Fall 2009 School Programs
The Kemper Art Museum invites school classes, organizations, and community groups to schedule a tour of the fall 2009 exhibition Chance Aesthetics and to participate in one of the following educational programs being offered in conjunction with the exhibition:
Program I: Try Your Hand at Chance
(recommended for student groups of all ages)
Make an artwork using chance processes: The artists featured in Chance Aesthetics produced intriguing and thought-provoking works by implementing chance-based strategies that helped determine aesthetic outcome. After touring the exhibition, participants will select an envelope from a box. The contents inside will determine which strategy to implement in order to create individual chance-based artworks. Creative decision-making may still be necessary in order to successfully complete this project, but the final creations will be just as much defined by elements of arbitrariness as by personal choices.
After making artworks, the group will discuss ways in which chance-based creations alter preconceptions about the role of the artist and art itself.
Program II: Chance Readings
Lesson Plan with additional details (.pdf) >>
(recommended for high school age and older)
Profile: André Breton (born 1896 in Tinchebray, Normandy; died in Paris 1966)
Chance Readings explores key Surrealist writings by the French poet, essayist, and critic André Breton. Founder of the Surrealist movement, Breton is considered one of the great writers of the twentieth century. His prose and poetry demonstrate a dynamic linguistic power and an unsurpassed lyric imagination.
His collection of prose poems titled Soluble Fish (Poisson Soluble),written in 1924, is an early example of automatic writing that served as inspiration for Surrealist artists André Masson, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and others. The novel Mad Love (L’Amour Fou), written in 1937, is a series of autobiographical reminiscences about the author’s romantic involvement with the painter Jacqueline Lamba. More broadly, it is a poetic rumination on the liberating power of irrational love.
Both of these works serve asmonuments to Surrealism in that that they convey one of the movement’s primary goals: to reinvent the world through the powers of associative thinking and language. They demonstrate the writer’s insistence on freedomand "the dazzling revenge" of human imagination against the limits of the rational mind.
After touring Chance Aesthetics, we will discuss key points articulated in Breton’s literature, and draw meaningful connections between these influential texts and the works featured in the exhibition.
RELATED READINGS (downloadable .pdfs)
Soluble Fish (Poisson Soluble) >>
Mad Love (L’Amour Fou) >>
To participate in one of these programs, contact Sydney Norton at
sydneynorton@wustl.edu or 314.935.7918. Visit the Chance Aesthetics Education Resources page for additional information and to download the Connections Guide.
Ongoing School Programs
Portraiture
offered continually
School Level: Grades 3-12
Participants in this guided program will closely examine significant portraits in the Museum's permanent collection, comparing and contrasting a diverse range of artist techniques and depictions of the human form through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Works currently on display include paintings by Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Philip Guston, as well as contemporary works by Glenn Ligon and Christian Boltanski, among others. School and youth groups will also have the opportunity to include a hands-on activity in the gallery. Using exploratory sketching to experiment with both realistic and abstract techniques, they can create their own portrait during the visit to the Museum.
Landscape
offered continually
School Level: Grades 3-12
Participants in this guided program will closely examine significant works of landscape in the Museum's permanent collection, comparing and contrasting a diverse range of artistic techniques through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Works currently on display include paintings by George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Church, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, James Ensor, and Lyonel Feininger, as well as more recent photographic works by Alan Sekula and Spencer Finch, among others. School and youth groups will also have the opportunity to sketch in the galleries and create an original landscape during their visit to the Museum, experimenting with both realistic and abstract techniques in representing the world around us and our relationship to it.
