Using Artist's Biographies in the Classroom

As a teacher of all-level art, I believe it’s important that students of all ages be exposed to artists that have made an impact on our culture and on our understanding of visual communication. Artists create out of the context of the times and places in which they live, and out of the world view that they’ve formed from their unique personal experience of family and friendship, religion, their culture and the world. So that learners can see something of how this process works, I’ve looked for biographies and for works of fiction that are based on biographical material that engagingly tell the stories of very different people who have created works of art for very different purposes, some using new materials in new ways.

For the purposes of this project I’ve narrowed my focus to painters of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Because of the invention and widespread use of the camera beginning in the middle 1800s, realistic painting was no longer the only way to capture the likenesses of important people in the church and government. Commissions of artwork from these wealthy people had meant that artists painted what others considered to be important or beautiful, but now many artists decided that there were other valid reasons to paint. Now painters wanted to record what they themselves believed to be important and beautiful, or even unimportant and ugly. They wanted to express their personal reactions to what they saw and heard or express feelings from inside of themselves. Many artists wanted to paint from their imaginations or dreams. Others thought that art could be simply an arrangement of lines and colors on a flat surface. And some wanted to draw attention to injustices that cause human suffering in order to bring about social change. I want my students to see a variety of 19th and 20th century paintings and understand the motives for their creation.

Along with finding new reasons to paint, artists of the 1800s and 1900s began to look for new materials and to experiment with new ways of using them. Because students from kindergarten through high school are in formative stages of development, I want them to feel this same freedom to experiment with materials and methods, to discover the capabilities of those materials and to discover creative capabilities within themselves. The methods used by the artists that we will study are adaptable to lessons for young learners that encourage freedom to experiment and have fun. Along with reading a biography and viewing works by an individual artist, students will create a painting that imitates some aspects of the work of the artist being studied.

In addition, there are two additional considerations I have made in choosing books for my reading response log. First, I have chosen books on a variety of reading levels to represent the range in age of students I may one day teach. I have also chosen books that are based on the lives of artists of both sexes and of varying ethnic backgrounds. It’s important for students to see that many different types of people and representatives of a variety of cultures have made important contributions to the rich world of art we enjoy today.