This week’s Text is this reading on the influential Japanese artist known simply as Hokusai along with a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
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.
“Representational Art: In contrast with non-objective and abstract art, representational art strives to depict figures and objects as they appear to the eye.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Representation: Refers to that which is representational. Art historians once limited iconographical studies to art, but as a result of postmodern influences, the study and critique of many representations (e.g., visual examples drawn from popular culture, especially the mass media) have become increasingly important. The often mentioned ‘crisis of representation’ in the arts refers to current dilemmas regarding the values and biases always present in visual depictions and yet masking as accurate realities.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Regionalism: Now understood to be a movement within American scene painting. Protesting against the spread of European Modernism, the regionalists sought an authentic American style by concentrating on realistic depictions of the rural Midwest and South of the 1930s. The best-known regionalists were Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry.”
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
“Symbolist Movement: A literary movement in France (Stephane Mallarme, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine) which got underway about 1885 in reaction to Realism and Impressionism. In painting, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, and Gustav Klimt produced lyrical dream fantasies, combining mystical elements with an interest in the erotic and decadent.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Graffiti Art: (It., scratched) Beginning in the 1970s with the availability of aerosol spray paints, illegal graffiti statements and designs began to coat New York subway cars. Whereas political art took art from inside galleries and into the streets, the graffiti are movement appropriated this element of street culture and brought it into the elite world of New York art galleries. There, untrained artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat enjoyed brief recognition, while Keith Haring’s self-conscious use of the style made him its most famous proponent. Once in the galleries, however, graffiti art lost its element of illegal performance, its power as protest, and its context. Neutralized, it became fashion and quickly went out of style.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Italianate Style: An American residential architectural style seen ca. 1840-1865. Fancifully adapted from Italian Renaissance palaces, the American version is typically of two or three stories with a low-pitched hip roof, formal balance of design, wide and bracketed eves, and much interest in such façade details as window caps. Most examples have a cupola or belvedere. The innovation of cast-iron construction in the mid-19th century provided affordable, mass-produced Italianate facades such as those still found on the SoHo district of New York City.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Magic Realism: Deriving from the metaphysical period of Giorgio de Chirico (see METAPHYSICAL ART) and related to surrealism, magic realism translates everyday experiences into disturbing images by curious juxtapositions of sharply painted elements. Balthus and Peter Blume are magic realists. Also called precise realism, sharp focus realism.”
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
“Vignette: An ornament of leaves and tendrils; the flourishes around a capital letter in a manuscript; a small decoration or embellishment found in beginning or ending sections of a book or manuscript; a small picture or illustration not enclosed by a definite border but shading off into the surrounding page.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
[Over the years in my classrooms, it was hard to miss the fact that students who struggled with reading, particularly the students of Asian Pacific descent I served, would nonetheless exhaust my school library’s supply of anime. In researching this post, I learned that Bakin’s best-known book, Hakkenden, has been adapted to anime. For that reason, I have tagged this as high-interest material.]
“Kyokutei Bakin: (1767-1849) Japanese fiction writer of the late-Tokugawa period. Bakin was among the most gifted writers of his time, and succeeded in establishing himself as a serious writer in an age dominated by the lowbrow entertainment genre of Gesaku. Bakin is best known for an extraordinary tour-de-force, Hakkenden (1814-1832), whose title translates, improbably, as “Eight Canine Biographies.” This high-flown historical romance of noble vengeance, with its thickly applied Confucianist morality of virtue rewarded and vice punished, ranks as Japan’s longest literary narrative. Hakkenden has retained its popularity in contemporary Japan, albeit in abridged modern editions.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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