“What was Maurice Sendak’s first book? The author/illustrator was a designer of window displays in a toy store when he was commissioned to illustrate The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Ayme in 1951. Sendak wrote and illustrated his first children’s book, Kenny’s Window, in 1956.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
It’s not a word in particularly common use in English even if one of our most recognizable pieces of public art and architecture–the Washington Monument–is indeed such a monument. In any case, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun obelisk. If you’re teaching about ancient Egypt (where it came up when I taught global studies, which is, I assume, why I wrote this in the first place), this might be a useful document.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Tole: Items of tinware painted with decorative designs. Also called toleware, it was much practiced by amateurs and artisans in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged art/architecture/design
“Gesamtkunstwerk: (Ger., total work of art) Term applied to the art of the Baroque and Rococo periods, which sought unification of architecture, sculpture, painting, and sometimes even the applied and decorative arts into a ‘total work of art.’ For example, Gianlorenzo Bernini’s execution of the Coronaro Chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome. By extension, the same idea applies to other periods.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Bar for Bend. ‘Bar sinister.’ There is no such thing in heraldry as a bar sinister.
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Multiculturalism: This movement focuses primarily on changing traditional canons throughout the humanities. With the expansion of canonical traditions and exposure of students at all levels to artists, writers, and historical movements previously marginalized in general bodies of knowledge, the next generation is expected to have a better grasp of an increasingly diverse society in a world in flux. In the realm of art in the United States, this has resulted in a greater emphasis on and interest in non-Western art and on works produced in communities without previous access to museum and gallery exposure (e.g. African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, women, gays, and lesbians).”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Art for Art’s Sake: English equivalent of the French l’art pour l’art, which is embodied in The Poetic Principle by Edgar Allan Poe:
There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified…than the poem which is a poem and nothing more—the poem written solely for the poem’s sake.
The doctrine which this represents, that the aim of art should be creation and the perfection of technical expression rather than the service of a moral, political, or didactic end, has been evolving ever since the romantic period. It was adumbrated by Coleridge and given early expression by Poe in the above treatise, flowered among the French symbolist poets and their English associate Walter Pater, and reached its culmination in the aesthetic theory of I.A. Richards. It was the dominant theory of art and especially of poetry until the 1930s, when the proletarian and Marxist movements in literature threatened for a time to revive the 18th-century didactic theories. After the beginning of World War II in 1939, the latter movements began to lose much of their influence.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Synthetism: A Post-Impressionist direction associated with Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, and Maurice Denis, which reduced forms to essentials and applied colors as flat, nonshaded fields bounded by strong contour lines.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“What was the first book printed in English? The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a prose romance by Raoul Lefevre, printed by William Caxton in 1474 in Bruges, Belgium. Caxton himself translated it from the French. Caxton also printed the first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, published on November 18, 1477.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Readers and users of this blog are already aware that I have published here a great deal of reference material related to the visual and plastic arts. I’m well aware that I’m not the only person to decry the decline of arts education in our public schools. I’m not an artist myself–I cannot draw a straight line without the aid of solid straight edge to guide my writing instrument–but I love art and believe kids should learn about it–if not learn to create art themselves.
In that spirit, here is a reading on expressionism and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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