Yesterday, I saw a museum lesson plan directing children to study a famous artist. It was filled with rubrics and schema and handouts and directions for implementation. But, for all the effort that went into constructing this recipe for learning, the lesson completely missed the point of the artist's work. Similarly, the day before, I saw a lesson plan that asked students to make art in the "style" of a famous artist, but the students only copied the subject matter and maybe the angle of view which is important but is not the most crucial component of the artist's style.
When I guide students to study an established artist, I help them determine what the artist was up to. There are two kinds of art. Many artists do both. One kind of art is timeless in terms of design principles. We might need some context to understand some of it, but don't require any specific knowledge to appreciate the aesthetics. If artists of a time period challenged each other with opposing concepts and approaches, then it helps to know this. But that isn't required.
The other kind of art is mostly contextual. The point of the work has to do with something that was happening at the time. There are some design qualities we can talk about, but mostly what is timeless is the provocative nature of the art—the response it demanded at the time. Artists always do something like this. But, in this case, we need more information.
So, it is very important that students are encouraged to learn as much as possible about an artist. That means going deeper than the surface. If, for sake of example, I decide to have my students explore Rauschenberg, I'm not going to have each student bring in a stuffed animal to shove into a tire (apologies if you've done this—I only just dreamed up the idea as an example and hopefully not too much of a straw man). I'm sure that some art lovers would look at such projects approvingly. But we'd all be missing the point and teaching the kids to miss it too if we only copied or explored the immediate content.
I once had a student show me something she made on her own and she said, "that's how Maya Lin would have done it." This is learning: when a student has a deep enough understanding of an artist's style that she can make the knowledge her own and later apply it to a completely new situation. My student understood qualities of Lin's style that transcended the immediate context and specific design of the art we had examined.
That's what I want them to do.
