Topic: In the shadow of the Avant‑garde

Lesson plan elaborated by: Katarzyna Maciejak

Target group:

4th‑grade students of a high school.

Core curriculum

I. Literary and cultural education.

2. Receipt of cultural texts. Student:

4) compares cultural texts, taking into account various contexts;

5) recognises and characterizes the main styles in architecture and art;

6) reads non‑literary cultural texts using the code proper in a given field of art;

IV. Self‑study. Student:

1. develops the ability of independent work, inter alia, by preparing various forms of presenting their own position;

2. organises information into the problematic whole by valuing it; synthesizes the learned content around the problem, topic, issue and uses it in your statements;

9) uses multimedia sources of information and makes their critical evaluation;

11) uses multimedia resources, eg from: libraries, on‑line dictionaries, e‑book publications, original websites; selects web sources, taking into account the criterion of material correctness and critically evaluates their content.

General aim of education

Pupils meet three twentieth‑century avant‑garde painters and try to interpret their works

Key competences

• communication in foreign languages;

• digital competence;

• learning to learn.

Operational goals

Student:

• indicates the most important representatives of surrealistic and dadaistic painting and their main works;

• attempts to interpret avant‑garde images;

• learns about artistic techniques used by avant‑garde painters;

• develops vocabulary related to avant‑garde art.

Methods/techniques

• expository

  • talk.

• activating

  • discussion.

• programmed

  • with computer;

  • with e‑textbook.

• practical

  • exercices concerned.

Forms of work

• individual activity;

• activity in pairs;

• activity in groups;

• collective activity.

Teaching aids

• e‑textbook;

• interactive whiteboard, tablets/computers;

• colored paper;

• scissors;

• glue;

• crayons;

• colored markers;

• sheets of paper.

Lesson plan overview

Before classes

1. The teacher announces to the students that the next lesson will be about the works of avant‑garde painters: Francis Picabia, Giorgio de Chirico and Rene Magritte. The students' task is to divide into three teams. Each group is obliged to bring to the lesson materials for making a poster on the subject of the creator's work (clippings, prints of works, photos, Bristol, A3, colored paper, glue, scissors, etc.). All students should also familiarize themselves with the content of the abstract (reversed lesson).

Introduction

1. The teacher states the subject of the lesson, explains the aim of the lesson and together with students determines the success criteria to be achieved.

2. The teacher writes a key word on the board: AWANGARDA. He asks students to give associations. The mental map can be supplemented during the lesson by students at any time during the lesson.

Realization

1. Brief setting of the scope of the lesson: discussion of the initial associations with the word AWANGARDA, recognition of the level of preparation of students for the lesson.

2. Preparation of students' workplaces. The teams appointed before the lesson will prepare posters regarding the work of three avant‑garde artists. There can be three groups or six, depending on the size of the class and the way of cooperation.

3. The teacher gives the students the criteria according to which the student work results will be assessed:

   • realization of the theme: the silhouette and creativity of an avant‑garde artist

   • wealth of content (cognitive values)

   • aesthetic impressions

   • commitment of all group members

4. Presentation and evaluation of posters.

5. The teacher plays the recording of the abstract.
   He stops it after one or two sentences, asking the chosen student to tell in his own words what he just heard.

Summary

1. The teacher asks a willing student to summarize the lesson from his point of view. He asks other students if they would like to add anything to their colleague's statements.

Homework

1. Arrange your own metaphysical composition in the form of a collage or photomontage, juxtaposing several ordinary items. Use photos or newspaper clippings. Do not forget about an interesting job title based, for example, on a word game or a double word meaning.

The following terms and recordings will be used during this lesson

Terms

Texts and recordings

In the shadow of the Avant‑garde

The art of the first decades of the 20th century deviated from the tradition in both its form and content in search of a new vision of the world. Avant‑garde artists took the reins. The need for originality prevailed; experimental, rebellious and even iconoclastic activities were of paramount importance. A number of new trends were created: expressionism, Fauvism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, suprematism, neoplasticism, dadaism and surrealism. Most of them contravened contemporary aesthetics based on the value of objective beauty and propounded an extension of artistic boundaries. The creators were fascinated by the achievements of science and technology. Some people worshipped machines while others were fascinated by geometry, theosophy or psychoanalysis. Artistic and moral freedom prevailed.

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) – A Frenchman of Cuban descent, a painter, poet, one of the most important representatives of Dadaism and was considered the author of the first abstract painting (Caotchouc, 1909). During World War I he stayed in New York, where he co‑edited the literary magazine „291”, and then published magazine „391”, which gathered the majority of the participants of the Dada movement. Works like poems, cartoons of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray as well as Picabia's sarcastic and ironic remarks on the art of writing were published therein. Picabia's work cannot be subjected to simple classification. He was an independent artist, full of invention with considerable intelligence and an unbridled temperament; at the same time he became a precursor of the anti‑art movement, propounding the destruction of all “funny” values. His most famous works include: Match Woman (1920), Trois Clowns (c. 1925) and Hera (1928).

Love parade is a so‑called mechanistic picture, ironically referring to the idea of technical progress and the machine as its symbol. It was glorified by Italian futurists but for Picabia, however, it was not at all a measure of modernity. A complicated construction composed of pistons, pumps and gears, placed in an empty abstract space is therefore deliberately inoperative and absurd in its uselessness. The strange machine, in which you can find erotic allusions, says more about the hidden instincts and drives of a human than about the development of civilization. The artist, probably against all his instincts, created a beautiful painting whose aesthetics has its source in precise, technical drawing and economical, refined, cool colours.

Portrait of Cézanne is a mockery of works dedicated to the great masters of the past. Described usually as Hommage à ... („Tribute to ...”), they expressed admiration of and deference towards the geniuses or virtuosos of art, often referring to the forms of expression and applied techniques developed by them. In Portrait of Cézanne, Picabia violated all the rules of such performance. Creating his assemblage, he used trivial and cheap materials – a cardboard box on which, in the form of irregular circumscription he „hand‑wrote” the inscription with an ink, and a plush toy playing the role of an ambiguous symbol. It constitutes a dadaistic „ready object” (so‑called * ready made*), and at the same time a mocking figure of traditional painting – figurative art, representing and mimetic, and thus imitating nature. In colloquial language, however, „aping” is a pejorative expression, meaning a mindless, malicious or caricatural repetition of a pattern, face or behaviour. The artist therefore mocked the styles and authority of eminent painters. The „still life” he created is a virulent attack on the traditional painting genre.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) – An Italian painter, writer and author of theoretical and critical texts about art. An expert and admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. A supporter of traditional painting craft. His mysterious works, which belonged to the pittura metafisica movement, full of quotations from Mediterranean culture and antiquity, captured the imagination of the surrealists. His works influenced such artists like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and René Magritte. The most famous works of de Chirico include: The Enigma of the Oracle (1910), The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913), Red Tower (1913), The Anxious Journey (1913), The Mystery and Melancholy of the Street (1914) and Hector and Andromache (1917).

Giorgio de Chirico created non‑existent worlds: he placed known forms and ostensibly ordinary objects in peculiar contexts. The unnatural state of the suspension emanating from the picture The Disquieting Muses is the effect of the perception of space disturbance due to the application of a number of movements and the lack of logical convergence points in the composition. Here we are dealing with a mysterious situation which does not refer to an everyday experience of a man. Although individual elements of the performance can easily be recognized and described, they create a vision beyond physical reality. Expression and anxiety are intensified by multiple disturbances in the proportions and sizes of forms, especially monuments or sculptures that are substitutes for people. The whole image is penetrated by contrasting light creating visible shadows. The colours are saturated and applied as a flat stain within the shapes depicted in the black contour.

René Magritte (1898–1967) – a Belgian surrealist painter, creating in the convention of onirism (captivating reality in the shape of a dream or a nightmare). Author of brilliant and mysterious works, depicting realistically painted, ostensibly ordinary objects arranged in unusual, often absurd or paradoxical compositions. Distinguishing features of Magritte's creativity are: intellectual provocation, resentment of logic, humour and effective baffling through enigmatic or metaphorical titles as well the application of the painting within a painting effect. His most famous works include: The Human Condition (1935), The Therapist (1937), The Rape (1945), The Philosophy in the Bedroom (1947), Golconda (1953), The Castle of the Pyrenees (1957) and The Son of Man (1964).