HA227:
Indian Painting
Discussion
and Reading assignments for Sept. 12 and 13
Discussion
Assignment for Friday, September 13
***this needs to be done between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.
on Thursday, September 12!***
Go to the College Museum of Art (in the Center for the Arts, lower level) and choose one work in the Conversations with Traditions exhibition to write a formal analysis about. The goal of this assignment is to help you develop descriptive and analytical skills in writing about art, so choose a work that you find complex, interesting, and rewarding.
For Friday's discussion section, I'd like you to simply be prepared to talk about why you selected your work, and be ready to talk about what you see (or think you see) and how it makes you feel.
You are then to write a 2-3 page (typed; double-spaced; font no larger than 12 pts.; margins 1” all around; with your name, date, and discussion section information at the top of the first page; double-sided printing acceptable) interpretive formal analysis about your chosen work, due Tuesday Sept.17 at the beginning of class in hard copy ( i.e., not e-mailed to me)
What,
exactly, is a formal analysis? I have slightly adapted the following
explanation from the Writing Center website at University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill (http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/arthistory.html). Another good website is from Dartmouth,
which I also highly recommend you look at prior to doing this exercise: (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~compose/student/humanities/arthistory.html).
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UNC
Writing Center guidelines for writing in Art History |
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1)
Formal Analysis
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This assignment requires a detailed description of the "formal" qualities of the art object (formal as in "related to the form," not a black tie dinner). In other words, you're looking at the individual design elements, such as composition (arrangement of parts of or in the work), color, line, texture, scale, proportion, balance, contrast, and rhythm. Your primary concern in this assignment is to attempt to explain how the artist arranges and uses these various elements.
Usually you have to go and look at the object for a long time and then write down what you see. As you will quickly see from the page length of the assignment, your instructor expects a highly detailed description of the object. You might struggle with this assignment because it is hard to translate what you see into words -- don't give up, and take more notes than you might think you need. Why would your instructor ask you to do this assignment? First, translating something from a visual language to a textual language is one of the most vital tasks of the art historian. Most art historians at some point describe fully and accurately their objects of study in order to communicate their ideas about them. You may already have found this tendency helpful in reading your textbook or other assigned readings. Second, your instructors realize that you are not accustomed to scrutinizing objects in this way and know that you need practice doing so. Instructors who assign formal analyses want you to look--and look carefully. Think of the object as a series of decisions that an artist made. Your job is to figure out and describe, explain, and interpret those decisions and why the artist may have made them. Ideally, if you were to give your written formal analysis to a friend who had never seen the object, s/he would be able to describe or draw the object for you or at least pick it out of a lineup. In writing a formal analysis, focus on creating a logical order so that your reader doesn't get lost. Don't ever assume that because your instructor has seen the work, they know what you are talking about. Here are a couple of options:
Some instructors want your formal analysis to consist of pure description with little or no interpretation. In this case, you should describe your object and explain how these formal elements contribute to the work as a whole. Others will expect you to go further and comment on the significance of what you have observed [That's what I want! Yours truly, Prof. Atherton] Find out which way your instructor wants you to write your formal analysis in your particular assignment. Most art historians include formal analysis at some point in their essays, so there are a lot of examples to look at in textbooks and other readings, but you will probably have to be more in-depth than they are.
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Read the following excerpts (all in your coursepack) as background for Thursday’s class. Note that I will regularly call upon you to answer these and other reading-based questions in class. I will also draw upon these questions in formulating exams.
-note: this is a bit dated, and somewhat romantically written. Read it primarily to come to some understanding of the overall role of aesthetics in painting
-although very technical, and full of complex Sanskrit vocabulary, read this with an eye to the following questions: imagine you are an apprentice painter in 5th century India. You have been commissioned to paint a wall depicting a king worshipping a god. How would you make the king look? How would you paint a god? How would you tell the difference between the two? What are some of the most important aesthetic criteria in creating paintings?
-in what ways does Jain painting differ from earlier precedents? What purpose did such paintings fulfill? Would you conclude that the formal linear qualities mean that the paintings are less well done than earlier works? If not, then by what standards can we evaluate these images, and why are they considered important?
Jeremiah Losty, The Art of the Book in India (London: The British Library, 1982),
pp.5-17
-Losty puts the question well: just what is a book? How did materials, technique, patronage, and context affect the production, style, and format of painted manuscripts in India? How were manuscripts and paintings considered, collected, appreciated, used?