About 12 years ago as I sat planning picture study lessons, I evaluated where we were and what we had done. We had studied some of the older classic painters as we travelled along the line of history—Giotto, Van Eyck, Michelangelo, Vermeer, Bouguereau, Millet, Degas, Constable, Stuart, Copley, David, Homer… This time period is a veritable feast of beautiful art.
As our history moved out of the late 1800’s and into the modern era, I was thrilled with the history side of the curriculum. Living Books about the Roosevelts, Helen Keller, World War I and II, the Great Depression, Lindberg, Kennedy, MLK … a history feast. But the further we moved along the historical timeline, the choices for picture study because more and more challenging for my taste. We studied Renoir and Monet and were ready for more modern artists to study. But I wasn’t finding anything that inspired me in the most famous of modern art.
About this time I read an article on the purpose of modern art and the patience and training it takes to see what the artist is conveying. So, ok, that’s the problem… we need patience and training. With this to give me motivation for more modern art in our lessons, I purchased some recommended Living Books on modern artists, and got ready to make lessons.
As I looked through these books and viewed the art, I was perplexed. How was I supposed to present these artists to my children? The pictures were odd at best, some were downright gruesome, some were inappropriate.
Because I was having trouble finding twelve pieces of decent art from one individual artist, I decided to make lessons based on a modern art theme rather than on one individual artist. I found the best I could from several artists. I chose works that weren’t necessarily the most famous, but ones that had better presentation, colors, reality, and were decent.
I typically enjoy creating picture study lessons, but this was not my favorite. I urged myself on, telling myself it was my duty to present a full table to the children and we were going to broaden our horizons. Like the article said,…patience and training. My kids need to be educated, they need to know what is common knowledge, or I was selling them short. Charlotte even talks about a uniting common knowledge.
On week one for our new modern art term, I started out with Picasso because he was the most famous of the group of artists I had chosen. Everyone needs to know Picasso. Right? The first picture I presented to my children was this 1913 Picasso, Head. The color choices seemed harmonious…
I opened the folder, pulled out the copies of the pictures and began to hand them out. My kids shrieked.
“We aren’t going to study that, are we?!”
“Yes, this term we are doing a different style of art. This is a famous artist.”
“No! I’m not looking at that!” shot back my artistic daughter.
“But many people like this artist, he is famous.”
“No, I’m not doing it!” came the reply from my daughter who is a most obedient, faithful soul. I think this might be the first and probably only time she has ever said “no”.
“It might be odd at first, but we can learn to like it.”
“No we can’t!” shot back the others.
Complete mutiny and rebellion. I put the pictures away. Stunned.
Well, what is a mother to do?!
Having lived through that incident, I didn’t attempt to do this type of modern art again. I found other artists. We did Cezanne, Cassatt, Hopper, Bierstadt, Hokusai, Rockwell. And they enjoyed them.
But then, about five years later, it crept up on me again. The… ‘you better make sure they are educated’ feeling. By now, it was very clear that my oldest highschool age daughter had a bent for art, probably heading into some field of art. Again the questions and insecurity came back. She might take art classes in college and get laughed out of the room because she doesn’t know Picasso. So, I tried again. More enthusiastically than the last time.
“I’ve got a new, exciting study, it’s going to be fun!” I said as I got the picture study folder.
Didn’t I know from CM, that teacher ‘manipulation tactics’ don’t work? I bypassed that part of the volumes and tiptoed forward.
“We are going to try something new. Some art that is a little different. Cubist and seeing different perspectives,” I said hoping to appeal to my artist-daughter’s curiosity and bent for math and art.
She didn’t buy it.
And that’s the problem I’ve noticed over the years. CMers, beware! When you treat children as persons, and when you set a feast of plain, nutritious, no nonsense (no twaddle), real, mind-food before them, and they eat day after day, year after year…. then when you disregard their personhood or when you try to feed them junk food- they balk in a big way.
They sniffed a skunk before I even had the pages out of the folder.
“We aren’t doing Picasso!” they all revolted.
ugh….
I gave up.
Trust the philosophy— they are persons, do not spoon feed OR force feed.
Trust in their sense of beauty.
Trust that there are healthy things to mind-eat, and there is unhealthy, saw dust that doesn’t go down very well, if at all.
Trust that they will be ok if they don’t know all there is out there to distract from beauty.
Trust the method—picture study week after week, term after term, year after year, will produce an educated, well rounded person. Training the eye to placement, color, lighting, attention, and talent is more important than studying modern art.
I have a feeling if our modern art – ‘modern’ in the typical definition of the style of art that comes to mind – were shown to our great grandparents, they’d laugh and ask who got fooled into buying that trash?
And so, now I have banished my fear and insecurity. Through my own instinct and my children’s reactions, I see the ‘modern art’ messages as the sales job that they are. The messages like ‘see the intent of the artist’, ‘envision the story that the blue line down the middle of the page is trumpeting to your open mind’, ‘enter into the reality of the horror of the broken world of the artist as an acknowledgment of their pain’ don’t fool me.
I can sympathize with the pain of others, but I can rise to beauty and maybe even help the wounded rise to beauty. Ultimately this is the only way to survive. Over and over, the stories of artists lives who stay in the pain and portray it on canvas end sadly. There is no hope when we shut out beauty and stay consumed in the ugly and nonsensical. Fragmented never leads to wholeness. Disjointed never leads to healing.
We get bullied by society if we do not accept the new norm of art. We even get badgered in the homeschool world, which is where the ‘training and patience’ article originated. We are called closed minded, intolerant, old, unenlightened, stupid…and probably other names. Guilt is thrown on for keeping our children in a closed box of child mistreatment and ill-teaching by sheltering them.
Someone, please, call this art what it is.
The children will, if you let them speak.
The Emperors New ‘Modern Art’ Clothes.
For the CM world and for Christians….let’s hold to what we know to be the purpose of art – to lift us up higher than our misery, to bring us to light out of the dark of this world. The world can be a dreary, dark place. We need the beauty of art. If our reality is a world with storms and rough seas, let’s use art to bring us peace and calm. If we live in a world of darkness, let’s use beautiful art to bring us light and hope. Our earth is beautiful, let’s celebrate it. People have inherent beauty in them, let’s proclaim their goodness.
“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” – Philippians 4:8
“Our Beauty Sense.—There is another region open to Intellect, of very great beauty and delight. He must needs have Imagination with him to travel there, but still more must he have that companion of the nice ear and eye, who enabled him to recognise music and beauty in words and their arrangement. The Æsthetic Sense, in truth, holds the key of this palace of delights. There are few joys in life greater and more constant than our joy in Beauty, though it is almost impossible to put into words what Beauty consists in; colour, form, proportion, harmony—these are some of its elements. Words give some idea of these things, and therefore some idea of Beauty, and that is why it is only through our Beauty Sense that we can take full pleasure in Literature.
Beauty in Nature.—But Beauty is everywhere—in white clouds against the blue, in the gray bole of the beech, the play of a kitten, the lovely flight
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and beautiful colouring of birds, in the hills and the valleys and the streams, in the wind-flower and the blossom of the broom. What we call Nature is all Beauty and delight, and the person who watches Nature closely and knows her well, like the poet Wordsworth, for example, has his Beauty Sense always active, always bringing him joy.
We cannot get away from Beauty, and we delight in it most perhaps in the faces and forms of many little children and of some grown-up people.
The Palace of Art.—We take pleasure, too, in the arrangement and colouring of a nice room, of a nice dress, in the cover of a book, in the iron fittings of a door, when these are what is called artistic. This brings us to another world of beauty created for us by those whose Beauty Sense enables them not only to see and take joy in all the Beauty there is, but whose souls they become so filled with the Beauty they gather through eye and ear that produce for us new forms of Beauty—in picture, statue, glorious cathedral, in delicate ornament, in fugue, sonata, simple melody. When we think for a moment, how we must admire the goodness of God in placing us in a world so exceedingly full of Beauty—whether it be of what we call Nature or of what we call Art—and in giving us that sense of Beauty which enables us to see and hear, and to be as it were suffused with pleasure at a single beautiful effect brought to our ear or our eye.
The Hall of Simulation.—But, like all the good gifts we have received, this too is capable of neglect and misuse. It is not enough that there should be a Beauty World always within reach; we must see to it that our Beauty Sense is on the alert and kept
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quick to discern. We may easily be all our lives like that man of whom the poet says:—
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
Was that, and nothing more.”
—that is, he missed the subtle sense of Beauty which lay, not so much in the primrose nor in the river, but, rather, in the fact of the primrose growing just there. Our great danger is that, as there is a barren country reaching up to the very borders of the Kingdom of Literature, so to is there a dull and dreary Hall of Simulation which we may enter and believe it to be the Palace of Art. Here people are busy painting, carving, modelling, and what not; the very sun labours here with his photographs, and he is as good an artist as the rest, and better, for the notion in this Hall is that the object of Art is to make things exactly like life. So the so-called artists labour away to get the colour and form of the things they see, and to paint these on canvas or shape them in marble or model them in wax (flowers), and all the time they miss, because they do not see, that subtle presence which we call Beauty in the objects they paint and mould. Many persons allow themselves to be deceived in this matter, and go through life without ever entering the Palace of Art, and perceiving but little of the Beauty of Nature. We all have need to be trained to see, and to have our eyes opened before we can take in the joy that is meant for us in this beautiful life.” – Volume 4