Write a concise formal analysis of any painting located on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, except Monet's Water Lilies, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon and Jackson Pollack's One: Number 31.
*** You must attach proof of admission (i.e. a receipt or a picture of yourself in front of your chosen work of art).
This is not a research paper nor is at an art history paper. This is the beauty of Art Humanities: you are free to analyze works of art on their own merit, without couching them in history or worrying about tedious secondary source research. This assignment is intended to exercise your visual and verbal skills. I would like you to learn to see an image both in all its details and as a whole, and to verbalize and organize this visual information into a coherent essay. These skills are an important basis for thinking about and understanding works of art.
Here are some steps you might pursue in preparing your paper:
- Forget for a moment what is represented and think rather about how the image is painted. What kinds of materials are used? How is the paint applied? How are forms constructed and arranged? How is color used? How are effects of light and space created? This list could go on-the essential point is to focus on the how rather than the what.
- Looking now at what is represented in your painting, think about how the formal aspects focused on above contribute to this. That is, consider why the specific figure or scene you see is painted the way it is. You should think about both part and whole here: why are certain areas of the image painted differently than others, and how do these together create an integrated work?
- Then begin identifying the basic elements of the composition: what is depicted? What are the relationships between figures and architectural elements? Between one figure and another? What are the dominant colors or expressions? What is the focus of the composition and how has the painter created this focus?
- Finally, compose your formal analysis. Your essay should focus above all on the form of your image-that is, the "how." Your essay should relate the subject of the painting and its literary source (if appropriate) to the way the artist has chosen to represent the subject. No additional research is necessary or advisable. Your essay should offer an elegant and attentive response to the formal elements of the painting-scale, format, line, color, internal geometry, brushstroke, etc. Remember to articulate a thesis early in your essay and support it with your observations. Your thesis might propose an interpretation or might offer a characterization of the work.
- After having written a draft, return to MoMA and take another look at your painting. Does what you wrote correspond to what you see? Did you spend too much space on some elements and not enough on others? Revise accordingly. Be sure to balance between the forest and the trees: ultimately, your discussion of discrete components should add up to an integrated analysis of the image as a whole.