Teaching Through Art
Hola Sunday Morning Coffee-ites. I come to you this week fresh off a week of traveling up the East coast with my daughter and grandbabies, so it’s been a good week. How about yours?
A month ago, I saw a notice that Boston’s Museum of Fine Art was hosting an exhibit called Fashioned by Sargent. Full disclosure: John Singer Sargent is my favorite artist of all time. I’m not kidding. I’m a bit of a fanatic. Sargent is usually not thought of as an Impressionist painter, but he used impressionistic techniques in such a stellar way, often using them on the entire palette and then painting the subject’s face with almost photo-realistic detail. His canvases are so large they would cover an entire wall of my home. His subjects stare out at you with arrogance, sweetness, cockiness, and humor. Oh. I forgot to mention that Sargent was the leading portraitist of his time. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. He painted portraits of the rich, forever memorializing them in their Edwardian-era luxury. Thus the exhibit’s theme: Fashioned by Sargent. The museum bombarded our senses with one painting after another, interspersed with the actual gowns or accessories seen in the portraits. Beautifully preserved 130 year old velvet, brocade, and silk gowns, top hats, fans, cloaks, and costumes. I mean, if you know me at all, you know that I was in one version of heaven.
My favorite Sargent painting is Madame X. When my daughter was 12, I took 27 country kids from Texas to New York City on a week long field trip (I was that teacher). Every chance we got, she and I and one of my students ran to the Met to see as much as possible in that week. Our first visit was to see Madame X, whose permanent home is the Met. She was on loan to the Louvre. We just stood and stared at her empty spot on the wall, feeling like she’d cheated on us somehow. Fast forward a couple of years and I took a group of former students to Europe on a field trip. We couldn’t wait to get to the Louvre, and guess what? Madame X had gone home. Drats! Foiled again! When my daughter did a grad-school fellowship with the Met, she finally got to see her and took a picture of herself with her and sent it to me. When I moved to DC, the first thing I did was go to NYC to see Bette Midler in Hello Dolly, but my first stop off the train was the Met, and I finally saw Madame X in all her glory, and I actually cried (I’m that kind of art geek). This week, I took a picture of my babies in front of her and sent it to my former student letting her know that my daughter and I were passing the passion to the next generation, and she wrote back, saying, “Tell her hello for me.” By “her,” of course, she meant Madame X.
Before we went to the museum, we talked to our girls (ages 3 and 6) about Sargent and his work. Why portraits of rich people? Because that’s the only way he could make a living with his art. Otherwise he would have been cutting off his own ear (just a little impressionistic dark humor for any aficionados out there). There was a room at the exhibit full of watercolor canvases, small, wild landscapes, dock workers, women doing laundry in the river…all subjects that captured Sargent’s eye and heart, but weren’t lucrative. We talked to the girls about museum decorum, what to say when someone asks “what’s your favorite painting?” and how to ask them the same, why a painting is your favorite (style, technique, subject, message?), what the little cards next to an item means and how to read it, and we talked a lot while we were there about a whole host of things. Some topics the girls brought up and some we introduced. Like, while we’re admiring the beautiful gowns (one liked a sleek red velvet and the other liked the glittery gold dancing costume), we talked about the Edwardian period and the role of women and how even though the clothes were beautiful, they were confining and limiting and sometimes dangerous (i.e. corsets), etc. Our six year old treated me to her observations of Sargent’s brush strokes and how up close they looked like paint and when you stepped away, they looked like velvet (and there you have it folks…an expert explanation of impressionism).
When I taught high school art, I created a curriculum that let students dabble in a variety of mediums, and I interspersed art history, which can be a little bit dry if you aren’t careful. I made sure to connect art with how it tells our story as a culture, as a generation, as a species. I took students on field trips, as previously mentioned, because I wanted them to experience art and figure out where it fit in their own lives and to learn how to navigate different worlds. I always introduced the course by saying that it was my goal for them to learn to appreciate art, understand its place in our lives and the lives of others, to create, and to gain enough knowledge to be able to hold their own at cocktail parties. It was a successful roadmap.
I introduced art in every subject I taught: Theater, English, Reading, Speech, and when I’m teaching criminal justice topics. Is art activism? Is it advocacy? Of course. Artists have, through the ages, captured the beauty of the human condition and the horrors of what humans do to one another. It reminds us of our greatest strengths and our ultimate frailties.
When I got home, I had to pick up my pup (well, she’s 14, so maybe no longer a pup) from my friends who host her when we’re out and about. Over coffee, my friend, who is a literature teacher at a local high school, said she had just taken a group of students to the National Art Gallery on Friday. She talked about how many of her students had never been to a museum. Maybe you’re thinking she’s at an inner-city urban school, but actually she teaches at a suburban private school, where the majority of students come from households with ample income. And these are kids who live in Smithsonian-utopia. Anyway, as most teachers do, she said she was worried about student behavior, but they had the same discussions we had with our little ones before going in, and she said the students were entranced and begged for more time.
Teaching through art.
I’m not saying this just because I’m an art geek. I’m an art geek because it teaches us so much, makes us feel so much, and you know…sometimes it’s just pretty. Nothing wrong with that.
Tallyho coffee drinkers, masterful educators, art lovers, and faithful readers. Kick your week off with a bang. And look up Madame X by Sargent when you have a minute. There’s a little bit of scandal attached to her, if you want to Google a bit.
