introduction

*Note: I realize now how much of this is similar to my last post, but I feel like I explain it in a different way and focus more on that first semester a bit, so I will leave it be and start with the real Art History stuff in the next entry. Still sorting myself out, you know.*

This is both an introduction to myself and an introduction to Art History. I don't really know how to do it any other way as most of my Art History experience has been very me-centric. I guess I first became somewhat interested in art by virtue of being interested in architecture because my dad is an architect and my mom is a realtor.

My parents, especially my dad, always took us to museums as kids, and we had a good rule of not having to do anything other than walk around at the pace we wanted and look at whatever interested us. This way, we didn't feel conned into going to the museum and willingly went along and left whenever we felt ready. Parents: I advise this to you so that museums are a friendly environment for your kids. Although I didn't know or care much about art until I took Art History, I always enjoyed the feeling of museums. They are so clean and elegant, and the ones in my hometown, Fort Worth, Texas, are particularly nice - the Kimbell, in particular, is one of my favorites. In my mind, they were nice places to go on Sundays or vacations, look at some interesting stuff, feel grown up and fancy, and then look at weird stuff in the museum gift shop.

I set off to Williams College with every intention of studying math. I had taken calculus and multivariable calculus in high school and loved them. When I met with my advisor at Williams, he briefly made me work out some multivariable problems and pronounced me ready to move on. My first math class in college was a Linear Algebra tutorial with four other [male upperclassmen] students. It was definitely harder and different than the other math I had studied, but I enjoyed it. Freshman spring, I took something or other vector calculus, which I think was not the best advice from my advisor as it ruled out statistics from my major track, and sophomore fall, I took my Abstract Algebra course - Groups & Characters. I understood the lectures in class and the proofs during office hours, but on my own, in ym door room, my friends would find me in a mess of books and notes on the floor, ready to cry because I couldn't for the life of me think of the theorems to use or how. It was just too abstract for my visual, tangible-loving mind.

Meanwhile, sophomore fall I had signed up for Introduction to Western Art, a year long course divided into a fall semester on sculpture and architecture and a spring semester on painting. I had been coerced by my fellow students freshman year into taking art history at Williams because they have the best professors in the country. Completely uninterested and intimidated by the infamous slide quizzes, I resisted for a while but eventually signed up.

And then classes started. I don't know if I was enraptured on day one, but I must have been. The sculpture and architecture professor was E. J. Johnson. I had to look up his profile (or perhaps there is a better, non-facebook inspired term out there) on the website to make sure that I gave him appropriate credit. I admired and loved almost every professor I had at Williams, and certainly respected them all, but Professor Johnson changed the world for me. I wish I knew how long he had been teaching at Williams, but it must be years because he seems like such a fixture of the department and the introductory classes. At any rate, I was lucky enough to have him both for the full class lecture three times a week and the weekly conference of about 20 students.

Professor Johnson is an older man, and he is always accompanied by his dog, Soane (I hope I spelled that right), a brown and white spotted dog who sits quietly at his feet by the podium during classes. Occasionally, Soane would gaze up adoringly at his/her master, but usually the dog was content to just sit on the stage and be a part of the experience. Now, I know that many of my classmates found those lectures very soporific. Intro ArtH is one of the larger classes at Williams and takes place in a darkened auditorium. Professor Johnson has a soft, sonorous voice that reveals the details of paintings with admirable eloquence. I cannot overstate what it is to listen to him lecture. He would walk in with his dog and a stack of notecards of the slides for the day, begin talking as the lights dimmed, and ask the student operating the slide projector for "the next, please." For those of us able to resist falling asleep, and I am sure that I had sleepy days and one or two that I missed, he then transformed a building or sculpture into a symbol of its time that communicated ideas and more information than I could have anticipated. Within his even cadence and intellectual information, he was even clever and funny, and I remember registering jokes and quips moments after they had passed from his lips because he so discretely slipped them in.

I had struggled with history in high school. Not struggling in the sense of grades because I studied well enough to score well on essays and tests, but struggled to really understand anything or have it stick in my brain. To this day, I don't think I know much of anything about the world that I didn't learn in Art History, in spite of having had good history teachers. The problem was that I am a visual learner, and no matter how many notes I took and studied, I just couldn't see what we were talking about. But then I had Professor Johnson explaining how the Greek temples were built to facilitate important rituals and had even incorporated those rituals into the facades, or that the Christians didn't want their art to look like that of the pagan Greeks, so they developed a new canon of images to portray their god. Dates stuck in my head because I could see how one style preceded another and related to certain religious beliefs, political personas, financial opportunities, and other outside influences. Really and truly, art history enabled me to understand the world around me. I was overwhelmed with my new access to knowledge and understanding.

By the end of the first semester, I decided to drop math and give art history a try as my major. The major requirements seemed very reasonable and flexible, I was doing well in my classes, and I was curious to learn more about the world. I figured that I didn't have a career path set out for myself anyway, that theoretical mathematics wouldn't be part of it anyway - only practical, applied math and I had already taken all of that, and that art history would at least teach me about the world and how to analyze and write. Plus, a liberal arts degree is a liberal arts degree, why not take what I wanted to? So I did. Then I graduated college and moved to Casablanca, Morocco to be a math teaching intern. I got antsy and missed art history, so I started teaching guest classes for the art and history students. When I came to Sofia, Bulgaria to teach English at a high school with an American curriculum, I decided to offer an introductory class as an elective. I don't really know how art history will be involved in my life in the future, and I, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, don't want to pursue a masters or doctorate degree in the field, but I do think about it often. And I always go to museums when I travel, and my brain gets revved up a bit again and tries to reach into my memory files to my classes at Williams.

So all I have to offer is what I know from my notes left from my classes at Williams and my experiences teaching art and visiting museums. I don't have much in-depth knowledge about anything in particular, aside from some semester-long research projects. But what I do have is the perspective of someone who was not an Art Historian but felt like it was a discipline that helped open up my eyes to the world around me. I love how it has helped make the world and history a little more tangible for me. So, I want to try and organize my notes and lectures into coherent thoughts, partly as a record for myself and partly in case anyone is interested in reading them. I hope that I will learn how to present it such that anyone who is curious can easily read through my (rather long, though I will try to control myself) entries and learn a little bit more about an artist or a movement or a period. It's a learning process, and we will see how I do.

a new direction

As a sophomore at Williams College, I felt frustrated with my intended major - math - because it was moving into a theoretical and abstract realm that I could comprehend in class but not replicate or manipulate on my own. I was also taking Introduction to Western Art, after my peers had pressured me by telling me that it was the best course at Williams and that the professors and department was the best in the country. As much as I felt categorically uninterested in anything with the words "history" involved, I buckled and signed up. So as I felt overwhelmed by the increasingly intangible world of abstract mathematics, I discovered that history became something tangible and knowable, for me, through art. It really was a turning point in how I saw and understood the world. I had always been a decent history student for essays and exams, but later on, I didn't recall or understand anything. Once I started studying art history and seeing physical representations and reflections of what was going on in society, I saw the world and the timeline of cultures like I never had before. It all sounds so cliche and I know it, but that is really how it all seemed to me.

So the story continues with me switching majors from math to art history, to my father's abhorrence, and piecing together parts of history through painting, sculpture, and architecture, along with film, photography, museums, and monuments. I definitely wasn't the best student in the department, and I had no aspirations to continue with art history beyond graduation. I felt confident that I would want to continue to engage with the visual world and that my skills learned in art history classes would be valuable in the career I would eventually pursue, but I wasn't interested in a deep commitment to the discipline. Any time we went to museums, my dad, an architect, would always tease me for being the worst art history student because I wasn't interested in any art I hadn't studied. I have found it interesting, though, how much art history has continued to be part of my life, and how much I have continually worked to keep it as an active part of my life.

My first year out of college, I was the mathematics teaching intern at the Casablanca American School in Morocco. Although I did spend most of my time teaching algebra, geometry, and IB classes, I also did guest lectures for the art and history classes on Impressionism, Nazi Propaganda, Christian iconography, writing about art, and other things related to their curriculum. I saw what they were studying and couldn't resist offering up what I had learned so that other students like me, who couldn't grasp history without the visual aid, wouldn't miss out on learning and engaging with the material.

The next year, this year, I am an English teacher at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria. All teachers have the opportunity to offer electives in addition to their teaching load, and I offered an introductory Art History elective this past fall. I took the notes I had typed and presentations I had made for my classes, thank goodness for my electronic study skills, and organized it into a short, weekly, 80-minute class on Western art. I started this blog to post assignments and notes to my students. The course ended in January.

But I find myself going to museums on trips and scribbling down notes in my travel journal about the exhibits and artists. I take pictures in museums and around cities that I want to research later. Last semester, I would incorporate them into my lesson and share them with my students. Now, I find that I'm not so sure what to do with these observations and questions. It occurred to me, then, on my recent trip to Rome, that I could use this blog to write about art. I could write about the art I see now, research and write about new artists and movements that I didn't really study, and I could convert my class lesson plans and presentation into paragraph form and post. So that is my new ambition and hobby and goal for myself. It definitely will require time and effort for each, and I am a bit worried about correct sourcing and credit, especially as most of what I know about art I learned in lectures with my Williams professors, but I will figure it out and hopefully the academic police won't come knocking down my door for my confused infractions.

I'm not sure whether I will start with my first art history lessons from my elective or with the exhibits I saw while in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. There were two exhibits, and I really enjoyed both. The first was 100 works from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt of Impressionist, Expressionist, and Avant Garde works, and the second was an exhibit of Aleksandr Deineka (Aлександер Дейнека), a Russian artist active in the 1920s - 1960s. I went to the museum because I had visited before while studying abroad in Siena, Italy, and saw an exhibit there on Stanley Kubrick's films and another exhibit that included some Mark Rothko paintings. At any rate, it is too late to begin tonight, but I hope to get started on this project soon.