Description
ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTION : ACT LIKE YOU VISITED AN MUSEUM OF YOUR CHOICE , CHOOSE AN ART WORK THAT IS FEATURED IN THE MUSEUM AND USE THAT FOR PART 2 of the assignment.
Part One: Museum or Gallery Analysis
One of the primary skills that will help you enjoy viewing art is the ability to successfully find worthwhile materials to help navigate the museum experience. There is a huge difference between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Washington County Historical Society in Stillwater, Minnesota, but most places that present art for public view have similarities. By analyzing the experience of your visit, you will learn skills applicable in many settings.
Your museum or gallery analysis should include the following:
- Basics: Identify the facility you visited by name and address, including other pertinent details if necessary.
- Environment: Describe the physical environment.
- Content: Describe the facility’s contents in general terms. Is this a museum with a comprehensive collection, displaying materials from all times and cultures, or is this a gallery specializing, for example, in paintings by contemporary Native American artists?
- Object selection: Select the object you will analyze for the second part of this project. Describe how the object is displayed. Are there didactic materials, like title cards, with information to help you learn about the object? If so, what kind of information is provided?
- Significant displays: Curators and exhibit designers will often use various tools and devices to guide visitors to look at particular things. If $8 million was spent on a statue, the curators and designers will locate the statue and display it so they are sure visitors will see their treasure. Knowing this, please identify specific exhibitor pieces of art you think this gallery or museum values most. How can you tell? What things have been done to focus your attention on the most significant point?
- Facility Web site: Does this gallery or museum have a Web site? Was it a helpful previsit tool? After you have visited, do you find that the Web site provides true and reasonable information about the physical location, the collection, and the experience?
- Overall experience: Finally, describe the overall experience. How does a thoughtful, deliberate, and planned visiting experience assist you in seeing what you are supposed to see? How do you imagine using these skills and insights in the next six months?
Part Two: Object Analysis
Books, pictures, and on-screen images are wonderful tools to learn about art, but there is nothing quite like the experience of seeing and studying real art firsthand. It is not only a wonderful opportunity to be able to apply your new skills and knowledge about art and art criticism, but also seeing real works allows you to make more sense out of the material you study in class. Engagement with art is essential in an art history course.
Your object analysis should include the following:
- Introduction: Introduce the work and the artist.
- Describe the work: It is a good idea to make a list of all the things you observe in the work without making any kind of judgment. This step is a basic description of what you see.
- Analyze the work: Pay close attention to the design principles that have been used. How is the composition organized using elements and principles of art? The principles of design or of art are the ways that an artist uses elements of art in his or her work. Artists use such principles as balance, emphasis (or dominance), harmony, movement, pattern, proportion, rhythm, unity, and variety to design their artworks.
- Interpret the work: Explain the meaning or mood of the work. What is your personal reaction? How does it make you feel? What did you learn? Base your interpretation on your observations.
- Conclusion: Conclude with your judgment of the work. Did the work fulfill its goals? How is it successful? How could it be improved?
PART TWO DISCUSSIONS : ( see attached image for discussion response)
Art Reaction Journal
Discussion Introduction
Chapter 4 in our An Introduction to Art Criticism textbook introduced us to judgment and evaluation. For this discussion, apply what you read to critically analyze a work of art from the medieval world, using some of the language of art analysis.
Here is a review of the four-step process:
- Name and describe the facts. Simply identify the objects in the artwork by describing what you see.
- Analyze the facts. Using the language of art, describe what elements of the artwork catch your attention. These could be elements such as shapes, lines, colors, or textures.
- Interpret the evidence. Based upon what you learned in steps 1 and 2, what do you think the artwork is about? What ideas, moods, emotions, messages, or stories do you think the artwork communicates?
- Judge the work of art. Do the objects, elements, and meaning of the artwork achieve the desired result, in comparison with other works of art?
Celts and Anglo-Saxons in Britain
After the Romans departed Britain at the beginning of the fifth century, Angles and
Saxons from Germany and the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and Holland) and
Jutes from Denmark crossed the sea to southeastern Britain. Gradually they extended
their control northwest across the island. Over the next 200 years, the arts experienced
a spectacular efflorescence. A fusion of Celtic, Roman, Germanic, and Norse cultures
generated a new style of art, sometimes known as Hiberno-Saxon (from Hibernia, the
Roman name for Ireland). Anglo-Saxon literature is filled with references to sumptuous
jewelry and weapons made of or decorated with gold and silver. Some of these
objects—Celtic and Scandinavian, as well as Anglo-Saxon—have survived.
The Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, composed as early as the seventh century, describes its
hero’s burial with a hoard of treasure in a grave mound near the sea. Such a burial site
was discovered near the North Sea coast in Suffolk at a site called Sutton Hoo
(hoo means “hill”). The grave’s occupant had been buried in a ship—90 feet long and
designed for rowing, not sailing—whose traces in the earth were recovered by careful
excavators. The wood and the hero’s body had disintegrated, and no inscriptions record
his name. He has sometimes been identified with the ruler Raedwald, who died about
625. Whoever he was, the treasures buried with him prove that he was a wealthy and
powerful man. They include weapons, armor, other equipment to provide for the ruler’s
afterlife, and many luxury items. The objects from Sutton Hoo represent the broad
multicultural heritage characterizing the British Isles at this time: Celtic, Scandinavian,
and classical Roman, as well as Anglo-Saxon. There was even a Byzantine silver bowl.
One of the most exquisite finds was a gold clasp that once secured the leather body
armor of its owner over his shoulder (FIG. 15–4). The two sides of the clasp—almost
identical in design—would have been connected when a long gold pin, attached to one
half by a delicate but strong gold chain, was inserted through a series of aligned
channels on the back side of the inner edge of each. The superb decoration of this work
was created with thin pieces of garnet and blue-checkered glass (known as millefiori,
from the Italian for “a thousand flowers”) cut into precisely stepped geometric shapes
and sinuous animal forms. The cut shapes were then inserted into channels and
supplemented by granulation (the use of minute granules of gold fused to the surface;
see also “Aegean Metalworking,” page 93). Under the geometric pieces that form a
rectangular patterned field on each side, jewelers placed gold foil stamped with incised
motifs that reflect light back up through the transparent garnet to spectacular effect.
Around these carpetlike rectangles are borders of interlacing snakes, and in the curving
compartments to the outside stand pairs of semitransparent, overlapping boars stylized
in ways that reflect the traditions of Scandinavian jewelry. Their curly tails overlap their
rumps at the outer edges on each side of the clasp and connect through visible
vertebrae along the arched backs to heads with floppy ears and extended tusks. Boars
represented strength and bravery, important virtues in warlike Anglo-Saxon society.
15–4 HINGED CLASP, FROM THE SUTTON HOO BURIAL SHIP
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
After the Romans departed Britain at the beginning of the fifth century, Angles and
Saxons from Germany and the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and Holland) and
Jutes from Denmark crossed the sea to southeastern Britain. Gradually they extended
their control northwest across the island. Over the next 200 years, the arts experienced
a spectacular efflorescence. A fusion of Celtic, Roman, Germanic, and Norse cultures
generated a new style of art, sometimes known as Hiberno-Saxon (from Hibernia, the
Roman name for Ireland). Anglo-Saxon literature is filled with references to sumptuous
jewelry and weapons made of or decorated with gold and silver. Some of these
objects—Celtic and Scandinavian, as well as Anglo-Saxon—have survived.
The Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, composed as early as the seventh century, describes its
hero’s burial with a hoard of treasure in a grave mound near the sea. Such a burial site
was discovered near the North Sea coast in Suffolk at a site called Sutton Hoo
(hoo means “hill”). The grave’s occupant had been buried in a ship—90 feet long and
designed for rowing, not sailing—whose traces in the earth were recovered by careful
excavators. The wood and the hero’s body had disintegrated, and no inscriptions record
his name. He has sometimes been identified with the ruler Raedwald, who died about
625. Whoever he was, the treasures buried with him prove that he was a wealthy and
powerful man. They include weapons, armor, other equipment to provide for the ruler’s
afterlife, and many luxury items. The objects from Sutton Hoo represent the broad
multicultural heritage characterizing the British Isles at this time: Celtic, Scandinavian,
and classical Roman, as well as Anglo-Saxon. There was even a Byzantine silver bowl.
One of the most exquisite finds was a gold clasp that once secured the leather body
armor of its owner over his shoulder (FIG. 15–4). The two sides of the clasp—almost
identical in design—would have been connected when a long gold pin, attached to one
half by a delicate but strong gold chain, was inserted through a series of aligned
channels on the back side of the inner edge of each. The superb decoration of this work
was created with thin pieces of garnet and blue-checkered glass (known as millefiori,
from the Italian for “a thousand flowers”) cut into precisely stepped geometric shapes
and sinuous animal forms. The cut shapes were then inserted into channels and
supplemented by granulation (the use of minute granules of gold fused to the surface;
see also “Aegean Metalworking,” page 93). Under the geometric pieces that form a
rectangular patterned field on each side, jewelers placed gold foil stamped with incised
motifs that reflect light back up through the transparent garnet to spectacular effect.
Around these carpetlike rectangles are borders of interlacing snakes, and in the curving
compartments to the outside stand pairs of semitransparent, overlapping boars stylized
in ways that reflect the traditions of Scandinavian jewelry. Their curly tails overlap their
rumps at the outer edges on each side of the clasp and connect through visible
vertebrae along the arched backs to heads with floppy ears and extended tusks. Boars
represented strength and bravery, important virtues in warlike Anglo-Saxon society.
15–4 HINGED CLASP, FROM THE SUTTON HOO BURIAL SHIP
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
Categories: Uncategorized