethnic Studies, until you learn of the story behind the painter. Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American painter whose mother escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, and his father was a bishop of an African Methodist Episcopal Church. In post-slavery America, he did his best to make a name for himself, studying under Thomas Eakins and developing his art. When success didn't come, he moved to Paris (in 1891). In Paris, he was judged for his skills as a painter, rather than his race.
When I learned of this story, I knew this painting would be a perfect fit for Ethnic Studies English 9. This painting communicated 2 goals of Ethnic Studies better than most: (1) the story behind a work is just as relevant as the work itself; (2) the cultural and political environment can suppress brilliant art.
For me, this painting is a cautionary tale and an explanation to the true purpose of Ethnic Studies: without awareness of culture, biases, and advocation for those who don't have power, we will lose some of the greatest thinkers, artist, and people of our time.
Rembrandt's dark, moody compositions and colors have always spoken to me at a personal level (maybe it's the morbid Ukrainian/Russian in me). However, this painting does more than just express a tone.
Rembrandt painted a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses, or the transformation of Zeus and Hermes traveling in disguise. An old couple in poverty (Philemon and Baucis) offered welcome to strangers, and offered everything they have to these secretly divine guests. As a result, they are spared from a flood and their home is transformed into a temple. They are turned into two tree, intertwined, after their death. (More about the myth here)
The tone, mythology, parable, and symbolism of this painting feel Joycean to me. Joyce made the ordinary a myth; he created a parable of empathy and understanding; his symbolism (structural and traditional) embodies the intertwining nature of experience; and he expressed the gods that stand beside men (heretically, men as embodying gods themselves).
Done in the ukiyo-e tradition, this style of art was considered low, common, and cheap. Meaning "pictures of the floating world" literally, it was intended to showcase the subjects of ordinary actors, geishas, courtesans.
This tradition parallels how self-discovery and self-reflection are treated in education. Education loves to prioritize 'academic' writing and 'academic' learning for 'having a better future.' However, what kind of future can a person have if they don't know themselves? If they don't take a moment to stop, think about who they are? How is anyone supposed to make sense of the world around them, if they don't make sense of themselves first?
Unit 1 is all about looking in a mirror and reflecting on oneself. This is a perfect image and history for this unit.
While this painting does not seem to directly connect to 'intersectionality' at first glance, the painter's complex diversity and the vague subjects make this painting feel like it couldn't be any other.
Camille Pissarro was Jewish, Caribbean, French, a painter, a Parisian, born in the Danish West Indies, and more. His history is a symphony of variation. Beyond him, his subjects' identities in this portrait as distinct, yet undefined. As a viewer, you are effectively asked to impose some label on their purpose, identities, and more. The painting, for me, exposes humanity's attachment to comfortable, singular narratives.
For these reasons, this painting feels like a perfect fit for intersectionality, which is all about the variety of labels that are attached to us. Moreover, it is about definitions of identity. More importantly, self-definition. After all, society will spend more than enough time defining us. The definitions we give ourselves will ultimately be the ones that linger.
Bazille painted this in response to Édouard Manet's Olympia (1865), which depicted a nude, white woman that was attended by a Black servant. In response, Bazille depicted a black flower vendor as the primary subject. Killed at the age of 28 in the Franco Prussian War, this is one of his final paintings before his death.
Yet what does this have to do with Martin Luther King Jr.? Malcolm X? Protesting for change?
To me, the story behind this painting is a retelling of the story of the activists of the 1960s. Like Bazille's intention behind this painting, Black Americans were fighting for their own representation in the portrait of American. Exhausted by being the 'servant' of a white society, their goal was to be placed as the subject of America's portrait. And just like Bazille, they died far too early to see their legacy threaded into the future.
Born in the Russian Empire (Poland today), Hirszenberg was an Orthodox Jewish painter deeply dedicated to his faith and heritage. This painting, Golus in Yiddish, was inspired by real people that he observed in his life. The original painting was destroyed in WWII, along with the lives of 6 million Jewish people (17 million total at the concentration camps).
This painting represents so many essential elements of unit 4: Resilience and Resistance. Sometimes, resistance can be loud, bombastic, and powerful. Other times, resistance can simply be survival.
The subject of the painting and the history both align with the essential learning of this unit: exhausted people, real people, that are recognized and immortalized in Hirszenberg's art; a history of thousands of years of dispossessed people wandering in the diaspora; finally, a lost painting found only as an image on the internet, a defiant rebellion of its own, and a marker of a history that refuses to die.
A Spanish painter, Velázquez chose to depict a dark-skinned woman in the foreground as the primary subject. Behind her, secondary to her existence, is the sacred image of Jesus and the Last Supper.
The result was revolutionary for its time, and just as relevant today: the juxaposition and conflict between the storys of myth, religion, and power; the every day existence of lives often not represented by those myths, religions, and power.
This image is especially fitting for this unit: who tells the story? What happens when a history is white-washed or repurposed to represent one ethnic group in order to forget another? Who has ownership rights to stories of heroism, journey, love, and more?
The second work by Pissarro on this page, The Artist's Garden at Eragny was painted at a much later time in his life. When I was learning about this painting, I found 2 specific elements fitting for this unit.
First of all, Pissarro was committed to depicting people and people at labor in his art. Undaunted by trends or beliefs of other famous artists, he dedicated his work to representing the hard laborers he observed. This unit, emphasizing reading and empathy, is to honor the labor of reading and empathy. It dedicates time to a skill often overlooked in our society, much like Pissarro dedicated his time to subjects often overlooked by artists.
Finally, this is a painting of a woman in a garden. How can I, a literary teacher, not be drawn to the symbolism of a garden in a unit about reading? What is reading if it is not a seed planted and nurtured?
All academia aside, it's a beautiful painting of a garden. All academia aside, this unit just asks students to read. Maybe academia aside is the best way to close the year.
The Desperate Man (1843) by Gustave Courbet (Link)
Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind) (1903) by Käthe Kollwitz (Link)
Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Link)
The Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David (Link)
The Milkmaid (1657–58) by Vermeer (Link)
Hecate (c. 1795) by William Blake (Link)
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby (Link)
Oath of the Horatii (1784) by Jacques-Louis David (Link)
Work (1852–65) by Ford Madox Brown (Link)
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1873–76) by Winslow Homer (Link)
The Swing, by Renoir, takes its time to depict an ordinary couple. It is a calm, unassuming painting that expresses Renoir's development in his style. As Renoir honed his craft, he began to dive away from studios and controlled environments and into the chaos of the outdoors, which had changing light and less-controlled circumstances. He experimented with light, and was often critiqued when his work did not conform to some formulated expectation as defined by the critics of the time.
For these reasons, this painting seems like a perfect fit for the first unit of this course. It reminds you, as a creative, to focus on the ordinary; great works are created not by extraordinary subjects, but by the artist that depicts the subject. It also acts as a reminder to leave the 'studio.' This class can act as a studio, per se, for your art of creative writing, but your writing will be expected to leave this controlled space. Finally, it reminds you to develop your craft while taking criticism, for the criticism you provide on your own work is often the only criticism that matters.
Van Gogh's A Pair of Shoes is an unassuming subject tied to a vast and deep human experience. The shoes depicted here are used and tossed aside, as if at the end of a work day. In his letters to his brother, Theo, Van Gogh expressed his desire to paint "the silent inner life of things" (Link). When I observe this painting, I am reminded of Joyce's quote (from Ellmann's biography): "Absence is the highest form of presence."
For these reasons, I feel this to be a fitting painting for unit 2, which focuses on poetry. Poetry is, by its nature, the art of expressing that which is not present. You are tasked, in poetry, to focus on the minutia of details and the minutia of your own writing. Poetry can do something prose cannot: place its entire being on a word, a punctuation mark, or on empty space.
In those shoes exists an entire history of the person that wore them, the craftsman that created them, the space in which they were used, the space the currently occupy, and the artist that depicted them. Poetry is no different, and somehow expresses more the more it limits its word use.
Géricault's painting, The Raft of the Medusa, tells the tale of a French vessel on a mission to continue the covert slave trade, abolished in France. The vessel was ultimately beached, and various high-ranking officials took to life boats while the rest of the crew (around 150 of them) had to board a makeshift raft (depicted in the painting). Only 10 survived. You can read the whole story here. This painting pairs with Unit 3, which asks students to structure a story of their own. Moreover, we will explicitly cover the hero's journey story structure during this unit.
For these reasons, I felt this painting was particularly fitting and ironic. The historical connection helps showcase that art and narratives are often inspired by their surroundings. Oceanic imagery is particularly connected to stories of journeys, challenge, and fate. Finally, this painting tells a tale worthy of a novel as it has an explicit exposition, climax, and dénouement, as well as a journey that fits well with the monomyth/hero's journey story structure.
Ironically, there are no heroes here. Rather, the painting showcases a vessel on a journey of subjugation and the continuation of oppression. The pity we might feel looking at the painting is undercut by the purpose of their journey, and the cannibalism and murder that took place on the stranded, make-shift vessel of men facing their almost-certain death.
The narrative contained in this painting is as compelling as the ones I would like students to create, and a model of engagement, drama, and ambition.
While this painting (as any other) has an extended story and authorial purpose (read here), the entire story feels as if it is told in observation and the title: an artist is painting a self portrait of them painting a self portrait. The final unit of semester asks students to look at themselves much like Gentileschi looked at herself. In other words, as students create a work of creativity, students are asked to look at who is creating that work. All art has a creator, and htis unit and painting asks people to consider the creator as much of the subject of their art piece as the piece they create; art is always a reflection of the self, and the artist and their art are forever interconnected.
Vertumnus is the Roman God of seasons, growth, and change. Arcimboldo was famous for his use of fruit and other objects to create paintings, ones he called "three-dimensional paintings" (source). For our purposes, this painting coincides with our second poetry unit. This painting is also the embodiment of two principles I see consistently recurring in art and life: gestalt and the nebeneinander. Both are German or German-origin words; gestalt is the principle of understanding the whole as a collection of parts (basically), and the nebeneinander is about taking things collectively and together - seeing the whole picture simultaneously.
Poetry is about the collection of individual, beautiful parts that are arrange and [re]arranged to create something new. Poetry, more than anything, stresses an individual word and exposes the reality of our perception as a collection of individual parts and moments that if looked at closely, can be divided even more. Like a microscope with eternal zoom, life just gets increasingly more vast and complex the more we begin to zoom into the tiniest details (paradoxically).
So... Fruit. More specifically, Vertumnus made of fruit. A Roman God of growth, change, depicted in a painting that demands gestaltian comprehension, experienced nebeneinander (simultaneously).
I should also mention: this unit emphasizes restrictions more than the previous poetic unit. Those restrictions do not hamper creativity. Rather, they are supposed to push it and demand the artist to be creative, rather than their environment. Creativity is ultimately a choice from the artist to work within the confines and context they are given. There are no examples from history where being absoilutely free increases creativity. Rather, the opposite is often true: in times of restriction and censorship, creativity finds ways to flourish in the margins. Thus, just like Arcimboldo used the restriction of fruit or objects to depict his subject, you will be restricted in form or theme and asked to find your own creative voice within those margins.