pop art research

For my Pop Art class, we had to write a research paper. This was quite the experience for me. First of all, I hadn't ever written a paper of its length (15-20 pages) or done very in-depth research. Second of all, we had to submit proposals at the very beginning of the semester. I thought I had a decent idea, but boy was I wrong. I had an idea to write about how food advertising was affected by the pop art movement. It seemed like a decent idea, but as I hadn't written a proposal before or written that long of an analytical art history paper, my professor tore it to pieces. Because I am a bit compulsive, I typed up his comments and saved them, so I have the pleasure of reading them today. But I don't need typed comments for the most important part of that experience, which was the check minus MINUS that was in big, black ink on the front. I read his comments and they were good. But I had written a proposal and gone to the library to do some initial research, so I felt like the double minus was insulting and unwarranted. At first, I waited until I got home and then slammed my dorm room door and stomped over to my bed and punched my pillow (all true) before calling my mom and crying and yelling and saying not very nice things about my professor and that I would just fail the class. Well, I also happen to hate failure and losing anything, so I changed my mind and made an appointment with my professor.

At the end of the day, writing that research paper was one of the most important academic experiences I have ever had in my life. I met with the professor many times over the semester to get his help, guidance, and suggestions for my research and writing, and I put in more work than I ever had to anything besides rowing. By the end of the semester, I knew I was going to get an A because I had learned so much and improved my writing so much and really felt like I had done some original research. (Now, I'm sure I will reread the paper and want to change things and edit sentences, but overall, I feel confident that I still would find it good.)

We had to do a presentation for the class, so I will include those images below and then my paper. My paper references the images that I had in my appendix using "figure" labels, but they are all the same as the ones I used in my presentation, so based on description, you should be able to tell which is which. Obviously my presentation originally was accompanied by me explaining it, but if you are really interested to see how it all connects, read the paper!

Tom Wesselmann’s American Still Life

and the postwar suburban American housewife

Tom Wesselmann’s early still lifes incorporate collaged advertising images with painted elements in a juxtaposition that emphasizes the ideals of the American household portrayed in advertisements in the 1950s and 1960s. Through formal analysis of composition, color, and rendering, paired with scholarship on Wesselmann’s still lifes and the 1950s and 1960s American household, Still Life #19  transitioned from a nostalgic evocation of the period of my parent’s childhood to a more complicated composition that suggests the roles and expectations of that period and how they were portrayed in advertising. Still Life #19 doesn’t make a positive or negative commentary on the ideals presented by the inspirations and sources for this work, instead the lack of compositional unity creates a  focus on the awareness of the brands selling more than the products – the advertisements sell participation in the lifestyle of the American dream of postwar egalitarianism in the suburbs through the use of these products.

Still Life #19 is a still life composition by Tom Wesselmann from 1962 of collaged and painted elements. This relatively large scale work, 48 by 60 inches, is composed of a group of images of contemporary food objects on a tablecloth in front of a wall with a window. The objects on the table are primarily collaged advertising images of grocery products: a loaf of American Beauty white bread, a box of Lipton soup mix, red apples, a bottle of Schmidt’s beer, a canned Del Monte food product, a red Del Monte bottle, presumably ketchup, and a box of Camel cigarettes. A painted bowl for the apples and a bowl with some dessert with whipped cream and a cherry are interspersed among the still life objects. These are arranged on a blue and white checkered table cloth in front of a yellow wall with a red chair on the right and a window with red wall beneath it on the left. The window has a painted blue and white curtain halfway eclipsing an image of a shade revealing a photograph of two men rowing on the water surrounded by trees, seen from a distance and clearly outside the domestic sphere.

Red, white, yellow, and blue are the principal colors in Still Life #19. The repeated use of red, white, and blue underscores the American patriotism and consumerism portrayed in the advertisements of the time. All the food besides the apple – the only unprocessed, natural food – is yellow, suggesting the constancy and uniformity of mass-produced goods. All of the painted elements are strong, saturated hues of the primary colors – red, yellow, and blue. The wall is yellow with the shape of a red chair-back painted on it behind the tablecloth. The tablecloth is blue and white checkered, the same pigments as the curtain. The collaged elements are mostly from advertisements and therefore are also bright, saturated colors. The Del Monte logo features red and yellow that are very similar to the red and yellow Wesselmann painted on the canvas. The bread is white with yellow-brown crust and a yellow label. The Lipton box is red checkered and features a bowl of yellow soup. The Schmidt beer and Camel cigarettes are white with accents in brown and gold. The only aspect of the painting with a tonal variation and colors outside of the vivid primary group is the picture of the men rowing which features dull browns, greens, and blues. There is a stronger sense of contrast in the outside element of the painting, with the strongly highlighted boat and tops of the tree and the dark shadows beneath the tree and in the background.

Despite the realistic rendering of the objects in the painting, the discrepancies and inconsistencies among the objects negates a realistic, three-dimensional impression of the objects existing in this environment. The various elements conflicting with each other cue the viewer in to the inauthentic world the artist has composed, which then draws attention to the ideals typically portrayed in similar compositions at that time.

Because the collage elements are taken from different sources, the light and shadow vary in each item. The tablecloth and walls exhibit no shadows cast from the table or objects of the still life. The curtain has shadows within the folds and highlights down the ridges, suggesting a frontal light, but because none of the objects cast a shadow back onto the tablecloth or walls, the light in the painted areas is as inconsistent as in the collaged elements. Wesselmann’s painting style leaves very little trace of the hand of the artist, so the painted wall, chair, and curtains are without evidence of the brushstroke or texture. The lack of lighting and shadow variations on the painted surfaces of the wall and chair creates a very flat background for the still life.

The conflicting perspectives in Still Life #19 are more obvious discrepancies than the variations in lighting and shadow, and through their discomforting inconsistencies call further attention to the false world of the advertising layouts. The table slants up in perspective unrealistically, which flattens the objects on the picture plane instead of allowing them to recede as if they were placed on a real table. Because most of the objects are collaged from a variety of advertisements, they have various lines of perspectives which contributes to the flattening effect. The solid color wall and chair further this by presenting a completely flat background. Although the curtain has folds and shadows, its contrast with the wall and tablecloth without shadow continues the inaccuracies of depth and perspective present throughout the composition. The loaf of bread is placed across the front of the composition and picture plane. It recedes back to the right, pushing the elements behind it further back than the evenly spaced squares on the table cloth would suggest. The Lipton soup mix box juts out past the edge of the table and exists in a completely different line of perspective from the bread. The pudding is painted somewhat in accordance with the perspective of the table and the apples and Del Monte can seem to follow perspective similarly enough, so that the middle group has a fairly consistent perspective and horizon line. The back row, however, reverts back to the unsettling and conflicting planes.

The incongruous planes of the objects arranged in the back of the still life are highlighted by the close proximity of the bottles and cigarettes. The Del Monte ketchup bottle reveals almost all of its cap, sitting below the viewer’s horizon line, while the Schmidt beer bottle cap is almost flat, yet the two caps are relatively even. The Camel cigarettes peeking up seem to correspond to their horizon line, which is several inches below that of the Schmidt beer can. The variety of conflicting perspectives and the flat background presses the objects up to the front of the picture plane and prevents the work from conjuring up a credible space despite the accurate renderings of the collaged elements. The objects on the table stay well within the picture frame and cluster in the center of the painting, creating a staged and consciously composed group.

Cecile Whiting, Danilo Eccher, Christin Mamiya, and Thomas Garver have all explored the aspects determined through formal analysis of the American ideals portrayed in Still Life #19. Mary Beth Haralovich and Kristina Zarlengo examine the role of the American household and housewife at the time. Through studies of the patterns and standards in Wesselmann’s still lifes of the early 1960s and the historical context of the time, this scholarly literature supports the interpretation of Still Life #19 as a composition intentionally working to make the viewer conscious of the economic and social values of the time.

Thomas Garver’s introduction in an exhibition catalogue from 1974 for the Newport Harbor Museum introduces the formal objectives that Tom Wesselmann developed for himself in 1960 that are consistent themes in his still life works. These objectives were: keep the picture plane in front of the canvas plane, all colors must advance, keep space shallow or deny it altogether, and try to disintegrate the central images and disperse them around the canvas[1]. Still Life #19 effectively follows most of these standards: the bright, warm colors advance, the space is shallow, and the picture plane is flat on the canvas plane. The images cluster in the center of the painting, but this is characteristic in other still lifes from 1962, which have the elements together in a similar arrangement to Still Life #19. The catalogue also refers to the effect of the flat, abstract and geometric painted backgrounds to move the objects towards us and flatten the picture. This effect is seen Still Life #19 with the solid patches of red and yellow behind the still life arrangement, placing the three-dimensionally rendered objects in a two-dimensional space that threatens their ability to sit on the picture plane.

Christin Mamiya’s chapter, ‘Corporations and the Imperative to Consume,’ in Pop Art and Consumer Culture refers to Still Life #19 in regards to the pervasiveness of labels like Del Monte and Tom Wesselmann’s use of those labels in his work. Mamiya points out that the companies wanted the label to be immediately recognizable to the consumers and more important to the purchasing process than the product itself. Wesselmann uses two Del Monte images in this work, yet neither explicitly shows the food within the package, allowing the label to speak to the viewer rather than the food in the same way advertisers placed the primary importance on the label and brand name. Mamiya also points out that the contrasts in Wesselmann’s works between the ‘tangible reality of the advertising image[2]’ and the flat, painted elements of the work heightens the perception of the taste experience and greater corporeality of the advertised products[3]. Although the flat background threatens the reality of the picture space, it also heightens the contrast between the perfectly rendered containers and foods of the advertisements with the painted areas. The sliced bread, shiny apples, and glistening beer appeal more to the viewer than the painted bowl of pudding because of their realistic and intentionally alluring appearance. Through these contrasts, Wesselmann propagates the ideals of the advertisements – these products are the new nourishment for suburban America and they provide for a better lifestyle by saving time and labor.

Cecile Whiting describes the ability of Wesselmann’s still lifes to ‘transport the viewer to the hearth of an economy of domesticity characterized by the increased number of goods available to the female consumer and homemaker after World War II[4].’ Whiting points out that Wesselmann’s still lifes depicting the family oriented suburban kitchen focus on packaged foods that were mass-produced and readily available and perpetuates the image and perception of ‘postwar American economic egalitarianism[5].’ The items present in Still Life #19 are basic food staples – fruit, soup, bread, beer, and dessert. The brands represented in Still Life #19 are affordable and nationally recognized – Lipton, Del Monte, Schmidt, and Camel. They explicitly suggest how they fit into and promote American ideals, like American Beauty’s sliced white bread. Focusing on food products that almost every home in America would consume and could afford, Still Life #19 presents a spread that includes all Americans. The pervasiveness of the name brands corresponds to the overall environment of mass production throughout post-war America, from food to housing, as well as the development of the kitchen as a showcase for the modern American family[6].  Wesselmann’s arrangement of the typical food stuffs as an artistic still life on display refers to this treatment of the kitchen as an exhibition space.

Danilo Eccher parallels Whiting’s point of Wesselmann’s still lifes as establishing standards of American taste and beauty. The objects and brands Wesselmann uses “are the horizon of a popular, everyday landscape that recognizes a sincere idea of beauty in their familiarity… the systems used to manipulate taste are put to the service of art[7].”

Kristina Zarlengo’s article on the Atomic Age American woman mentions that civic defense rhetoric categorized the American household as agency of the nation with patriotism as a domestic duty[8]. The contemporary focus on the American household as a place to showcase American idealism as well as pride in American manufactured goods is exhibited in Still Life #19 through the use of red, white, and blue and domestic brand products. Wesselmann’s still lifes recreate the comforting perception of home that the brands and advertisements established for the suburban, typical American.

Mary Beth Haralovich examines the role of the 1950s homemaker and determines that “suburban development and domestic architecture were designed with a particular definition of family economy in mind: a working father who could, along, provide for the social and economic security of his family; a homemaker wife and mother who maintains the family’s environment; children who grow up in neighborhoods undisturbed by heterogeneity of class, race, ethnicity, and age.[9]” This is evident in Wesselmann’s Still Life #19 in the portrayal of the indoor scene of domesticity looking out onto the separate world in which the male exists. The kitchen is home to ‘American Beauty’ bread in a patriotic color schemed environment, waiting expectantly for the males to return from the great outdoors, a world beyond the suburban home sphere, to enjoy the food, beer, and cigarettes thoughtfully arranged by the waiting housewife.

Wesselmann’s contrast of collaged image with painted surface, conflicting perspectives, and variety of image sources create a dynamic device that functions to make the viewer aware that neither Wesselmann nor the advertisements were trying to represent reality, instead, they portrayed and suggested certain ideals, roles, and expectations.

To determine the images and modes of composition Wesselmann drew inspiration from or reacted against in his still lifes, I looked through archives of Time and Life magazines from the 1950s. Many of the advertisements were stylistically similar to Wesselmann’s still life. Rather than introduce new aspects of composition, material, or presentation, Wesselmann seems to have emphasized certain elements already present in the advertisements. The style of drawing or photography in many of the advertisements look like the composition features collaged elements, which suggests that Wesselmann’s still life paintings and collages were more closely modeled after the actual advertising images of that era than they seem today.

Wesselmann exaggerates the flatness of the background to create a consciously uncomfortable environment that leaves the objects clustered on the picture plane instead of placing them in a accurately rendered scene. Although Wesselmann has emphasized this movement of objects toward the viewer, it is a device present in the advertisements from the 1950s. The advertisements press the products towards the viewer to entice them to consume this brand’s product, while Wesselmann uses the device to make the viewer conscious of the impossibility of the composition and question the motivations and underlying implications of the advertisements from which the collaged images are sourced.

In a Bell Telephone advertisement from Time magazine in 1958 (figure i), a housewife – perfectly made up, wearing a dress and pearls yet also holding a wooden spoon – is on the phone in her kitchen. The wall with the phone on it is a flat solid and the window, counter, and objects behind her only have depth because of their placement in the background. The salad bowl and window behind the housewife, as well as the housewife herself, look like collaged elements. The effect in this advertisement is that the housewife and the phone are the objects the viewer is invited to take into their world, away from this static and false backdrop. The composition around the housewife doesn’t create a realistic, three-dimensional context for her to exist in, just as Wesselmann’s still life provides only a flat plane behind the three-dimensional objects.

A Hotpoint stove advertisement from Time (figure f) has photo-like images of a stove and oven, which has an illustration of a turkey inside the oven. A drawn woman is rendered in the middle-grown and a drawn outdoor dining set occupies the left background. The dominant color of the advertisement is red: the semblance of countertop and wall with the stove and oven is red with some yellow accents, and the area surrounding the wall and counter – the background for the dining set and the woman – is almost the exact same shade of red. Like Wesselmann, despite the realistic rendering of both the drawn and collaged images, the setting is only suggestive of a real place – in this case, a suburban kitchen and backyard.

Advertisements for Hotpoint refrigerators in Time magazine issues from 1958 (figures c and d) portray large, open refrigerators accompanied by a housewife against solid color backgrounds. The refrigerators are stocked to the brim with meat products, milk, juice, desserts, and a variety of other products. These fridges portray the new accessibility to and lifestyle of plenty. An article describing the “visions of plenty” presented by refrigerators in America in the 1950’s concludes with this paragraph:

When the door of the 1950s refrigerator was shut, the entire unit receded, vanishing among the flush surfaces and polished metals of modernist aesthetics. But the moment hunger pressed, the refrigerator unfolded, seemingly by itself, into a vision of gustatory plentitude: an instantly edible spectacle, with every snack a story of material well-being.[10]

The refrigerators presented in the ads of the 1950s, like Wesselmann’s still life, pressed themselves, doors open and neatly packed with food, up against the picture plane, inviting the viewer to bring the tangible products out of the unreality of the advertisement’s environment into their home. The composition of the Hotpoint advertisements and Wesselmann’s still life place the images against a solid color background that makes the objects advance towards the viewer, leaving them perilously against the picture plane, the refrigerators about to spill their bounty from their open doors as the slices of bread of Wesselmann’s still life about to fall off the board.

The constant, but less significant, presence of women in the background of the Hotpoint refrigerator advertisements indicates their roles as housewives and the impact these appliances will have on their lives. In the May 12, 1958 Hotpoint ad (figure d), the women sits surrounded by empty shopping bags. The obvious and superficial implication of this image is the amount of food she is able to store in the refrigerator. The underlying message suggests that now that refrigerator can store more food, the housewife has less trips to the store, improving her life by allowing her more time for other activities. Instead of having a purely beneficial effect on the housewife’s life and chores, Susan Hartmann suggests that the impact of labor saving appliances on the modern housewife included higher expectations of cleanliness, happiness, attractiveness of the home and family, and better mothering abilities[11]. The advertisements of Life and Time depicted perfectly clean home environments, fully stocked refrigerators, a variety of time or labor saving appliances, and a delighted housewife.

An advertisement from August 24, 1959 in Life for Kroehler (figure g) almost explicitly states the double purpose of the advertisements of selling products and societal expectations. The image is of a child reading on a blue couch in a yellow living room – again, two colors dominate the composition and the floor and wall colors are the same, so despite realistic rendering and the suggestion of three-dimensionality by the placement of the objects, the furniture seems to float in space. The caption beneath the picture reads “Values like these are the reason why you can be CONFIDENT with KROEHLER.[12]” The advertisement doesn’t explicitly state what they are selling so the reference of the values is vague – is it the value of great furniture for a low price or is it the family values implied by a child setting in a middle-class suburban living room?

Two advertisements from Life magazine’s October 3, 1955 issue (figures a and b) feature similar compositional arrangements and elements  to one another and Wesselmann’s Still life #19 and the comparisons suggest the roles and ideals of the society at the time. The Rath Black Hawk Meats bacon advertisement features cooked bacon on a baking sheet laid diagonally across the page, like the American Beauty bread of Wesselmann’s still life. Behind the sheet is a package of Rath bacon with a blue and white pitcher to the right and ears of corn to the left behind a basket of red apples. The apples, corn, and pitcher are icons of Americana that place the bacon into the category of a traditional American staple. The color scheme, like that of Wesselmann’s, is red, white, blue, and yellow, contribute to the undertones of American patriotism and mass produced consumerism. The ad gives no context or background, instead, it presents the objects in an unrealistic space. While Wesselmann gives a suggestion of background with the painted wall, chair, and curtain in Still Life #19, the flatness of the painting maintains this uneasy sense of real objects existing in an unreal space. The lack of realistic setting for the goods prevents the viewer from believing this is where the product belongs, that the life-like food item fits better in the consumer’s real world kitchen and home.

The second October 3, 1955 Life magazine ad is for Ann Page canned beans. A dish of beans, sausage, and cheese in a white and blue casserole dish set across the page like the bacon sheet and Wesselmann’s bread loaf. The frame of the picture barely extends beyond the casserole dish to include a bowl with a red apple and green grapes, a white glass chicken dish, and more blue and white china dishes all set on a red and white checkered tablecloth. Below the picture is the recipe for the bean dish shown with an image of the can of beans. The primary colors of the advertisement are, again, red, white, blue, and yellow. The chicken dish, blue and white china, and red checkered tablecloth are more examples of icons of Americana placed within the advertisements to suggest the product and brand’s place within the postwar focus on supporting American companies and traditions.

Still Life #19 is representative of Wesselmann’s still lifes from 1962 and 1963, which feature similar compositional motifs as Still Life #19 and the Ann Page and Rath meats advertisements. Still Life #24 is almost the exact same composition as Still Life #19, a corn on the cob cuts across the front of the page and a Del Monte can, a salad dressing bottle, and a pack of cigarettes are lined up behind it, and the background to these objects is a flat, painted, red, white, and blue table, wall and curtain. Through the window is an image of a sailboat at sea. All the still lifes employ the conventional motif of Wesselmann and the advertisers to force the images up onto the picture plane and provide them with an impossible and unrealistically rendered background environment. Still Life #30 presents another spread of food on a blue checkered table cloth, however, the frame of this is greater and includes the refrigerator and counter. Through the window is yet another view of the greater world beyond the domestic sphere, beyond the grasp of the housewife.

The examination of advertisements of the 1950s implies that there were certain societal expectations portrayed and promoted in the representations of the housewife and suburban environment. Scholarly literature about the postwar situation of American women describes the expectation that women happily assume the role of suburban housewife.

Anthropologist William Beeman writes about the importance of choice and the freedom of choice in the minds of Americans and how advertisers made consumer “choice” a central theme in their campaigns because it is a central and symbolic theme in American culture[13]. This particular American belief is an underlying aspect of the patriotic, red-white-and-blue color scheme of Wesselmann’s Still Life #19, the Rath meats ad, and the Ann Page ad.  The advertiser’s discrete correlation between these products as American products and brands develops into the product and brand as representative and supporting the founding and important cultural beliefs of America – freedom and choice. The advertisements offer a superficial freedom of choice to consumers – the freedom to choose their brand of food over another.

William Chafe’s book on the American woman includes a chapter on the post-World War II era that suggested aspects of life of postwar women present in the advertisements selected from Life and Time from that period and that Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #19 calls to the viewer’s attention. Chafe discussed the overt dissatisfaction with being a woman and homemaker of middle-class, well-educated women[14]. The exaggerated happiness and delight of the women in the advertisements could be read as both instruction to those women of how to act and feel as well as promote the products as the missing link to making the lives of the housewives satisfactory and enjoyable.

In his book on the 1950s, David Halberstam offers the analysis that the images of ‘relentlessly happy’ American women accompanied by their new and improved appliances created the presumption that because it was true that the appliances were increasingly better and more prevalent, the women were as happy as the advertisers represented them[15]. Halberstam follows the development of the national perception of employed women as a patriotic necessity during WWII and then the almost immediate turnaround of that trend after the war, resulting from men returning to their jobs, the movement to the suburbs, and the ability for a family to survive on a single income[16]. S. J. Kleinberg also comments on the movement from WWII propaganda that portrayed women in the labor force supporting the war effort while upholding traditional family values to the postwar depiction of women to the sphere of the home, specifically the kitchen[17]. The new culture of consumerism that developed instructed women that their new roles were as homemakers who were merely buyers and consumers for the new appliances and products[18]. The magazines showed the women how to live their new lives: the advertisements of the time were there to show the women what to buy and how to use it and the articles alongside them told the women why they needed the products to look better, eat better, feel better, and take better care of their families[19].

The advertisements of Life, Time, and other magazines of the era were primarily addressed to suburban domestic housewives who had been forcefully transferred to the domestic sphere and their role as homemaker as World War II ended. During WWII, the advertisements and magazines worked to encourage the women to participate and support in the war effort by working, and then almost immediately denied them that world and removed them to the disparate environment of suburbia once the war ended, men returned to their jobs, and the economy allowed families comfortable living on a single income. Just as it had been propaganda to encourage women into the workplace during the war, these advertisements were propaganda to sell women happiness and fulfillment in a lifestyle focused on the household, shopping, children, and suburbia. The advertisers had a consumer culture with a previously unknown wealth and affluence, able to purchase and consumer ever new and improved appliances and never ending supplies of food. Advertisers had to capitalize on this to create brand loyalty and encourage continued spending in their niche markets.

As time- and labor-saving appliances developed to make life easier for the postwar housewife, new expectations arose for her to maintain her appearance, the appearance of her home, engage more with her children, and derive complete happiness and fulfillment from these tasks. Many of these women were unhappy or unfulfilled in this environment and many were displeased with being displaced from the workplace. The advertisements of the time, then, did not depict the factual reality, but created a representation based on the roles and expectations of women by the postwar American culture.

Wesselmann’s Still Life #19 works to display the falsity of these advertisements as representation instead of reality, and to highlight the social roles and expectations  being communicated and expressed by these representations. The ideals, roles and expectations of these advertisements and other constructed representations of homelife of the 1950s are perpetuated today as our culture views them nostalgically as accurate representations of the reality of the 1950s. Wesselmann’s still lifes work to create an awareness of the constructed world of the advertisement that makes the viewer reconsider the veracity of the images and representations that Wesselmann modeled his still lifes after.
Bibliography

§  Tom Wesselmann image sources

▫   Wesselmann, Tom. Still Life #19. 1962. Visual Resource Center. Williams College, Williamstown. http://drm.williams.edu/u?/slidelib,43314 .

▫   Wesselmann, Tom. Still Life #34. 1963. Visual Resource Center. Williams College, Williamstown. http://drm.williams.edu/u?/slidelib,43316 .

▫   Wesselmann, Tom. Drawing for Still Life #12. 1962. Art Institute of Chicago. http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/postwar .

▫   Wesselmann, Tom. Still Life #30. 1963. MoMA. http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=80004 .

▫   Wesselmann, Tom. Still Life #20. 1962. Answers.com. http://www.answers.com/topic/tom-wesselmann .

▫   Wesselmann, Tom. Still Life #24. 1962. Greenmuseum.org. http://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aen/images/ecology/24.php .

§  Advertisements

▫   “Amana Stor-Mor Refrigerator.” Advertisement. Life 17 Oct 1955: 32

▫   “Ann Page.” Advertisement. Life 3 Oct 1955: 16

▫   “Bell Telephone.” Advertisement. Time 7 Apr. 1958: 7.

▫    “Del Monte Catsup.” Advertisement. Life 21 Nov 1955: 74

▫   “Hotpoint Refrigerator.” Advertisement. Time 12 May 1958: inside cover

▫   “Hotpoint Refrigerator.” Advertisement. Time 16 June 1958: 39

▫   “Hotpoint Stove.” Advertisement. Time 21 Apr. 1958: 25

▫   “Hunt’s Catsup.” Advertisement. Life 24 Oct 1955: 56

▫   “Kroehler.” Advertisement. Life 24 Aug 1959: 35

▫   “Medallion Home – Life Better Electrically: General Electric.” Advertisement. Life 14 Sept 1959: 82

▫   “Medallion Home – Life Better Electrically: Hotpoint.” Advertisement. Life 14 Sept 1959: 79

▫   “Rath Black Hawk Meats.” Advertisement. Life 3 October 1955: 48

▫   “Swanson TV Dinner.” Advertisement. Life 17 Oct 1955: 51

▫   “Top Value Stamps.” Advertisement. Life 14 Sept 1959: 50

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§  Beeman, William O. "Freedom to Choose." Symbolizing America. Ed. Herve Varenne. New York: University of Nebraska P, 1986.

§  California State University, Long Beach, and Constance Glenn. Tom Wesselmann, The Early Years: Collages 1959 - 1962: An Exhibition organized by the Art Galleries, California State University, Long Beach, November 10-December 8, 1974. Long Beach, CA: California State University, 1974.

§  Canaday, John. "Pop Art Sells On and On - Why?" Pop Culture in America. Ed. David M. White. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1970. 233-42.

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§  Halberstam, David. The Fifties. 1st ed. New York, NY: Villard Books, 1993.

§  Haralovich, Mary Beth. "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989): 61-83.

§  Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. Boston: Macmillan Company, Incorporated, 1982.

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§  Kleinberg, S. J. Women in the United States, 1830-1945. New York: Rutgers UP, 1999.

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§  Mamiya, Christin J. Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market. 1st ed. Austin, TX: University of Texas P, 1992.

§  O’Doherty, Brian. "Art: ‘Pop’ Show by Tom Wesselmann is Revisited." Pop Art: A Critical History. Ed. Steven H. Madoff. New York: University of California P, 1997. 347-348.

§  Odgen, Annegret S. The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner, 1776-1986. New York: Greenwood P, 1986.

§  Phillips, Lisa. "Art and Media Culture." Image World: Art and Media Culture (1989): 57-71.

§  Pugh, Martin. "Women, Food, and Politics, 1880-1930." History Today 41 (March 1991): 14-20.

§  Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York, NY: Viking, 2004.

§  Swenson, G. R. "What is Pop Art? Part II." Pop Art: A Critical History. Ed. Steven H. Madoff. New York: University of California P, 1997. 112-14.

§  White, David M., ed. Pop Culture in America. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

§  Whiting, Cecile. A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 1997.

§  Zarlengo, Kristina. "Civilian Threat, the Suburban Citadel, and Atomic Age American Women." Signs 24 (1999): 925-58. JSTOR. 15 Oct. 2008 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175598 .

my art history major

Clearly, I haven't gotten around to this in the way that I intended. Well my first step is going to be to use my resources and post some things that I wrote in my Art History classes at Williams. I will post it in a following post, and first I will outline the classes that I took for my major so you can see how it fit together. One question people often ask me is what my concentration was. We didn't really have to pick a concentration for the art history degree at Williams, which is why there isn't really a clear thread through my courses.

For this list, I consulted the spreadsheet (but of course, I'm an addict) that I made to help me keep track of my courses and which requirements they fulfilled.

Here are the requirements for the Williams Art History major, though I noticed that the requirements for the class of 2013 have changed just a bit from what they were when I was there. Here are the requirements for the major when I was a student:

Sequence courses 

• ArtH 101-102 Aspects of Western Art 
• One of the following courses in Studio Art to be taken by the end of the junior year: ArtS 100, 101, 102, 109 
• ArtH 301 Methods of Art History 
• One 400-level Seminar or Graduate Course 

Parallel courses 

• Any five additional semester courses of art history including three concerned with the following: 

1. a period of art prior to 1800 
2. a period of art prior to 1400 
3. non-Western art 

And so, my major was comprised of the following courses. I copied the course descriptions from the online course catalog from the years that I took each class.

Spring 2006

Drawing 100: Intro Drawing [I took this before I knew I wanted to major in Art History]

The process of drawing develops a heightened awareness of the visual world. Your subjective experiences and your objective experiences combine to form a larger perceptual understanding of the environment in which you live. Drawing allows you an alternative use of these processes and provides a format for stating what you know about the world. Drawing is an excellent means for improving your skills in observing, seeing distinctions, and creating new meanings from your perceptions. This is an introductory course which will investigate the properties of making an image on the two-dimensional page. While drawing is an essential basis for much of the artmaking process, its use is not limited to artists. Design, illustration, engineering, and science are among the many fields which incorporate drawing. There are three to five sections of ArtS 100 offered each semester. Although individual faculty members teaching beginning drawing do not follow a common syllabus, they share common goals. Syllabi for each section are available from the secretary's office in the W. L. S. 

Fall 2006

Art History 101: Aspects of Western Sculpture and Architecture

A year-long introduction to a history of some European and North American art, this course concentrates on three-dimensional media in the fall (architecture and sculpture) and two-dimensional media in the spring (painting, drawing, prints and photography). Even though the course focuses on Western art, it also explores interchanges among other cultures and the west, particularly in more recent times.

Both semesters cover the same chronological span, from Ancient Greeks to computer geeks. We organize the course in this unusual way not only to give students the grasp of history but also to heighten their ability to understand visual objects by coming to grips with only one artistic medium at a time. To train students to look carefully at art, we use the wealth of art resources in Williamstown: the Clark Art Institute, the Williams College Museum of Art and the Chapin Rare Book Library. Students spend time with, and sometimes even hold, original works of art. For the study of architecture we have a unique set of "Virtual Buildings," made expressly for this course, that approximate the experience of being in structures thousands of miles away.

Spring 2007

Art History 102: Aspects of Western Painting
A year-long introduction to a history of some European and North American art, this course concentrates on three-dimensional media in the fall (architecture and sculpture) and two-dimensional media in the spring (painting, drawing, prints and photography). Even though the course focuses on Western art, it also explores interchanges among other cultures and the west, particularly in more recent times.
Both semesters cover the same chronological span, from Ancient Greeks to computer geeks. We organize the course in this unusual way not only to give students the grasp of history but also to heighten their ability to understand visual objects by coming to grips with only one artistic medium at a time. To train students to look carefully at art, we use the wealth of art resources in Williamstown: the Clark Art Institute, the Williams College Museum of Art and the Chapin Rare Book Library. Students spend time with, and sometimes even hold, original works of art. For the study of architecture we have a unique set of "Virtual Buildings," made expressly for this course, that approximate the experience of being in structures thousands of miles away.

Art History 104: Buddhist Visual Worlds
The richly decorated stupa gateways at Sanchi, the luscious wall paintings at Alchi, the serene Shakyamuni seated in the Sokkuram, and the glittering Phoenix Hall at the Byodoin are but a few of the diverse and dazzling sites we will study in Buddhist Visual Worlds. This introductory survey will begin by covering the origins of Buddhism in India and then trace the diffusion of the religion into Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia. Given the vast geographical and chronological ground to be covered, the material will be organized around the themes of transmission and transformation. This course will consider how Buddhist art and architecture were adopted and adapted by a variety of cultures. We will pay close attention to how rulers have used the religion and its art in their attempts to establish legitimate and prosperous governments. The importance of narrative art in the promulgation of Buddhism will be a reoccurring topic of discussion in this course. We will also examine the construction of the Buddha's body, including not only the iconography of Buddhahood, but also the variety of formal techniques artists used to represent the Buddha's divinity and wisdom. The spectacular pantheon of bodhisattvas and Buddhist deities will also be introduced. Another theme of the course will be the use of Buddhist art in the performance of rituals. We will thus consider eye-opening ceremonies, during which the image is animated with the divine presence, and other ritual activities that involve the use of imagery. Finally, consideration of the reception, interpretation, and creation of Buddhist images in the West will be woven throughout the semester.

Fall 2007 [Abroad in Siena, Italy]


Siena and Florence: Medieval to Renaissance

Spring 2008


Art History 224: Romanesque and Gothic Art and Architecture
The goal of this course is to survey the major works of ecclesiastical architecture, sculpture and stained glass produced in France between approximately 1050 and 1400. These works were not created in isolation from their surroundings; thus we will attempt to understand them not only stylistically, but also in their original functional, social, and sometimes even political settings. The course will emphasize the abbey church and the cathedral, the two major ecclesiastical buildings of this period, as heterogeneous entities that used architecture, sculpture, stained glass and other media, in conjunction with church ritual, to render their sacred spaces distinct from, and elevated above, the world outside. We will furthermore try to appreciate the special centrality of the abbey church and the cathedral in high medieval society. Sites for contact with God and for the development of advanced learning, they could also serve as critical determinants of local economic and political life, and as focuses of pilgrimage, trade, and international cultural exchange.

Art History 301: Methods of Art History
This course on art-historical method is designed to offer art history majors a historiographic overview of the discipline of art history, with a focus on developments of the present century. The course will survey the most influential concepts of the discipline, the evolving tasks it has set itself, and the methods it has adopted for executing them. Works of art will inevitably enter into our discussions, but the main objects of study will be texts about art, particularly texts about methods for a historical study of art. Topics include: concepts of the discipline; style and periodication; iconography, semiotics, and deconstructionl; the social functions of images and the social history of art; gender and sexuality; and art history as representation.


Fall 2008


Art History 463: The Holocaust Visualized [This was my senior seminar]
This seminar will examine how memories of the Holocaust have been conveyed through visual means and consider what historical, cultural and political circumstances have caused various nations to remember the Holocaust differently. We will discuss the issues prompted by public memorials, exhibitions and, as one writer puts it, the "museumification" of concentration camps. How should we define the Holocaust? Whose memory should take precedence? What is lost or gained by the inclusion of texts with images? How might memory be misrepresented by the exhibition of visual materials such as video testimony, photographs and artifacts? In addition, we will study art about the Holocaust, including Art Spiegelman's graphic novel, Maus, and non-fiction films, such as Night and Fog, Shoah and Schindler's List, to ask whether constructed or simulated images can convey the experience of the Holocaust as well as documentary ones. Additionally, we need to consider ways in which the images of the Holocaust, by now too well-known, have been instrumentalized by groups wishing to minimize the Shoah (e.g. the recent Holocaust cartoon competition in Tehran, 2006.)

Art History 265: Pop Art
The use of commercial and mass media imagery in art became recognized as an international phenomenon in the early 1960s. Items such as comic strips, advertising, movie stills, television programs, soup cans, "superstars" and a variety of other accessible and commonplace objects inspired the subject matter, form and technique. This course will critically examine the history and legacy of Pop Art by focusing on its social and aesthetic contexts. An important component of the course involves developing skills in analyzing visual images, comparing them with other forms, and relating them to their historical context.

Spring 2009


Art History 254: Manet to Matisse
A social history of French painting from 1860 to 1900, beginning with the origins of modernism in the work of Courbet and Manet. Among the topics to be discussed are the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III; changing attitudes toward city and country in Impressionist and Symbolist art; the impact of imperialism and international trade; the gendering of public spaces, and the prominent place of women in representations of modern life. The course addresses vanguard movements such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and the styles of individual artists associated with them, as well as the work of academic painters. 

trips/museums/notes

I am cleaning out my room, getting ready to pack everything up and move home, and I found the stash of museum brochures, maps, etc that I collected this year on my trips because I wanted to research further and write about the art that I saw there. Obviously, I haven't gotten around to that yet, but I wanted to make note of these artists/places/pieces so that I could throw away the physical paper and have the information to work on this later. Thus, I am utilizing the blog as a storage facility and maybe a little bit as a teaser for the things I hope to write about this fall with my new free time and access to the UT library system.

It is funny to me how hard it is to read my own handwriting, especially as I am somewhat furtively scribbling on backs of brochures or in my travel journals as I explore an exhibit. Hopefully most of these names/words are actually what I have twice transcribed them to be. Also, I guess some of these things aren't really art but are other interesting things that I liked aesthetically and wanted to make note of and learn more about.

• Musée d/Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France: Van Dongen exhibit
• Trouville
• Sacre Coeur
• Bureuse d'absinthe
• La parade
• Souvenir Groendad
• Lucie
• Versailles, France
• Terror Háza, Andrássy út 60, Budapest, Hungary
• History museum of the Nazi and Communist regimes in Budapest/Hungary
• Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland
• Karimer
• Bernard Frize
• Luno Amiet
• Giovanni Giocometti
• Julian Opie
• Camille Grager
• Dienre Bonnard
• Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany
• Propellor Island City Lodge, Berlin, Germany
• Hadji Ivanchova House, Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria
• Van Gogh museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria
• Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria
• Palazzo delle esposizioni, Rome, Italy
• Aleksandr Deineka
• 100 Capolavori dallo Städel Museum di Francoforte
• National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece

More to come on these, later...

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.

End of Class

Thank you all for a wonderful semester and your reflection notes. I really enjoyed getting to teach this elective and sharing some of what I have learned in Art History with all of you. From what you wrote in your reflections, it seems like you got a taste of art and how it can help you think about the world it came from and exists in today, and that was really what I was hoping for.

As mentioned to a few of the girls after class: http://culinary-correspondence.blogspot.com/

As per Kristina's continued demands, I am uploading my powerpoints and notes to my google docs and will share those with you. I do ask that you only use them for your personal use as almost everything is from my notes from classes at Williams and occasionally from various sources on the internet. If you want to use the information we discussed, it would be better if you researched the information elsewhere and sourced that.

Again, I just wanted to say that I enjoyed having this course and hope that you enjoyed it as well. Good luck with exams!