Teaching Art History

This semester, I got tapped to teach the first in a new sequence of three courses at the Mexican university high school (or "prepa") where I teach. The concept is interesting, and quite advanced for high school: comparative literature and art history. The scope is intended to be global, and the division of the three courses is "clasica" (prehistory to Renaissance), "moderna" (1600-1870), and "contemporanea" (modernism to the present). The courses are only offered in the top or "multicultural" track of the prepa, and are taught in English like the bulk of the coursework here.

So, nothing if not ambitious. The ambition is not institutionally backed by much specificity, however, except for the insistence on globalism. There are no textbooks, suggested texts or resources, detailed model syllabi: nada. I'm basically having to write the entire curriculum for the "clasica" course from scratch, and may get to do the same for the two later courses as well. On the literature side, I pluck short texts from the Internet (since the tight schedule doesn't give me time to teach any complete long texts). On the art side, I was lucky that the campus library happened to own the perfect guide for my preparation, Marilyn Stokstad's two-volume Art History published by Abrams (the 2002 edition), which is an excellent, comprehensive, and thoroughly global college-level textbook. It gives full coverage to architecture, which is extremely important for my purpose. Most of the images I use are suggested by this set, and thanks to Google Images, are easy to find in electronic form on the Web.

As happened when I taught philosophy last fall, having to organize an introductory course systematizes and extends bodies of knowledge that I only possessed in a scattered way. The process of immersion is also intensely spiritual. In preparing to teach art history, I live every day in the presence of amazing imagery that begins to affect how I see and (I notice with interest) how I dream. So far in the semester, we have covered prehistoric through Roman art, and it has been a visual feast, with unmistakable emergent themes - for example, the importance of animals and human-animal hybrids in ancient art, starting right with the cave paintings.

Of course, seeing artworks reproduced on the printed page or the Internet will never substitute for seeing them in person. Questions of scale become entirely distorted, since a small painting and a large painting reproduced at the same size look comparable. The brushwork of painting, thin or thick, straight or swirling, is
utterly lost. And so on. But getting to look at the images frequently, until they colonize the crannies of your mind, offers a good deal of compensation for those losses.