Welcome to the 2011 English-Speaking

Docent Training Course at the New Taipei

City Yingge Ceramics Museum!
Instructor: Elenor Wilson
Dates: April 2nd – June 4th 2011
Times: Saturday 19:00 – 21:00
 Saturday, April 2nd, 2011:
Greeting & Art/Ceramics History Overview

Objectives
• to introduce ourselves and the course schedule
• to review the chronology of Art History including
major genres and ceramic art
• to practice oral presentation of learned
vocabulary

Agenda
• Greeting, Introduction, Course Outline,
Attendance, E-mail List . . .
• Timeline
• Focus on: Modern, Post-Modern, Contemporary
Art Definitions
• Review vocabulary frequently used in the
Pablo Picasso, Cubism
discussion of contemporary ceramic art.
• Homework 
 Timelines
Ceramics

Western Art
 15th - 16th Century
Renaissance
• Enlightenment
• Artists’ talents, innovations, and ideas began to acquire greater cultural importance

Classicism
• Fascination with the values of classical Greece and Rome
• ratio; symmetry; proportion; myth; scholarship; synthesis

Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, 1483 Richard Millette, Hydra, (1980’s)
 17th and 18th Centuries
Baroque
• Convince, transform and deceive through
illusion
• Still-life and landscape painting

Rococo
• Florid, decorative, ornate, playful,
aristocratic, non-linear
• Pleasure and emotion valued over
seriousness
Vermeer, Milkmaid, Fragonard, The Swing,
1658 1766

Gwen Hanssen Pigott, Caravan, 2002 Caroline Slotte, Behind Pink Skies, Early
21st Century
 19th Century

Impressionism
• rejected Academic traditions of representing the
world
• perceptual impressions of sunlight color and
shadow

Post-Impressionism
• focus on design, structure, and form Cezanne, Still Life: Flask, Glass and Jug, 1877
• refusal to imitate nature
• recovered the significance of symbolic, spiritual
and emotional meaning

Materialism begins here and continues through

to contemporary art. Broadly interpreted, it
critiques the way art and personal identity are
shaped by economic and cultural forces.

Firth MacMillan, Big Grass, Little Grass, Quince,

2005
 20th Century, Modern Art
Modern Art was a broad movement encompassing all of the avant-garde “-isms” of the 20 century.
th

The art was experimental and sought answers to fundamental questions about art itself and the human
experience.

Cubism - still life, multiple viewpoints, flattened volume, collage, analytic,

synthetic

Dada – ‘a new reality,’ chance, unconscious, ready-mades, nonsense

Surrealism - the unconscious, dreams, irrational, uncanny, juxtaposition,

eroticism

Kim Simonsson, Fighter, 2009

Picasso, Still Life with Chair
Caning, 1912

Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964

 20th Century, Modern Art
Abstract Expressionism
• the first exclusively American art movement (New York)

• ‘action painting’ and ‘color field painting’

• focus on process of making

• unconscious; contemplative
Left: Peter Volkous, 1999; Right: John Glick, 2007

Jackson Pollock, Untitled No. 3, 1949 Mark Rothko, Red, Orange, de Kooning, Woman V,
Tan and Purple, 1949 1953
 Late 20th Century
Post-Modern art explores and challenges the cultural values, traditional hierarchies, and economic
power. It does not use unconsciousness as a source, and does not value art for its timelessness or universality.
It values the imperfect, accessible, low-brow, disposable, local and temporary.

Pop Art asserts that an artist's
use of the mass-produced visual
commodities of popular culture is
contiguous with the perspective of
fine art.
Conceptual art emphasizes the Minimalism is sculpture that is
idea, not the material object/image; highly simplified, sometimes sterile,
thus, ‘problematizing’ its commercial both in appearance and concept.
value.

Above: Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing

56, 1970; Right: Clare Twomey,
Consciousness/Conscience, 2003

Left: Roy Lichtenstein, Girl With Ball,

1961; Right: Shalene Venezuela, Ironing
Thing Out (series), early 21st century
 Contemporary (?)
Trends: Installation, New Media, Computer-aided Design

Liu Jianhua, Dream, 2005-2008

Merek Cecula for Design in Kielce

 Homework
Choose an artwork you find attractive/interesting:
http://www.accessceramics.org/ for lots of great images.
Write a short (2-3 sentence) description that you feel comfortable presenting
to the class. In your description try to attribute aspects of the work to art
history or ceramic history.

Online Art History and Contemporary Art Resources

http://www.artyfactory.com/sitebody/sitemap.htm

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/sculpture-history.htm#introduction

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/ceramics/ceramic%20features/ceramics_timeline/index.html

http://www.accessceramics.org/

http://www.pbs.org/art21/education/abstraction/index.html
 Next Time: Saturday, April 9th
Objectives:
• 1. to study the differences between art and craft
• 2. to understand and discuss the current debate surrounding these two ideas
• 3. to practice oral presentation of learned vocabulary

This presentation is posted on my blog: www.elenorwilson.com 