essay about visual arts

Visual Analysis: How to Analyze a Painting and Write an Essay

A visual analysis essay is an entry-level essay sometimes taught in high school and early university courses. Both communications and art history students use visual analysis to understand art and other visual messages. In our article, we will define the term and give an in-depth guide on how to look at a piece of art and write a visual analysis essay. Stay tuned until the end for a handy visual analysis essay example from our graduate paper writing service .

What Is Visual Analysis?

Visual analysis is the process of looking at a piece of visual art (painting, photography, film, etc.) and dissecting it for the artist’s intended meaning and means of execution. In some cases, works are also analyzed for historical significance and their impact on culture, art, politics, and the social consciousness of the time. This article will teach you how to perform a formal analysis of art.

Need Help With Your Visual Analysis?

You only need to send your paper requirements to get help from professional writers.

A visual analysis essay is a type of essay written mostly by students majoring in Art History and Communications. The process of visual analysis can be applied to painting, visual art, journalism, photo-journalism, photography, film, and writing. Works in these mediums are often meant to be consumed for entertainment or informative purposes. Visual analysis goes beyond that, focusing on form, themes, execution, and the compositional elements that make up the work.

Classical paintings are a common topic for a visual analysis essay because of their depth and historical significance. Take the famous Raphael painting Transfiguration. At first glance, it is an attractive image showing a famous scene from the Bible. But a more in-depth look reveals practical painting techniques, relationships between figures, heavy symbolism, and a remarkable choice of colors by the talented Raphael. This deeper look at a painting, a photograph, visual or written art is the process of visual analysis.

Get term paper writer from our professionals. Leave us a message ' write my paper for me ' and we'll deliver the task asap.

Formal Analysis of Art: Who Does It?

Most people who face visual analysis essays are Communication, English, and Art History students. Communications students explore mediums such as theater, print media, news, films, photos — basically anything. Comm is basically a giant, all-encompassing major where visual analysis is synonymous with Tuesday.

Art History students study the world of art to understand how it developed. They do visual analysis with every painting they look it at and discuss it in class.

English Literature students perform visual analysis too. Every writer paints an image in the head of their reader. This image, like a painting, can be clear, or purposefully unclear. It can be factual, to the point, or emotional and abstract like Ulysses, challenging you to search your emotions rather than facts and realities.

How to Conduct Visual Analysis: What to Look For

Whether you study journalism or art, writing a visual analysis essay will be a frequent challenge on your academic journey. The primary principles can be learned and applied to any medium, regardless of whether it’s photography or painting.

For the sake of clarity, we’ve chosen to talk about painting, the most common medium for the formal analysis of art.

In analyzing a painting, there are a few essential points that the writer must know.

Who is the painter, and what era of art did they belong to? Classical painters depict scenes from the Bible, literature, or historical events (like the burning of Rome or the death of Socrates). Modernists, on the other hand, tend to subvert classical themes and offer a different approach to art. Modernism was born as a reaction to classical painting, therefore analyzing modernist art by the standards of classical art would not work.
What was the painter’s purpose? Classical painters like Michelangelo were usually hired by the Vatican or by noble families. Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel just for fun; he was paid to do it.
Who is the audience? Artists like Andy Warhol tried to appeal to the masses. Others like Marcel Duchamp made art for art people, aiming to evolve the art form.
What is the historical context? Research your artist/painting thoroughly before you write. The points of analysis that can be applied to a Renaissance painter cannot be applied to a Surrealist painter. Surrealism is an artistic movement, and understanding its essence is the key to analyzing any surrealist painting.

Familiarizing yourself with these essential points will give you all the information and context, you need to write a good visual analysis essay.

But visual analysis can go deeper than that — especially when dealing with historic pieces of visual art. Students explore different angles of interpretation, the interplay of colors and themes, how the piece was made and various reactions, and critiques of it. Let’s dig deeper.

A Detailed Process of Analyzing Visual Art

Performing a formal analysis of art is a fundamental skill taught at entry-level art history classes. Students who study art or communications further develop this skill through the years. Not all types of analysis apply to every work of art; every art piece is unique. When performing visual analysis, it’s essential to keep in mind why this particular work of art is important in its own way.

Step 1: General Info

To begin, identify the following necessary information on the work of art and the artist.

Subject — who or what does this work represent?
Artist — who is the author of this piece? Refer to them by their last name.
Date and Provenance — when and where this work of art was made. Is it typical to its historical period or geographical location?
Past and Current Locations — where was this work was displayed initially, and where is it now?
Medium and Creation Techniques — what medium was this piece made for and why is it important to that medium? Note which materials were used in its execution and its size.

Step 2: Describe the Painting

Next, describe what the painting depicts or represents. This section will be like an abstract, summarizing all the visible aspects of the piece, painting the image in the reader’s mind. Here are the dominant features to look for in a painting:

Characters or Figures: who they are and what they represent.
If this is a classical painting, identify the story or theme depicted.
If this is an abstract painting, pay attention to shapes and colors.
Lighting and overall mood of the painting.
Identify the setting.

Step 3: Detailed Analysis

The largest chunk of your paper will focus on a detailed visual analysis of the work. This is where you go past the basics and look at the art elements and the principles of design of the work.

Art elements deal mostly with the artist’s intricate painting techniques and basics of composition.

Lines — painters use a variety of lines ranging from straight and horizontal to thick, curved, even implied lines.
Shapes — shapes can be distinct or hidden in plain sight; note all the geometrical patterns of the painting.
Use of Light — identify the source of light, or whether the lighting is flat; see whether the painter chooses contrasting or even colors and explain the significance of their choice in relation to the painting.
Colors — identify how the painter uses color; which colors are primary, which are secondary; what is the tone of the painting (warm or cool?)
Patterns — are there repeating patterns in the painting? These could be figures as well as hidden textural patterns.
Use of Space — what kind of perspective is used in the painting; how does the artist show depth (if they do).
Passage of Time and Motion

Design principles look at the painting from a broader perspective; how the art elements are used to create a rounded experience from an artistic and a thematic perspective.

Variety and Unity - explore how rich and varied the artists’ techniques are and whether they create a sense of unity or chaos.
Symmetry or Asymmetry - identify points of balance in the painting, whether it’s patterns, shapes, or use of colors.
Emphasis - identify the points of focus, both from a thematic and artistic perspective. Does the painter emphasize a particular color or element of architecture?
Proportions - explain how objects and figures work together to provide a sense of scale, mass, and volume to the overall painting.
Use of Rhythm - identify how the artist implies a particular rhythm through their techniques and figures.

Seeing as each work of art is unique, be thoughtful in which art elements and design principles you wish to discuss in your essay. Visual analysis does not limit itself to painting and can also be applied to mediums like photography.

Got Stuck While writing your paper?

Count on the support of the professional writers of our essay writing service .

The Structure: How to Write a Visual Analysis Paper

It’s safe to use the five-paragraph essay structure for your visual analysis essay. If you are looking at a painting, take the most important aspects of it that stand out to you and discuss them in relation to your thesis. Structure it with the simple essay structure:

Introduction: An introduction to a visual analysis essay serves to give basic information on the work of art and briefly summarize the points of discussion.

Give a brief description of the painting: name of artist, year, artistic movement (if necessary), and the artist’s purpose in creating this work.
Briefly describe what is in the painting.
Add interesting facts about the artist, painting, or historical period to give your reader some context.
As in all introductions, don’t forget to include an attention-grabber to get your audience interested in reading your work.

Thesis: In your thesis, state the points of analysis on this work of art which you will discuss in your essay.

Body: Explore the work of art and all of its aspects in detail. Refer to the section above titled “A Detailed Process of Analyzing Visual Art,” which will comprise most of your essay’s body.

Conclusion: After you’ve thoroughly analyzed the painting and the artist’s techniques, give your thoughts and opinions on the work. Your observations should be based on the points of analysis in your essay. Discuss how the art elements and design principles of the artist give the painting meaning and support your observations with facts from your essay.

Citation: Standard citation rules apply to these essays. Use in-text citations when quoting a book, website, journal, or a movie, and include a sources cited page listing your sources. And there’s no need to worry about how to cite a piece of art throughout the text. Explain thoroughly what work of art you’re analyzing in your introduction, and refer to it by name in the body of your essay like this — Transfiguration by Raphael.

If you want a more in-depth look at the classic essay structure, feel free to visit our 5 PARAGRAPH ESSAY blog

Learn From a Visual Analysis Example

Many YouTube videos are analyzing famous paintings like the Death of Socrates, which can be a great art analysis example to go by. But the best way to understand the format and presentation is by looking at a painting analysis essay example done by a scholarly writer. One of our writers has penned an outstanding piece on Leonardo Da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronnière, which you may find below. Use it as a reference point for your visual analysis essay, and you can’t go wrong!

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian artist born in April 1452 and died in May 1519who lived in the Renaissance era. His fame and popularity were based on his painting sand contribution to the Italian artwork. Leonardo was also an active inventor, a vibrant musician, writer, and scientist as well as a talented sculptor amongst other fields. His various career fields proved that he wanted to know everything about nature. In the book “Leonardo Da Vinci: The Mind of the Renaissance” by Alessandro Vezzosi, it is argued that Leonardo was one of the most successful and versatile artists and anatomists of the Italian renaissance based on his unique artwork and paintings (Vezzosi, p1454). Some of his groundbreaking research in medicine, metal-casting, natural science, architecture, and weaponry amongst other fields have been explored in the book. He was doing all these in the renaissance period in Italy from the 1470s till his death.

Visual analysis essays will appear early in your communications and art history degrees. Learning how to formally analyze art is an essential skill, whether you intend to pursue a career in art or communications.

Before diving into analysis, get a solid historical background on the painter and their life. Analyzing a painting isn’t mere entertainment; one must pay attention to intricate details which the painter might have hidden from plain sight.

We live in an environment saturated by digital media. By gaining the skill of visual analysis, you will not only heighten your appreciation of the arts but be able to thoroughly analyze the media messages you face in your daily life.

Also, don't forget to read summary of Lord of the Flies , and the article about Beowulf characters .

Need Someone to Write Your Paper?

If you read the whole article and still have no idea how to start your visual analysis essay, let a professional writer do this job for you. Contact us, and we’ll write your work for a higher grade you deserve. All ' college essay service ' requests are processed fast.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

National Museum of African American History & Culture

Plan Your Visit
Group Visits
Frequently Asked Questions
Accessibility Options
Sweet Home Café
Museum Store
Museum Maps
Our Mobile App
Search the Collection
Initiatives
Museum Centers
Publications
Digital Resource Guide
The Searchable Museum
Exhibitions
Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal
Early Childhood
Talking About Race
Digital Learning
Strategic Partnerships
Ways to Give
Internships & Fellowships
Today at the Museum
Upcoming Events
Ongoing Tours & Activities
Past Events
Host an Event at NMAAHC
About the Museum
The Building
Meet Our Curators
Founding Donors
Corporate Leadership Councils
NMAAHC Annual Reports

The Importance of Visual Art

Visual art is a fundamental component of the human experience reflecting the world and the time in which we live. Art can help us understand our history, our culture, our lives, and the experience of others in a manner that cannot be achieved through other means. It can also be a source of inspiration, reflection, and joy.

Visual Art and the American Experience is a testament to the power of art and its connection to our national heritage. Through the exploration of various themes, eras, and artistic styles, the exhibition will serve as a lens through which we can learn about the history of American art and the African American experience.

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

Visual Arts - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Visual arts encompass a wide range of artistic expressions that are created to be appreciated primarily for their aesthetic or emotional impact. Essays on visual arts could delve into the exploration of different art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, and digital art. Discussions might also explore the evolution of visual arts, the impact of technological advancements, and the significance of visual arts in cultural and societal contexts. Moreover, analyzing the works of significant artists, the aesthetic principles, and the therapeutic and educational value of engaging in visual arts can provide a comprehensive understanding of the enriching and diverse world of visual arts. A vast selection of complimentary essay illustrations pertaining to Visual Arts you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Visual Arts Analysis: ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’

In the realm of art history, few works have encapsulated the raw power of divine calling as vividly as Caravaggio's "The Calling of Saint Matthew." This masterpiece, painted between 1599 and 1600, remains a pivotal work that not only exemplifies Caravaggio’s pioneering use of chiaroscuro but also captures an intense and intimate biblical moment. Caravaggio's treatment of this scene from the Gospel of Matthew (9:9) is as dramatic as it is groundbreaking. The painting shows Matthew, a tax collector, sitting […]

Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo

Both Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo belonged to the period names High Renaissance. This beginning in 1490’s and ending in 1527. This period was also referenced as the “Hochrenaissance” in the early 19th century. Leonardo Da Vinci was a well-known painter throughout renaissance. He was not just a painter but also a scientist, inventor, and philosopher. Leonardo was known as an Italian polymath which means he is a person who has a very wide range of expertise in a specific […]

The Art between the Creation of Adam and Mona Lisa

Over the pass hundreds of years, there has been all types of beautiful artwork. More than thousands of artworks are in our museums today that has so much meaning and potential. I would like to talk about and to analyze two types of artwork that I find fascinating Today, the creation of Adam and the Mona Lisa. Although these paintings are fascinating to see there's a lot of meaning behind these artworks such as the elements and principle, they have […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Raphael – Essay

Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael are all considered a great in their own considered fields however, they are all different in their artistic styles. Who was the better artist of the Renaissance and The Late Middle Ages. Leonardo Da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, Raphael was born on April 6,1520. Michelangelo was born on March 6,1475. All of these artist have different painting styles. Leonardo Da Vinci typically painted with oil paint that he made by hand […]

The Evolution of Art in Mexican Culture

When the world thinks about art we think about paintings and sculptures. But what comes from it? When art is tied with culture you create this everlasting piece of work that has an impact on those who come across it. The significance of each work of art differs from the next. In this research paper we will indulge into the background of art in Mexican culture. Art in Mexico has shifted and continues to modernize because of the customs that […]

Frida Kahlo: a Bibliography and Analysis

"In this research paper I will discuss a brief biography on the artist Frida Kahlo and a cultural and historical context of the two images I chose for this paper. I will focus on a formal analysis on two of Kahlo’s famous paintings, Henry Ford Hospital (Fig 1.) and Self Portrait Along the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States (Fig 2). I will be comparing/analyzing the two paintings based on the subject, space, size, and dimensions. My research […]

Religion and the Renaissance

Religion is not easy to define. Many people have their own definitions of religion based on how they perform their religious beliefs. Religion can be a specific underlying set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or faith community. In the dictionaries religion is defined as “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” The Florence Cathedral depicts religion through the artifacts inside that have a religious […]

Extended Essay Final Draft By: Esther Natal

Frida Kahlo is now recognized as the greatest twentieth century female artist. Her art explores female themes that are still relevant and timeless, and her work remains iconic for the feminist movement. Frida Kahlo is often iconized by the feminist movement because of the appeal of her images to women, her efforts to claim her Mexican cultural heritage, and her role in expressing evolving gender roles The 6th of July, 1907, in the City of Mexico, Frida Kahlo was born […]

Andy Warhol’s Life and Career

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 6, 1928. His family were immigrants from Carpatho-Rusyn, which is now known as Eastern Slovakia (Andy Warhol's Life). Warhol's family was a religious one, being devout Catholics, they attended mass regularly and kept to their heritage (Andy Warhol's Life). When he was six years old, they moved to a South Oakland neighborhood to be closer to the church they attended, St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic (Andy Warhol's Life). Warhol's childhood was […]

Caravaggio and Caravaggisti in Th-Century Europe

Caravaggio's painting, Death of a Virgin, is painted in a very dark style and he painted Virgin Mary in a very realistic style that is very characteristic of him. Caravaggio painted Virgin Mary like an average modern Roman and he was criticized for portraying her in a very indecent way. Virgin Mary is painted in a style that is usual of the Baroque by having her laying diagonal. Caravaggio spent a lot of time in detailing each aspect of the […]

High Renaissance and the Amazing Artists

"In week two we discussed the High Renaissance and the amazing artists, arts, and styles that were brought up during that time. The High Renaissance was a time period beginning in the 1490’s in the Italian states that truly had amazing artistic production. This time period was greatly dominated by three famous and intellectual artists named Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. This time period flourished for about 35 years, from the 1490’s to 1527. The High Renaissance originated in […]

Renaissance Art: the Madonna of the Rocks

Interpreting historical paintings is as interesting as they are challenging, more so considering that the artist who made them did not write prefaces to enlighten viewers about the theme of their work and the purpose they served. This omission leaves these works to several, sometimes conflicting interpretations. One such painting is The Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci, which depicts the Virgin Mary, the angel Gabriel, baby Jesus and baby John the Baptist in a cave. I chose […]

1300 Italian Art

During the 1300s, Italian Art made a tremendous impact on a variety of people and still does today. Not only was this a turning point for Italian art because of the Renaissance but also because of the realism and new techniques that were brought about during this time. The art reflected the modernization that this time period was entering. These numerous characteristics, styles, and influential artists all displayed the feelings and emotions of the 1300s. The innovations made in the […]

Art : Mona Lisa

Art is the skill and imagination exercise by the expression of human creativity. We have seen different kinds of art like painting and sculpture that has amazed us throughout our life. There are lots of historical art in this world which were created by some of the legendary artists. Among that Mona Lisa artwork of Leonardo da Vinci is also listed as one of the greatest, famous and amazing artwork of all time. Leonardo da Vinci was one of the […]

Biography of Frida Kahlo

For this assignment, I chose to write about Frida Kahlo. About a year ago, I was not familiarized with many artists except for the well none artist you hear about everywhere, such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo Da Vinci; so when I stumbled upon Frida Kahlo on Google images I was impressed to have found not only a well-known female artist but also a Mexican female artist. Being a child of grown are raised Mexican parents made […]

Leonardo Da Vinci and his Artwork

Leonardo da Vinci is an artist who made paintings, sculptures, architecture and he was also an inventor under military engineering. Leonardo was from a peasant family his mum known as Caterina, and the father's name was Ser Piero. He was born in the town of Vinci on 15th April of the year 1452 (""Leonardo da Vinci"" 56). His parents were no living together and due to the struggles that Leonardo experienced he decided to move to Florence city when he […]

“The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne” by Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was had an interest in studying landscapes, which can be seen in his painting called, the Annunciation, in which the artist was attentive in producing a persuasive illusion of the nature features of the painting using light and dark oil paints to create dimension (Brown 76). Leonardo’s primary intent was to juxtapose his characters in an environment. In his original painting, Leonardo u create a mountain range using the gradual and irregular grading of blues that fades […]

Effect Science had on the Art during the Three Major Art Periods

"In this paper, I will discuss the effect science had on the art during the three major art periods, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo. As a part of the discussion, I will examine one art from each art period. One of the greatest artists of the Renaissance period was Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo was an Italian polymath. He was great at many disciplines both humanitarian and scientific in nature. He was skilled in drawing, painting, sculpting, carpentry, metallurgy, chemistry, mathematics and […]

Caravaggio a World-renowned Painter

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a world-renowned painter. Actively painting from 1584 to his controversial death in 1610. Merisi was most renowned for his use of the art technique known as chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro refers to the use of bold contrasts of light and dark which affect the whole piece, adding volume or solidarity. Many artists and art historians would agree that Caravaggio had a large influence on the Baroque style of painting. The Baroque style is often characterized by "... […]

A Tour of Five Eras

The best representatives of Greek and Roman culture for the Greco-Roman room of the museum are Funerary Crater and Emperor Caracalla, respectively. Funerary Crater, a terra cotta amphora created by an unknown artist in the eighth century BC, is decorated with black-figure images, mainly depicting mythological symbols and scenes (Benton and DiYanni, 2014, p. 38). This fits well with the Greek culture, which was totally permeated by mythological ideas; a vase such as this one would have been used in […]

Frida Kahlo’s Broken Canvas: Pain, Perseverance, and the Quest for Freedom

The artwork includes both elements of design and principles of design. Horizontal lines are found on several areas such as the straps painted onto Frida Kahlo for support and the lines included in the background depicts the terrain as dry and harsh. The lines are also used to divide the sky from the terrain. The shape of Frida Kahlo’s skin, hair, and breasts are soft while other parts in the piece are depicted more concrete and hard-edged such as the […]

Analyzing Changes in the ‘Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’ Painting

A rendition of the renowned painting found in the Louvre that was created by Leonardo da Vinci himself, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne by Gian Giacomo Capriotti or Sali was painted in the workshop of Leonardo under his direct supervision. Changes done to the painting, such as inclusion of undergrowth, trees, rendering of light, color and alterations of figures, were made purposefully to bring to life Leonardo’s various ideas for the painting that he left unfinished or hidden […]

Mexican Artist – Frida Kahlo

Frida kahlo was one of the most influential Mexican artists. Frida painted self portraits. She was inspired by Mexico’s well liked culture. She painted folk art, gender, race in the mexican society. Frida the well known artist in Mexico died on July 13, 1954. Kahlo was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1907. Frida went to National Preparatory School. She was one of the few females that went to the school. She joined the Young Communist League and the Mexican […]

Biography of Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo was born in April 15, 1452, Italy, and he died on May 2, 1519, France. While he was growing, he was exposed to Vinci's long standing painting tradition. When Leonardo was about 15 years old, his father apprenticed him to the well-known workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. As an trainee, Leonardo proved his great talent. One of Leonardo's first big breaks was to paint an angel in""Baptism of Christ."" He was so much better than his master's […]

Every Artist has a Different Muse

The 20th century is a very interesting era, planished with different artists and art movements. One of the greatest art movement was surrealism, it was not only an artistic movement but also a literary one. Surrealism was an important movement because of the end of the World War I and the Mexican revolution. Surrealists—inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious—believed insanity was the breaking of the chains of logic, and they represented this idea in their art […]

Painting of Mona Lisa

A painting which doesn't have words but can explain everything just by a view of the true artist. One of the most beautiful works in history is a painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo in the city Florence between 1503 and 1505. Mona Lisa was beautiful wife of Francesco del Gioconda, but Leonardo never gives the portrait to Francesco. Instead, he kept it with himself. They are the much more profound meaning of the painting some say it is the […]

“A Picture Says a Thousand Words”

A wise man once said, "A picture says a thousand words." I have found one of the best painting ever made in the art world. It none other than the famous "The Mona Lisa." For some people, it is just a painting of a woman, but others it’s like the best romantic painting ever. One of the most beautiful works in history is a painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci in the city of Florence between 1503 and […]

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Y Calderon

Magdalena Carmene Frida Kahlo y Calderón, otherwise known as Frida Kahlo, was born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico. She was the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrant photographer, Guillermo Kahlo, and Matilde Calderón. Kahlo studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, where she was one of thirty-five girls in a student body of two thousand. In 1925, Kahlo was in a traffic accident and her spine and pelvis were fractured. While she recovered she began to paint. In 1929, Kahlo […]

Advances in Arts: Exploring the Evolution from Renaissance to Rococo

Advances in arts and sciences generally go hand in hand, as we have seen from the Classical era to the Modern. This is true especially for the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo eras. When we think of the arts and science of the Renaissance one man comes to mind before all others, Leonard da Vinci. Scientific expansion during the Baroque era was achieved with a shift towards observation. Scientific expansion during the Baroque era was achieved with a shift towards observation. […]

An Analysis of Great Quattrocento and High Renaissance Art

An interesting tradition among the dining rooms of convents and monasteries in Italy is the depiction of the Last Supper, where Christ administered the Eucharist to his Disciples on the night he was betrayed. Both Andrea del Castagno’s and Leonardo da Vinci’s depictions of the Last Supper are intimate, as monks and nuns dine with Christ and his disciples each evening. With diverse facial expression and hand gesture, Del Castagno’s The Last Supper is indicative in style of the Quattrocento, […]

Margin Size

Download Page (PDF)
Download Full Book (PDF)
Periodic Table
Physics Constants
Scientific Calculator
Reference & Cite
Tools expand_more
Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

1.2: What is Visual Art?

Last updated
Save as PDF
Page ID 10109

Pamela Sachant, Peggy Blood, Jeffery LeMieux, & Rita Tekippe

Pamela Sachant, Peggy Blood, Jeffery LeMieux, & Rita Tekippe
University System of Georgia via GALILEO Open Learning Materials

$ \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } $

$ \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} $

$ \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}$ $ \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}$

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) $ \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}$

$ \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}$ $ \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}$

$ \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}$ $ \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}$

$ \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}$

$ \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}$

$ \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}$

$ \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}$

$ \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}$

$ \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}$

$ \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}$

$ \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}$

$ \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}$

$ \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}$ $ \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}$

$ \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}} % arrow$

$ \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}} % arrow$

$ \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } $

$ \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} $

$ \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} $

$ \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} $

$ \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} $

To explore a subject, we need first to define it. Defining art, however, proves elusive. You may have heard it said (or even said it yourself) that “it might be art, but it’s not Art,” which means, “I might not know how to define it, but I know it when I see it.”

Everywhere we look, we see images designed to command our attention, including images of desire, images of power, religious images, images meant to recall memories, and images intended to manipulate our appetites. But are they art?

Some languages do not have a separate word for art. In those cultures, objects tend to be utilitarian in purpose but often include in their design the intent to delight, portray a special status, or commemorate an important event or ritual. Thus, while the objects are not considered art, they do have artistic functions.

1.2.1 Historic Development of the Idea of Art

The idea of art has developmentally progressed from human prehistory to the present day. Changes to the definition of art over time can be seen as attempts to resolve problems with earlier definitions. The ancient Greeks saw the goal of visual art as copying, or mimesis. Nineteenth-century art theorists promoted the idea that art is communication: it produces feelings in the viewer. In the early twentieth century, the idea of significant form, the quality shared by aesthetically pleasing objects, was proposed as a definition of art. Today, many artists and thinkers agree with the institutional theory of art, which shifts focus from the work of art itself to who has the power to decide what is and is not art. While this progression of definitions of art is not exhaustive, it is instructive.

1.2.1.1 Mimesis

The ancient Greek definition of art as mimesis , or imitation of the real world, appears in the myth of Zeuxis and Parhassios, rival painters from ancient Greece in the late fifth century BCE who competed for the title of greatest artist. (Figure 1.2) Zeuxis painted a bowl of grapes that was so lifelike that birds came down to peck at the image of fruit. Parhassios was unimpressed with this achievement. When viewing Parhassios’s work, Zeuxis, on his part, asked that the curtain over the painting be drawn back so he could see his rival’s work more clearly. Parhassios declared himself the victor because the curtain was the painting, and while Zeuxis fooled the birds with his work, Parhassios fooled a thinking human being—a much more difficult feat.

Figure 1.2 Zeuxis conceding defeat: "I have deceived the birds, but Parhassios has deceived Zeuxis." Artist: Joachim von Sandrart; engraving by Johann Jakob von Sandrart Author: (Public Domain; “Fae”).

The ancient Greeks felt that the visual artist’s goal was to copy visual experience. This approach appears in the realism of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery. We must sadly note that, due to the action of time and weather, no paintings from ancient Greek artists exist today. We can only surmise their quality based on tales such as that of Zeuxis and Parhassios, the obvious skill in ancient Greek sculpture, and in drawings that survive on ancient Greek pottery.

This definition of art as copying reality has a problem, though. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956, USA), a leader in the New York School of the 1950’s, intentionally did not copy existing objects in his art. (Figure 1.3) While painting these works, Pollock and his fellow artists would consciously avoid making marks or passages that resembled recognizable objects. They succeeded at making artwork that did not copy anything, thus demonstrating that the ancient Greek view of art as mimesis—simple copying—does not sufficiently define art.

Figure 1.3 Left: The She-Wolf; Right: Gothic, Artist: Jackson Pollock, Author: (CC BY-SA 4.0; "Group de Besanez")

1.2.1.2 Communication

A later attempt at defining art comes from the nineteenth-century Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy wrote on many subjects, and is the author of the great novel War and Peace (1869). He was also an art theorist. He proposed that art is the communication of feeling , stating, “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”1

This definition does not succeed because it is impossible to confirm that the feelings of the artist have been successfully conveyed to another person. Further, suppose an artist created a work of art that no one else ever saw. Since no feeling had been communicated through it, would it still be a work of art? The work did not “hand on to others” anything at all because it was never seen. Therefore, it would fail as art according to Tolstoy’s definition.

1 Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? And Essays on Art, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 123.

1.2.1.3 Significant Form

To address these limitations of existing definitions of art, in 1913 English art critic Clive Bell proposed that art is significant form , or the “quality that brings us aesthetic pleasure.” Bell stated, “to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour.”2 In Bell’s view, the term “form” simply means line, shape, mass, as well as color. Significant form is the collection of those elements that rises to the level of your awareness and gives you noticeable pleasure in its beauty. Unfortunately, aesthetics , pleasure in the beauty and appreciation of art, are impossible to measure or reliably define. What brings aesthetic pleasure to one person may not affect another. Aesthetic pleasure exists only in the viewer, not in the object. Thus significant form is purely subjective. While Clive Bell did advance the debate about art by moving it away from requiring strict representation, his definition gets us no closer to understanding what does or does not qualify as an art object.

1.2.1.4 Art world

One definition of art widely held today was first promoted in the 1960s by American philosophers George Dickie and Arthur Danto, and is called the institutional theory of art, or the “Artworld” theory. In the simplest version of this theory, art is an object or set of conditions that has been designated as art by a “person or persons acting on behalf of the artworld,” and the artworld is a “complex field of forces” that determine what is and is not art.3 Unfortunately, this definition gets us no further along because it is not about art at all! Instead, it is about who has the power to define art, which is a political issue, not an aesthetic one.

2 Clive Bell, “Art and Significant Form,” in Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1913), 2

3 George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 464.

1.2.2 Definition of Art

We each perceive the world from our own position or perspective and from that perception we make a mental image of the world. Science is the process of turning perceptions into a coherent mental picture of the universe through testing and observation. (Figure 1.4) Science moves concepts from the world into the mind. Science is vitally important because it allows us to understand how the world works and to use that understanding to make good predictions. Art is the other side of our experience with the world. Art moves ideas from the mind into the world .

Figure 1.4 Perception: Art and Science, Author: Jeffrey LeMieux, (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We need both art and science to exist in the world. From our earliest age, we both observe the world and do things to change it. We are all both scientists and artists. Every human activity has both a science (observation) and an art (expression) to it. Anyone who has participated in the discipline of Yoga, for example, can see that even something as simple as breathing has both an art and a science to it.

This definition of art covers the wide variety of objects that we see in museums, on social media, or even in our daily walk to work. But this definition of art is not enough. The bigger question is: what art is worthy of our attention, and how do we know when we have found it? Ultimately, each of us must answer that question for ourselves.

But we do have help if we want it. People who have made a disciplined study of art can offer ideas about what art is important and why. In the course of this text, we will examine some of those ideas about art. Due to the importance of respecting the individual, the decision about what art is best must belong to the individual. We ask only that the student understand the ideas as presented.

When challenged with a question or problem about what is best, we first ask, “What do I personally know about it?” When we realize our personal resources are limited, we might ask friends, neighbors, and relatives what they know. In addition to these important resources, the educated person can refer to a larger body of possible solutions drawn from a study of the history of literature, philosophy, and art: What did the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley say about truth in his essay Defense of Poetry (1840)? (Figure 1.5) What did the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claim about human nature in his treatise Emile or On Education (1762)? (Figure 1.6) What did Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675, Netherlands) show us about the quiet dignity of the domestic space in his painting Woman Holding a Balance? (Figure 1.7) Through experiencing these works of art and literature, our ideas about such things can be tested and validated or found wanting.

Figure 1.5 Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Artist: Alfred Clint, Author: (Public Domain; "Dcoetzee"). Figure 1.6 Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Artist: Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Author: (Public Domain; "Maarten van Vilet"). Figure 1.7 Woman Holding a Balance, Artist: Johannes Vermeer, Author: (Public Domain; " DcoetzeeBot")

We will examine works of visual art from a diverse range of cultures and periods. The challenge for you as the reader is to increase your ability to interpret works of art through the use of context, visual dynamics, and introspection, and to integrate them into a coherent worldview. The best outcome of an encounter with art is an awakening of the mind and spirit to a new point of view. A mind stretched beyond itself never returns to its original dimension.

1.2.3 The Distinction of Fine Art

From our definition of art proposed above, it would seem that craft and fine art are indistinguishable as both come from the mind into the world. But the distinction between craft and art is real and important. This distinction is most commonly understood as one based on the use or end purpose of an object, or as an effect of the material used. Clay, textiles, glass, and jewelry were long considered the province of craft, not art. If an object’s intended use was a part of daily living, then it was generally thought to be the product of craft, not fine art. But many objects originally intended to be functional, such as quilts, are now thought to qualify as fine art. (Figure 1.8)

Figure 1.8 Quilt, Artist: Lucy Mingo, Author: (CC BY-SA 4.0, " Billvolckening")

So what could be the difference between art and craft? Anyone who has been exposed to training in a craft such as carpentry or plumbing recognizes that craft follows a formula, that is, a set of rules that govern not only how the work is to be conducted but also what the outcome of that work must be. The level of craft is judged by how closely the end product matches the pre-determined outcome. We want our houses to stand and water to flow when we turn on our faucets. Fine art, on the other hand, results from a free and open-ended exploration that does not depend on a pre-determined formula for its outcome or validity. Its outcome is surprising and original. Almost all fine art objects are a combination of some level both of craft and art. Art stands on craft, but goes beyond it.

1.2.4 Why Art Matters

American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is considered a “father of the atomic bomb” for the role he played in developing nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II (1939-1945). (Figure 1.9) Upon completion of the project, quoting from the Hindu epic tale Bhagavad Gita, he stated, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Clearly, Oppenheimer had read more than physics texts in his education, which fit him well for his important role during World War II.

Figure 1.9 J. Robert Oppenheimer, Author: Los Alamos National Laboratory, (Public Domain)

When we train in mathematics and the sciences, for example, we become very powerful. Power can be used well or badly. Where in our schools is the coursework on how to use power wisely? Today a liberal arts college education requires students to survey the arts and history of human cultures in order to examine a wide range of ideas about wisdom and to humanize the powerful. With that in mind, in every course taken in the university, it is hoped that you will recognize the need to couple your increasing intellectual power with a study of what is thought to be wisdom, and to view each educational experience in the humanities as part of the search for what is better in ourselves and our communities.

This text is not intended to determine what is or is not good art and why it matters. Rather, the point of this text is to equip you with intellectual tools that will enable you to analyze, decipher, and interpret works of art as bearers of meaning, to make your own decisions about the merit of those works, and then usefully to integrate those decisions into your daily lives.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

View all journals
My Account Login
Explore content
About the journal
Publish with us
Sign up for alerts
Open access
Published: 31 October 2017

The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities

Remco Roes 1 &
Kris Pint 1

Palgrave Communications volume 3 , Article number: 8 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

9718 Accesses

1 Altmetric

Metrics details

Archaeology
Cultural and media studies

What could be the place of artistic research in current contemporary scholarship in the humanities? The following essay addresses this question while using as a case study a collaborative artistic project undertaken by two artists, Remco Roes (Belgium) and Alis Garlick (Australia). We argue that the recent integration of arts into academia requires a hybrid discourse, which has to be distinguished both from the artwork itself and from more conventional forms of academic research. This hybrid discourse explores the whole continuum of possible ways to address our existential relationship with the environment: ranging from aesthetic, multi-sensorial, associative, affective, spatial and visual modes of ‘knowledge’ to more discursive, analytical, contextualised ones. Here, we set out to defend the visual essay as a useful tool to explore the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human culture, both in the still developing field of artistic research and in more established fields of research. It is a genre that enables us to articulate this knowledge, as a transformative process of meaning-making, supplementing other modes of inquiry in the humanities.

Introduction

In Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011), Tim Ingold defines anthropology as ‘a sustained and disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life’ (Ingold, 2011 , p. 9). For Ingold, artistic practice plays a crucial part in this inquiry. He considers art not merely as a potential object of historical, sociological or ethnographic research, but also as a valuable form of anthropological inquiry itself, providing supplementary methods to understand what it is ‘to be human’.

In a similar vein, Mark Johnson’s The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding (2007) offers a revaluation of art ‘as an essential mode of human engagement with and understanding of the world’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 10). Johnson argues that art is a useful epistemological instrument because of its ability to intensify the ordinary experience of our environment. Images Footnote 1 are the expression of our on-going, complex relation with an inner and outer environment. In the process of making images of our environment, different bodily experiences, like affects, emotions, feelings and movements are mobilised in the creation of meaning. As Johnson argues, this happens in every process of meaning-making, which is always based on ‘deep-seated bodily sources of human meaning that go beyond the merely conceptual and propositional’ (Ibid., p. 11). The specificity of art simply resides in the fact that it actively engages with those non-conceptual, non-propositional forms of ‘making sense’ of our environment. Art is thus able to take into account (and to explore) many other different meaningful aspects of our human relationship with the environment and thus provide us with a supplementary form of knowledge. Hence Ingold’s remark in the introduction of Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013): ‘Could certain practices of art, for example, suggest new ways of doing anthropology? If there are similarities between the ways in which artists and anthropologists study the world, then could we not regard the artwork as a result of something like an anthropological study, rather than as an object of such study? […] could works of art not be regarded as forms of anthropology, albeit ‘written’ in non-verbal media?’ (Ingold, 2013 , p. 8, italics in original).

And yet we would hesitate to unreservedly answer yes to these rhetorical questions. For instance, it is true that one can consider the works of Francis Bacon as an anthropological study of violence and fear, or the works of John Cage as a study in indeterminacy and chance. But while they can indeed be seen as explorations of the ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, the artworks themselves do not make this knowledge explicit. What is lacking here is the logos of anthropology, logos in the sense of discourse, a line of reasoning. Therefore, while we agree with Ingold and Johnson, the problem remains how to explicate and communicate the knowledge that is contained within works of art, how to make it discursive ? How to articulate artistic practice as an alternative, yet valid form of scholarly research?

Here, we believe that a clear distinction between art and artistic research is necessary. The artistic imaginary is a reaction to the environment in which the artist finds himself: this reaction does not have to be conscious and deliberate. The artist has every right to shrug his shoulders when he is asked for the ‘meaning’ of his work, to provide a ‘discourse’. He can simply reply: ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I do not want to know’, as a refusal to engage with the step of articulating what his work might be exploring. Likewise, the beholder or the reader of a work of art does not need to learn from it to appreciate it. No doubt, he may have gained some understanding about ‘human existence’ after reading a novel or visiting an exhibition, but without the need to spell out this knowledge or to further explore it.

In contrast, artistic research as a specific, inquisitive mode of dealing with the environment requires an explicit articulation of what is at stake, the formulation of a specific problem that determines the focus of the research. ‘Problem’ is used here in the neutral, etymological sense of the word: something ‘thrown forward’, a ‘hindrance, obstacle’ (cf. probleima , Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon). A body-in-an-environment finds something thrown before him or her, an issue that grabs the attention. A problem is something that urges us to explore a field of experiences, the ‘potentials of human life’ that are opened up by a work of art. It is often only retroactively, during a second, reflective phase of the artistic research, that a formulation of a problem becomes possible, by a selection of elements that strikes one as meaningful (again, in the sense Johnson defines meaningful, thus including bodily perceptions, movements, affects, feelings as meaningful elements of human understanding of reality). This process opens up, to borrow a term used by Aby Warburg, a ‘Denkraum’ (cf. Gombrich, 1986 , p. 224): it creates a critical distance from the environment, including the environment of the artwork itself: this ‘space for thought’ allows one to consciously explore a specific problem. Consciously here does not equal cerebral: the problem is explored not only in its intellectual, but also in its sensual and emotional, affective aspects. It is projected along different lines in this virtual Denkraum , lines that cross and influence each other: an existential line turns into a line of form and composition; a conceptual line merges into a narrative line, a technical line echoes an autobiographical line. There is no strict hierarchy in the different ‘emanations’ of a problem. These are just different lines contained within the work that interact with each other, and the problem can ‘move’ from one line to another, develop and transform itself along these lines, comparable perhaps to the way a melody develops itself when it is transposed to a different musical scale, a different musical instrument, or even to a different musical genre. But, however, abstract or technical one formulates a problem, following Johnson we argue that a problem is always a translation of a basic existential problem, emerging from a specific environment. We fully agree with Johnson when he argues that ‘philosophy becomes relevant to human life only by reconnecting with, and grounding itself in, bodily dimensions of human meaning and value. Philosophy needs a visceral connection to lived experience’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 263). The same goes for artistic research. It too finds its relevance in the ‘visceral connection’ with a specific body, a specific situation.

Words are one way of disclosing this lived experience, but within the context of an artistic practice one can hardly ignore the potential for images to provide us with an equally valuable account. In fact, they may even prove most suited to establish the kind of space that comes close to this multi-threaded, embodied Denkraum . In order to illustrate this, we would like to present a case study, a short visual ‘essay’ (however, since the scope of four spreads offers only limited space, it is better to consider it as the image-equivalent of a short research note).

Case study: step by step reading of a visual essay

The images (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) form a short visual essay based on a collaborative artistic project 'Exercises of the man (v)' that Remco Roes and Alis Garlick realised for the Situation Symposium at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne in 2014. One of the conceptual premises of the project was the communication of two physical ‘sites’ through digital media. Roes—located in Belgium—would communicate with Garlick—in Australia—about an installation that was to be realised at the physical location of the exhibition in Melbourne. Their attempts to communicate (about) the site were conducted via e-mail messages, Skype-chats and video conversations. The focus of these conversations increasingly distanced itself from the empty exhibition space of the Design Hub and instead came to include coincidental spaces (and objects) that happened to be close at hand during the 3-month working period leading up to the exhibition. The focus of the project thus shifted from attempting to communicate a particular space towards attempting to communicate the more general experience of being in(side) a space. The project led to the production of a series of small in-situ installations, a large series of video’s and images, a book with a selection of these images as well as texts from the conversations, and the final exhibition in which artefacts that were found during the collaborative process were exhibited. A step by step reading of the visual argument contained within images of this project illustrates how a visual essay can function as a tool for disclosing/articulating/communicating the kind of embodied thinking that occurs within an artistic practice or practice-based research.

Figure 1 shows (albeit in reduced form) a field of photographs and video stills that summarises the project without emphasising any particular aspect. Each of the Figs. 2 – 5 isolate different parts of this same field in an attempt to construct/disclose a form of visual argument (that was already contained within the work). In the final part of this essay we will provide an illustration of how such visual sequences can be possibly ‘read’.

First image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Second image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Third image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fourth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fifth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Figure 1 is a remnant of the first step that was taken in the creation of the series of images: significant, meaningful elements in the work of art are brought together. At first, we quite simply start by looking at what is represented in the pictures, and how they are presented to us. This act of looking almost inevitably turns these images into a sequence, an argument. Conditioned by the dominant linearity of writing, including images (for instance in a comic book) one ‘reads’ the images from left to right, one goes from the first spread to the last. Just like one could say that a musical theme or a plot ‘develops’, the series of images seem to ‘develop’ the problem, gradually revealing its complexity. The dominance of this viewing code is not to be ignored, but is of course supplemented by the more ‘holistic’ nature of visual perception (cf. the notion of ‘Gestalt’ in the psychology of perception). So unlike a ‘classic’ argumentation, the discursive sequence is traversed by resonance, by non-linearity, by correspondences between elements both in a single image and between the images in their specific positioning within the essay. These correspondences reveal the synaesthetic nature of every process of meaning-making: ‘The meaning of something is its relations, actual and potential, to other qualities, things, events, and experiences. In pragmatist lingo, the meaning of something is a matter of how it connects to what has gone before and what it entails for present or future experiences and actions’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 265). The images operate in a similar way, by bringing together different actions, affects, feelings and perceptions into a complex constellation of meaningful elements that parallel each other and create a field of resonance. These connections occur between different elements that ‘disturb’ the logical linearity of the discourse, for instance by the repetition of a specific element (the blue/yellow opposition, or the repetition of a specific diagonal angle).

Confronted with these images, we are now able to delineate more precisely the problem they express. In a generic sense we could formulate it as follows: how to communicate with someone who does not share my existential space, but is nonetheless visually and acoustically present? What are the implications of the kind of technology that makes such communication possible, for the first time in human history? How does it influence our perception and experience of space, of materiality, of presence?

Artistic research into this problem explores the different ways of meaning-making that this new existential space offers, revealing the different conditions and possibilities of this new spatiality. But it has to be stressed that this exploration of the problem happens on different lines, ranging from the kinaesthetic perception to the emotional and affective response to these spaces and images. It would, thus, be wrong to reduce these experiences to a conceptual framework. In their actions, Roes and Garlick do not ‘make a statement’: they quite simply experiment with what their bodies can do in such a hybrid space, ‘wandering’ in this field of meaningful experiences, this Denkraum , that is ‘opened up’: which meaningful clusters of sensations, affects, feelings, spatial and kinaesthetic qualities emerge in such a specific existential space?

In what follows, we want to focus on some of these meaningful clusters. As such, these comments are not part of the visual essay itself. One could compare them to ‘reading remarks’, a short elaboration on what strikes one as relevant. These comments also do not try to ‘crack the code’ of the visual material, as if they were merely a visual and/or spatial rebus to be solved once and for all (‘ x stands for y’ ). They rather attempt to engage in a dialogue with the images, a dialogue that of course does not claim to be definitive or exhaustive.

The constellation itself generates a sense of ‘lacking’: we see that there are two characters intensely collaborating and interacting with each other, while never sharing the same space. They are performing, or watching the other perform: drawing a line (imaginary or physically), pulling, wrapping, unpacking, watching, framing, balancing. The small arrangements, constructions or compositions that are made as a result of these activities are all very fragile, shaky and their purpose remains unclear. Interaction with the other occurs only virtually, based on the manipulation of small objects and fragments, located in different places. One of the few materials that eventually gets physically exported to the other side, is a kind of large plastic cover. Again, one should not ‘read’ the picture of Roes with this plastic wrapped around his head as an expression, a ‘symbol’ of individual isolation, of being wrapped up in something. It is simply the experience of a head that disappears (as a head appears and disappears on a computer screen when it gets disconnected), and the experience of a head that is covered up: does it feel like choking, or does it provide a sense of shelter, protection?

A different ‘line’ operates simultaneously in the same image: that of a man standing on a double grid: the grid of the wet street tiles and an alternative, oblique grid of colourful yellow elements, a grid which is clearly temporal, as only the grid of the tiles will remain. These images are contrasted with the (obviously staged) moment when the plastic arrives at ‘the other side’: the claustrophobia is now replaced with the openness of the horizon, the presence of an open seascape: it gives a synaesthetic sense of a fresh breeze that seems lacking in the other images.

In this case, the contrast between the different spaces is very clear, but in other images we also see an effort to unite these different spaces. The problem can now be reformulated, as it moves to another line: how to demarcate a shared space that is both actual and virtual (with a ribbon, the positioning of a computer screen?), how to communicate with each other, not only with words or body language, but also with small artefacts, ‘meaningless’ junk? What is the ‘common ground’ on which to walk, to exchange things—connecting, lining up with the other? And here, the layout of the images (into a spread) adds an extra dimension to the original work of art. The relation between the different bodies does now not only take place in different spaces, but also in different fields of representation: there is the space of the spread, the photographed space and in the photographs, the other space opened up by the computer screen, and the interaction between these levels. We see this in the Fig. 3 where Garlick’s legs are projected on the floor, framed by two plastic beakers: her black legging echoing with the shadows of a chair or a tripod. This visual ‘rhyme’ within the image reveals how a virtual presence interferes with what is present.

The problem, which can be expressed in this fundamental opposition between presence/absence, also resonates with other recurring oppositions that rhythmically structure these images. The images are filled with blue/yellow elements: blue lines of tape, a blue plexi form, yellow traces of paint, yellow objects that are used in the video’s, but the two tones are also conjured up by the white balance difference between daylight and artificial light. The blue/yellow opposition, in turn, connects with other meaningful oppositions, like—obviously—male/female, or the same oppositional set of clothes: black trousers/white shirt, grey scale images versus full colour, or the shadow and the bright sunlight, which finds itself in another opposition with the cold electric light of a computer screen (this of course also refers to the different time zones, another crucial aspect of digital communication: we do not only not share the same place, we also do not share the same time).

Yet the images also invite us to explore certain formal and compositional elements that keep recurring. The second image, for example, emphasises the importance placed in the project upon the connecting of lines, literally of lining up. Within this image the direction and angle of these lines is ‘explained’ by the presence of the two bodies, the makers with their roles of tape in hand. But upon re-reading the other spreads through this lens of ‘connecting lines’ we see that this compositional element starts to attain its own visual logic. Where the lines in image 2 are literally used as devices to connect two (visual) realities, they free themselves from this restricted context in the other images and show us the influence of circumstance and context in allowing for the successful establishing of such a connection.

In Fig. 3 , for instance, we see a collection of lines that have been isolated from the direct context of live communication. The way two parts of a line are manually aligned (in the split-screens in image 2) mirrors the way the images find their position on the page. However, we also see how the visual grammar of these lines of tape is expanded upon: barrier tape that demarcates a working area meets the curve of a small copper fragment on the floor of an installation, a crack in the wall follows the slanted angle of an assembled object, existing marks on the floor—as well as lines in the architecture—come into play. The photographs widen the scale and angle at which the line operates: the line becomes a conceptual form that is no longer merely material tape but also an immaterial graphical element that explores its own argument.

Figure 4 provides us with a pivotal point in this respect: the cables of the mouse, computer and charger introduce a certain fluidity and uncontrolled motion. Similarly, the erratic markings on the paper show that an author is only ever partially in control. The cracked line in the floor is the first line that is created by a negative space, by an absence. This resonates with the black-stained edges of the laser-cut objects, laid out on the desktop. This fourth image thus seems to transform the manifestation of the line yet again; from a simple connecting device into an instrument that is able to cut out shapes, a path that delineates a cut, as opposed to establishing a connection. The circle held up in image 4 is a perfect circular cut. This resonates with the laser-cut objects we see just above it on the desk, but also with the virtual cuts made in the Photoshop image on the right. We can clearly see how a circular cut remains present on the characteristic grey-white chessboard that is virtual emptiness. It is evident that these elements have more than just an aesthetic function in a visual argumentation. They are an integral part of the meaning-making process. They ‘transpose’ on a different level, i.e., the formal and compositional level, the central problem of absence and presence: it is the graphic form of the ‘cut’, as well as the act of cutting itself, that turns one into the other.

Concluding remarks

As we have already argued, within the frame of this comment piece, the scope of the visual essay we present here is inevitably limited. It should be considered as a small exercise in a specific genre of thinking and communicating with images that requires further development. Nonetheless, we hope to have demonstrated the potentialities of the visual essay as a form of meaning-making that allows the articulation of a form of embodied knowledge that supplements other modes of inquiry in the humanities. In this particular case, it allows for the integration of other meaningful, embodied and existential aspects of digital communication, unlikely to be ‘detected’ as such by an (auto)ethnographic, psychological or sociological framework.

The visual essay is an invitation to other researchers in the arts to create their own kind of visual essays in order to address their own work of art or that of others: they can consider their artistic research as a valuable contribution to the exploration of human existence that lies at the core of the humanities. But perhaps it can also inspire scholars in more ‘classical’ domains to introduce artistic research methods to their toolbox, as a way of taking into account the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human life and human artefacts, this ‘visceral connection to lived experience’, as Johnson puts it.

Obviously, a visual essay runs the risk of being ‘shot by both sides’: artists may scorn the loss of artistic autonomy and ‘exploitation’ of the work of art in the service of scholarship, while academic scholars may be wary of the lack of conceptual and methodological clarity inherent in these artistic forms of embodied, synaesthetic meaning. The visual essay is indeed a bastard genre, the unlawful love (or perhaps more honestly: love/hate) child of academia and the arts. But precisely this hybrid, impure nature of the visual essay allows it to explore unknown ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, precisely because it combines imagination and knowledge. And while this combination may sound like an oxymoron within a scientific, positivistic paradigm, it may in fact indicate the revival, in a new context, of a very ancient alliance. Or as Giorgio Agamben formulates it in Infancy and history: on the destruction of experience (2007 [1978]): ‘Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged from knowledge as ‘unreal’, was the supreme medium of knowledge. As the intermediary between the senses and the intellect, enabling, in phantasy, the union between the sensible form and the potential intellect, it occupies in ancient and medieval culture exactly the same role that our culture assigns to experience. Far from being something unreal, the mundus imaginabilis has its full reality between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intellegibilis , and is, indeed, the condition of their communication—that is to say, of knowledge’ (Agamben, 2007 , p. 27, italics in original).

And it is precisely this exploration of the mundus imaginabilis that should inspire us to understand artistic research as a valuable form of scholarship in the humanities.

We consider images as a broad category consisting of artefacts of the imagination, the creation of expressive ‘forms’. Images are thus not limited to visual images. For instance, the imagery used in a poem or novel, metaphors in philosophical treatises (‘image-thoughts’), actual sculptures or the imaginary space created by a performance or installation can also be considered as images, just like soundscapes, scenography, architecture.

Agamben G (2007) Infancy and history: on the destruction of experience [trans. L. Heron]. Verso, London/New York, NY

Google Scholar

Garlick A, Roes R (2014) Exercises of the man (v): found dialogues whispered to drying paint. [installation]

Gombrich EH (1986) Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography. Phaidon, Oxford, [1970]

Ingold T (2011) Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge, London/New York, NY

Ingold T (2013) Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge, London/New York, NY

Johnson M (2007) The meaning of the body: Aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago University Press, Chicago

Book Google Scholar

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Hasselt University, Martelarenlaan 42, 3500, Hasselt, Belgium

Remco Roes & Kris Pint

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Remco Roes .

Additional information

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Publisher’s note : Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Roes, R., Pint, K. The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities. Palgrave Commun 3 , 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0004-5

Download citation

Received : 29 June 2017

Accepted : 04 September 2017

Published : 31 October 2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0004-5

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

Extended Essay: The Arts: Visual Arts

Step 1 - Choosing a Subject
Step 2 - Choosing a Topic
Step 3 - Draft a Research Question
Step 4 - Finding Sources
Step 5 - Evaluating Information
Step 6 - Bibliography & Citation
Step 7 - Organizing Information
The Arts: Visual Arts
Individuals & Societies: Business Management
Individuals & Societies: History
Individuals & Societies: Psychology
Language Acquisition
Language and Literature
Sciences: Biology
Sciences: Sports, Exercise, and Health Sciences
Interdisciplinary Papers: World Studies
Assessment Criteria
Research Questions
Investigation

Extended Essays in the Arts

Extended Essays in the Visual Arts

Choosing a Topic

The visual arts are here broadly defined also to include architecture, design and contemporary forms of visual culture. The outcome of a student's research should be a coherent piece of writing that effectively addresses a particular research question appropriate to the visual arts, and including any relevant images or illustrations.

The research may be generated or inspired by the student’s direct experiences of creating visual artworks, or by their interest in the work of a particular artist, style or period. This might be related to the student’s own cultural context or another cultural context.

Personal contact with artists, curators and other active participants in the visual arts is encouraged, as is the use of local and primary sources.

Students can choose an extended essay topic related to an area of their visual arts course, but students can also choose to explore other areas of the subject. Crucially, the topic must reflect their particular interest and enthusiasm within the visual arts.

Approaches to Research

It is vital that the methodology of the EE is tailored to the research question and allows for an in-depth exploration. Many different approaches to the research question can be appropriate. Students will often use a combination of primary and secondary research to answer their research questions.

Visual Arts Sources

Even students doing primary research will still need to reference secondary sources. These may include established artistic interpretations or criticisms, biographical and/or historical information.

Writing the Essay

Beyond individual interpretations, students should also demonstrate awareness of other issues surrounding the artworks they study such as:

Considering the origin and purpose of an artwork to discuss its value and limitations
Contextualizing the research question to demonstrate good artistic understanding

Relevant outcomes of this analysis should be integrated into a well-substantiated argument.

Using primary or secondary evidence to justify the argument
Ensuring that cited evidence is relevant, well founded, and not simply based on preconceptions

The emphasis of the EE should always be on written analysis, interpretation, evaluation and the construction and development of a sound argument.

Visual Reference Material

It is required that students include visual references to any artworks they discuss, provided it is relevant to the analysis or argument. Images should be appropriately presented and acknowledged and should appear in the body of the essay, as close as possible to the first reference.

In order to promote personal involvement in the EE, the use of local and primary sources should be encouraged wherever possible. (i.e. a picture of the artwork taken by the student themself). In the case where students do not have access to the artwork they may rely on high-quality reproductions or images.

Students are expected to evaluate critically the resources consulted during the process of writing the EE by asking themselves the following questions:

Which sources are vital to the support of my ideas, opinions and assertions?
Which sources do not contribute to the analysis?

Assessed Student Work

Marina Abramovic and her audience: An investigation into her diverse techniques to connect with her public.
To what extent did Japanese aesthetics and fashion have an influence on contemporary Danish fashion?
<< Previous: Subject Specific Guidance
Next: Individuals & Societies: Business Management >>
Last Updated: Apr 18, 2024 6:27 AM
URL: https://k497.libguides.com/extendedessay

IB Visual Arts EE examples

Filter exemplars, to what extent does the street art in downtown athens, greece politically and socially charge the city, how did pablo picasso develop intimacy with the original audience and the impact on the contemporary audience through his artworks during his blue period, want to get full marks for your ee allow us to review it for you 🎯, to what extent did the mughal architectural style influence the hindu temple architecture of india, to what extent was gaudi's iconographic program on the example of the basilica of the sagrada familia different from gothic solutions on the example of the seville cathedral, to what extent can artificial intelligence create original fine art, fast track your coursework with mark schemes moderated by ib examiners. upgrade now 🚀, to what extent did hilma af klint’s artworks (1906-1922) bridge science and spiritualism, to what extend does gender impact omani artists, to what extent did edvard munch apply formal elements of art therapy such as color,shape, and repetition to create symbolism and purpose in the scream, how did zofia and oskar hansen’s architectural vision of przyczółek grochowski estate translate into practice and with what effect, how do andy warhol and thierry guetta's artwork demonstrate the controversies between intertextuality and plagiarism in pop art culture, to what extent has the indian culture influenced the architect gajanan b mhatre in the design of the empress court in mumbai during the british colonization, an exploration into the theme of motherhood in art during the early weimar republic, as seen through the works of otto dix and käthe kollwitz, how does frida kahlo portrya her devotionb to communism, the influence of nature on caso batlo by architect antoni guadi, "how did the dynamic style of zaha hadid's original abstract paintings introduce her unique architectural design of the jockey club in hong kong"..

Extended Essay

Mathematics
Studies in language and literature
World studies extended essay
Visual arts
Language Acquisition

Visual Arts: Sample A

Visual arts: sample b, visual arts: sample c.

Last Updated: Oct 14, 2021 3:31 PM
URL: https://keystoneacademy-cn.libguides.com/extended-essay

Announcing the sixth volume of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné

By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

Know your critics.

Current Shows

Receive our award winning emails & enjoy 10% off your first purchase, thanks for signing up for our newsletter., that email has already been subscribed..

Now, personalize your account so you can discover more art you'll love.

a treasure trove of fine art from the world's most renowned artists, galleries, museums and cultural institutions. We offer exclusive works you can't find anywhere else.

through exclusive content featuring art news, collecting guides, and interviews with artists, dealers, collectors, curators and influencers.

authentic artworks from across the globe. Collecting with us means you're helping to sustain creative culture and supporting organizations that are making the world a better place.

with our art advisors for buying advice or to help you find the art that's perfect for you. We have the resources to find works that suit your needs.

INSIDER ACCESS TO THE WORLD'S BEST ART

Artspace offers you authentic, exclusive works from world-renowned artists, galleries, museums and cultural institutions. Collecting with us helps support creative culture while bringing you art news, interviews and access to global art resources.

COLLECT FROM 300+ GALLERIES & MUSEUMS

Collect the world's best

Sign up to view price and receive personalized experiences exclusive access to new works, special offers, invitations and features.

Thank you for signing up

Tailor your art, news & information to your preferences.

THANK YOU FOR SIGNING-UP TO ARTSPACE

Welcome to the world's premier online marketplace for fine art.

Enjoy 10% on your next purchase by using coupon code WELCOME10 at checkout.

THANK YOU FOR RETURNING TO ARTSPACE

The world's premier online marketplace for fine art.

Enjoy 10% on your next purchase by using coupon code PHAIDON10 at checkout.

Forgot your password?

Please enter your email below and we will send you a new password.

We've emailed you a new password. Sign In

Interested in Firstname Lastname?

To follow this artist and get updates on new work & exclusives, you must be signed into your Artspace account. Don't have one? Create one now.

You are now following first name last name

Interested in saving this work.

To save this work to your personal gallery and to access other features like this, you must be signed into your Artspace account.

prompt placeholder

The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever

Share this article

Use this form to share great articles with your friends.

Enter your email

Enter your friend's email

Your message was sent

Thank you for sharing with your friends.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share on Pinterest

Your email has been submitted and a 10% off discount code sent to you. Next, personalize your Artspace experience by creating an account.

Please select the statement that best describes you:

I am an existing collector.
I am a new and aspiring collector.

Types of art that interest you

Select all that interest you:, partners you'd like to follow, enter or select all partners that interest you:.

Your preferences have been saved to your account. Update them at any time in your Preference Center

How it Works

How bidding works.

To place a bid, enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the work. Artspace will accept a bid at the next increment, and save any excess amount as a maximum bid. If you are outbid, we will continue bid on your behalf up to your maximum bid.

Bid Increments

Bidding increments increase at the following intervals:

Below $400: $50
Between $400 and $699: $100
Between $700 and $1,499: $200
Between $1,500 and $2,499: $300
Between $2,500 and $4,999: $500
Between $5,000 and $9,999: $1,000
Between $10,000 and $19,999: $2,000
Between $20,000 and $29,999: $3,000
Between $30,000 and $49,999: $4,000
Between $50,000 and $99,999: $5,000
Above $100,000: $10,000

You will receive an email confirmation of your bid and when you are outbid.

If you are the winning bidder, you will be contacted 48 hours after of the close of the auction.

Maximum Bidding

Every bid submitted is treated as a maximum bid. You should always bid the maximum you are willing to spend for a work, though this does not necessarily mean you will pay that price. As the auction unfolds, we will increase your bid by increments to ensure you remain the highest bidder. If the winning amount is less than your maximum bid, you will pay the current increment. If your maximum bid no longer exceeds the current bid, you will receive an outbid notification email, and have the option to bid again.

In the case of multiple bidders placing the same maximum bid, the first person to place the maximum amount takes precedence as the highest bid until another bidder exceeds the maximum amount.

Buyer's Premium & Additional Charges

For Artspace Auctions winning bidders are charged a 15% Buyer's Premium on top of the hammer price. For Artspace Benefit Auctions, Buyer's Premiums are not applied. If they are, this will be clearly noted. Purchases made from all auctions, including benefit auctions, are subject to sales tax.

Winning bidders will be contacted within 48 hours to arrange shipping and to provide final price including commission, shipping, and taxes and duties when applicable. Promotion codes cannot be applied to auction works.

Auction Pre-Registration

Credit Card Validation

In order to secure a bid, please enter your credit card details below. We will not charge your card but only use it to validate your bid. We only need to validate your card once. You will be notified that you are the winning bidder before your card is charged, and you will have the option to change your payment method at that time.

Create an Artspace account

All our frames are manufactured in the USA, using eco-friendly & sustainably sourced engineered hardwood for durability and a uniform finish that is free of defects. Frames are available in Black or White Satin and Honey Pecan.

White Satin
Honey Pecan
Black Satin

All prints are hinged to a conservation quality, acid-free and lignin-free Alpha Cellulose matboard, using an acid-free linen tape. The mat's surface paper is fade and bleed resistant and is attached to a conservation quality foam-core mounting board that will keep the work safe from deterioration over time. Artworks with a deckled or decorative edges will be floated on the matboard, with acrylic spacers to separate the art from the glazing. All mounting is fully reversible, without any potential damage to the art.

Acrylic Glazing

All of our frames come with picture quality .090 mm plexiglass, which blocks 66% of UV to prevent color fading from exposure to light, keeping your art protected for years to come. It is now considered the industry standard for artists, museums and galleries throughout the world.

For images up to 30" x 40"

1 1/4” wide, 3/4” deep, with a 2 1/2” wide mat.
We generally leave 1/4” - 1/2” of paper showing around the image, to accommodate signatures and for visual appeal.

For sheet sizes larger than 30” x 40”

Please contact an Artspace advisor for a custom quote.

Artists you'd like to follow

Enter or select all artists that interest you:.

50+ Visual Arts Extended Essay Topics for IBDP

Table of contents

Writing Metier

Finally, this is our exploration of Visual Arts Extended Essay topics. As you set out on this creative path, you’re about to enter a world where art meets identity, emotion intertwines with nature, and spirituality dances with performance.

Suppose you’re fascinated by how artists express their cultural roots, intrigued by the emotional power of expressionism, or curious about the role of art in fashion. In that case, this article is your gateway to many inspiring topics.

With the help of IB experts from Writing Metier, we’ll venture into the realms of art conservation, examine the interplay between art and performance, and even delve into the ethical considerations of art restoration.

Art and Identity

Cultural Identity : Exploring how artists express cultural identity through their work.
Personal Identity : Investigating the role of art in shaping and reflecting personal identity.
National Identity : Analyzing how art is used to construct and communicate national identity.

Art and Emotion

Expressionism : Exploring how expressionist artists convey emotion through their work.
Art Therapy : Investigating the therapeutic effects of art on mental health.
The Sublime in Art : Analyzing the concept of the sublime and its emotional impact in art.

Art and Nature

Land Art : Exploring the relationship between land art and environmentalism.
Botanical Illustration : Investigating the scientific and artistic aspects of botanical illustration.
Animal Representation : Analyzing the symbolic and aesthetic representation of animals in art.

Art and Spirituality

Sacred Art : Exploring the role of art in religious and spiritual practices.
Mysticism in Art : Investigating the influence of mysticism on artistic expression.
Art and Meditation : Analyzing the use of art as a meditative and contemplative tool.

Art and Performance

Performance Art : Exploring the evolution and significance of performance art.
Theatre Design : Investigating the role of visual art in theatre production and design.
Dance and Visual Art : Analyzing the intersection of dance and visual art in interdisciplinary performances.

Art and Fashion

Fashion Illustration : Exploring the artistic techniques and impact of fashion illustration.
Art and Haute Couture : Investigating the relationship between art and high fashion design.
Street Art and Fashion : Analyzing the influence of street art on contemporary fashion trends.

Art Conservation and Restoration

Art Conservation Techniques : Exploring the methods and challenges of art conservation.
Restoration Ethics : Investigating ethical considerations in the restoration of artworks.
Preserving Digital Art : Analyzing the strategies for preserving and archiving digital art.

These categories offer a broader range of topics for an Extended Essay in Visual Arts, allowing students to delve into various aspects of the subject and contribute to the understanding of complex artistic issues.

Each category offers a unique lens through which to view the vibrant tapestry of visual arts.

So, grab your palette and brush (or pen and paper) as we set the stage for a journey into the heart of artistic exploration.

IB VA EE Topic Ideas and RQs

Our team has carefully compiled a diverse range of ideas spanning various artistic mediums, cultural contexts, and conceptual frameworks. In this block, you will find three topics and research questions for each category for an IB Visual Arts Extended Essay:

In “Art and Identity,” we’ll dive into the fascinating ways artists express themselves and their cultural, personal, and national identities through their art. It’s all about exploring how art can be a mirror reflecting who we are and where we come from.

Cultural Identity

Research Question: How have contemporary Australian artists incorporated indigenous art elements to express cultural identity?
Research Question: How did African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance use art to express and shape their cultural identity?
Research Question: How does calligraphy function as a tool for expressing cultural identity in Islamic art?

Personal Identity

Research Question: How does Frida Kahlo use self-portraiture to explore and express her personal identity?
Research Question: How do émigré artists represent the impact of migration on their personal identity through their artwork?
Research Question: How do contemporary artists use visual art to explore and express gender identity?

National Identity

Research Question: How do Canadian landscape paintings reflect and shape the national identity of Canada?
Research Question: How has postcolonial art contributed to the construction of national identity in India?
Research Question: How did propaganda art in Soviet Russia shape and reflect national identity during the 20th century?

Here, we’ll uncover how artists channel their feelings into their creations , from the raw intensity of expressionism to the healing power of art therapy. Let’s delve into the emotional depths of art and its impact on our hearts and minds.

Expressionism

Research Question: How does Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” embody the principles of expressionism and convey emotion?
Research Question: How do expressionist artists use color to convey emotion in their paintings?
Research Question: How does Egon Schiele’s portraiture reflect expressionist themes and the human psyche?

Art Therapy

Research Question: How effective is art therapy as a treatment for anxiety disorders compared to traditional therapies?
Research Question: How does art therapy facilitate trauma recovery and emotional healing in children?
Research Question: How does art therapy contribute to enhancing mental well-being and reducing feelings of loneliness in elderly populations?

The Sublime in Art

Research Question: How do Romantic landscape paintings, such as those by Caspar David Friedrich, depict the concept of the sublime?
Research Question: How do contemporary digital art installations create a sense of the sublime for viewers?
Research Question: How does the concept of the sublime influence the emotional impact of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings?

In “Art and Nature,” we’re going to explore the beautiful interplay between the natural world and artistic expression.

From land art that harmonizes with the environment to botanical illustrations that capture nature’s details, this section is all about art’s green side.

Research Question: What is the environmental impact of Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” and how does it interact with its natural surroundings?
Research Question: How has land art been used as a tool to promote environmental awareness and conservation?
Research Question: How does Andy Goldsworthy’s use of site-specific natural materials in his sculptures enhance the viewer’s connection to the environment?

Botanical Illustration

Research Question: How did botanical illustration in the 19th century contribute to scientific knowledge and artistic expression?
Research Question: How have botanical illustration techniques evolved from traditional media to digital media, and what are the implications for scientific accuracy and artistic expression?
Research Question: How can contemporary botanical illustration be used as a tool for environmental education and promoting biodiversity conservation?

Animal Representation

Research Question: How are animals symbolically represented in indigenous art, and what cultural meanings are associated with them?
Research Question: How has wildlife photography contributed to conservation efforts and public awareness of endangered species?
Research Question: How does anthropomorphism in children’s book illustrations influence children’s perceptions of animals and nature?

Here, we’ll delve into the sacred side of art, exploring how it intersects with religious practices, mystical experiences, and meditative contemplation. It’s a journey into the soulful dimensions of artistic expression.

Research Question: How does iconography function in Christian sacred art to convey theological concepts and spiritual experiences?
Research Question: How are Hindu deities represented in Indian temple architecture, and what is their significance in religious practices?
Research Question: How is art used in Buddhist meditation practices to enhance spiritual experiences and understanding?

Mysticism in Art

Research Question: How are mystical experiences represented in medieval art, and what do they reveal about the spiritual beliefs of the time?
Research Question: How do Kandinsky’s artworks reflect his interest in theosophy and mystical concepts?
Research Question: How is Sufi symbolism expressed in Persian miniature paintings, and what does it convey about Sufi mystical teachings?

Art and Meditation

Research Question: How are mandalas used in art therapy and meditation to promote mental well-being and spiritual growth?
Research Question: How does the practice of Zen calligraphy serve as a form of artistic expression and mindfulness meditation?
Research Question: What are the therapeutic effects of engaging in the creative process of art-making on mindfulness and stress reduction?

“Art and Performance” is where we’ll dive into the dynamic world of performance art, theatre design , and the interplay between dance and visual art. Get ready to discover how artists bring their visions to life on stage and beyond.

Performance Art

Research Question: How has performance art evolved in the 20th century, and what are the key themes and innovations that have shaped its development?
Research Question: How has performance art been used as a medium for feminist expression and activism?
Research Question: How does audience participation impact the meaning and experience of performance art?

Theatre Design

Research Question: How does set design influence audience experience and immersion in theatrical productions?
Research Question: How is digital technology integrated into contemporary theatre design, and what are its implications for storytelling and audience engagement?
Research Question: What are the sustainable practices being implemented in theatre design and production, and how do they impact environmental sustainability?

Dance and Visual Art

Research Question: How do collaborations between choreographers and visual artists influence the creation and interpretation of dance performances?
Research Question: How do visual elements such as costumes, lighting, and set design contribute to the aesthetics and narrative of contemporary dance?
Research Question: How has dance been represented in visual art throughout history, and what does this reveal about the cultural significance of dance?

In this section, we’ll explore the stylish intersection of art and fashion, from the creativity of fashion illustration to the haute couture runway.

>via GIPHY

Let’s unravel the threads that weave together the worlds of art and fashion.

Fashion Illustration

Research Question: How have fashion illustration techniques evolved from traditional methods to digital media, and what are the implications for the fashion industry?
Topic: The Role of Fashion Illustration in Brand Identity
Research Question: How does fashion illustration contribute to the development and communication of brand identity in the fashion industry?
Research Question: How has the rise of social media platforms influenced the style, visibility, and relevance of fashion illustration?

Art and Haute Couture

Research Question: How have specific art movements, such as Art Deco or Surrealism, influenced the design and aesthetics of haute couture collections?
Research Question: How do collaborations between contemporary artists and fashion designers impact the creative process and final designs in haute couture?
Research Question: How does haute couture contribute to the preservation and innovation of traditional artisanal techniques in fashion?

Street Art and Fashion

Research Question: How has street art influenced urban fashion trends and the development of streetwear brands?
Research Question: How is graffiti used in fashion design and branding to convey urban identity and cultural messages?
Research Question: How do collaborations between street artists and fashion brands impact the artistic value and commercial appeal of fashion collections?

“Art Conservation and Restoration” is all about the science and ethics behind preserving art for future generations. We’ll dive into the techniques used to conserve and restore artworks, and the challenges faced in keeping art alive and authentic.

Art Conservation Techniques

Research Question: What are the challenges in conserving contemporary art, and what innovative techniques are being used to address them?
Research Question: How is technology being used to enhance art conservation practices and extend the lifespan of artworks?
Research Question: What ethical considerations arise in the conservation of cultural heritage, and how are they addressed by conservators?

Restoration Ethics

Research Question: What are the ethical debates surrounding the restoration of damaged artworks, and how do different approaches impact the integrity of the original piece?
Research Question: How does the restoration process affect the authenticity and historical value of paintings?
Research Question: What ethical dilemmas arise in the restoration of religious artifacts, and how are they navigated by conservators and religious communities?

Preserving Digital Art

Research Question: What are the challenges in preserving digital art, and what strategies are being developed to ensure its longevity?
Research Question: How are museums adapting their conservation practices to accommodate and preserve digital media art?
Research Question: What methods are being used to archive and document digital artworks to maintain their accessibility and integrity over time?

All these topics and research questions are designed to inspire IB Visual Arts students to engage in meaningful and manageable research projects that contribute to their understanding of various aspects of art while meeting the IB Extended Essay criteria.

Final Thoughts

At WritingMetier, we firmly believe that the Visual Arts extended essay is a transformative experience that nurtures critical thinking, creativity, and a deeper appreciation for the boundless realms of artistic expression.

As you peruse through this list, allow your curiosity and passion to lead the way, and remember that the true essence of the extended essay lies in your ability to articulate your unique artistic vision and contribute to the ever-evolving discourse within the Visual Arts community.

If you need further assistance in finding the perfect topic or even require a custom-written IB Visual Arts extended essay, WritingMetier is here to help . Our team of experts can guide you through the process, ensuring your extended essay is well-researched, engaging, and aligns with all the IB’s requirements .

So, let your creativity flow, and set out on this artistic voyage with confidence and enthusiasm. Your journey through the visual arts is bound to be as colorful and dynamic as the subjects you choose to explore.

Free topic suggestions

Vasy kafidoff.

Vasyl Kafidoff is a co-founder and CEO at WritingMetier. He is interested in education and how modern technology makes it more accessible. He wants to bring awareness about new learning possibilities as an educational specialist. When Vasy is not working, he’s found behind a drum kit.

Anthropology Extended Essay Topic Ideas for IBDP

Our captivating exploration of human cultures and societies with our IB Anthropology Extended Essay topics. Uncover the rich tapestry of humanity and contribute to our understanding of the world.

Business Management Extended Essay Topic Ideas and RQs

Looking for the perfect topic for your IB Business Management Extended Essay? Dive into our comprehensive guide, covering everything from organizational leadership to the latest trends in 2023. And if you need a bit of extra help, Writing Metier is just a click away to assist with topic suggestions, writing, and editing.

Economics Extended Essay Topic Ideas for IB Students

This article serves as a launchpad for students crafting their Economics Extended Essays, offering a diverse array of topics that span from the intricacies of microeconomic market structures to the broad strokes of macroeconomic policy. It provides a rich tapestry of ideas, inviting exploration into the complex interplay between economic theory and real-world application across various branches such as labor, environmental, and health economics.

Film Extended Essay Topic Ideas for IB Diploma

Explore a world of captivating Film extendedeEssay topics, perfect for cinema enthusiasts eager to delve into the art and industry of filmmaking. Discover your ideal subject for an insightful and academically rewarding exploration of film.

Global Politics Extended Essay Topics and Research Questions

Dive into the dynamic world of Global Politics with our curated list of Extended Essay topics for 2023. From the digital revolution in democracy to the environmental challenges reshaping our planet, these topics offer a gateway to understanding and analyzing the pressing issues of our time.

We rely on cookies to give you the best experince on our website. By browsing, you agree to it. Read more

Dance and the Visual Arts

Focusing on works by Trisha Brown, Lin Hwai-Min, Jonah Bokaer, and others, the onstage worlds of eight different dances are examined from a visual perspective.

Introduction: Convergent Histories—Dance and the Visual Arts

The experimental climate of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States is often cited as the midcentury apex for socially transgressive and politically progressive art. Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and the experimental performances of Judson Dance Theater were among the counterculture movements that energized and engendered social, aesthetic, and political challenges to the status quo, questioning formal properties of artmaking. Radical arts practices imploded the boundaries of movement and form, drastically reconfiguring aesthetic conventions in dance and the visual arts. During this period, artists expressed anti-authoritarian commitments by creating works that exposed exclusionary politics at institutional levels. Institutional critiques offered across places of production questioned the right of the establishment to define the limits and location of artmaking, and to determine who qualifies as being an artist. As visual artists began questioning the institutional stronghold of galleries and museums, choreographers challenged the so-called decontextualization of the proscenium stage. Social situations produced by artists in alternative spaces sought to blur art and the everyday, calling upon the energy of civic participation to collectively create and/or sustain the work, while simultaneously reconsidering how bodies within artistic contexts interact with their environments.

Stephanie Rosenthal, curator of the ground-breaking 2012 exhibition Move: Choreographing You, addresses these convergent histories writing, “The interest—shared by an entire generation of visual artists—in the unique event, in playfulness and an exploration of one’s own body, was reflected in the developments in postmodern dance.” Close Rosenthal, Stephanie, Susan Leigh Foster, André Lepecki, and Peggy Phelan. 2011. Move: choreographing you : art and dance since the 1960s . London: Hayward Pub. Visual artists like Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Graham, to varying degrees, rejected object-based practices, instead turning their bodies or the bodies of their viewers into the foundational material of artistic inquiry. Arguably, visual artists began making dances. And, as choreographers began developing work for museum settings and unconventional spaces, dancemakers like Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Simone Forti developed installation pieces and site-specific works that explored pedestrian movement and everyday activity. The choreographies produced were de-theatricalized and task-oriented, which often resulted in the suppression of any clearly identifiable linear structure and an embrace of multiple meanings. As disciplinary boundaries began to deconstruct, new directions in the fields of dance and the visual arts multiplied.

Of course, the proliferation of interdisciplinary collaboration and creative cross-currents taking place between the visual arts and dance during the 1960s and beyond is not without precedent. Collaborations between choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and visual artist Robert Rauschenberg preceded and deeply informed the postmodern experimentations of Judson Dance Theater. The collaborative relationship between Cunningham-Cage-Rauschenberg began in 1954 with Theater Piece No. 1 , an untitled event organized by Cage at Black Mountain College. Rauschenberg would go on to design sets, costumes, and lighting for over twenty of Cunningham’s choreographies including Minutiae (1954), Summerspace (1958), Antic Meet (1958), and Travelogue (1977). A notable Cunningham-Rauschenberg collaboration that premiered at the Pillow was Nocturnes (1956). In addition to his long-term collaboration with Cunningham, Rauschenberg also designed sets and costumes for Trisha Brown and Paul Taylor. Set and Reset (1983), choreographed by Brown with designs by Rauschenberg, is indicative of the sensuous saturation that can take place when dance and the visual arts converse. The creation of the work was supported by Jacob’s Pillow through the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and has been presented at the festival several times.

Trisha Brown Dance Company

Set and Reset

For more information about the collaboration between Brown and Rauschenberg, explore Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive: Women in Dance essay on Trisha Brown by Maura Keefe.

The convergent histories between dance and the visual arts are extensive, yielding creative collaborations that continue to impress upon artmakers, audiences, and curators alike. For a deeper look into some of these iconic partnerships, see Dance Chronicle ’s “Kinetic, Mobile, and Modern: Dance and the Visual Arts.” Close Meglin, Joellen A., Karen Eliot, and Lynn Matluck Brooks. 2017. “Kinetic, Mobile, and Modern: Dance and the Visual Arts”. Dance Chronicle. 40 (3).

Given the shared creative cross-currents, this essay explores the interplay between dance and the visual arts through a discussion of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival performances taking place between 2002 and 2017. The central works discussed—Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Songs of the Wanderers (1994) and Jonah Bokaer’s CURTAIN (2012)—offer a particular lens to consider the relationship between dance and the visual arts. Each choreography crafts a stage design that incorporates natural elements as transformative agents in the space. Rice. River. Fire. Trees. Sand. These works bring the outside in to create a theatrical environment that makes the architecture stutter. In doing so, they converse with Jacob’s Pillow as a site deeply connected to the history of the land. As you journey through the select choreographies, consider how the interplay between movement and design stimulate the imagination, symbolically offering acts of transformation.

Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Songs of the Wanderers (1994)

Lin Hwai-min, Founder and Artistic Director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan (hereafter referred to as Cloud Gate), choreographed Songs of the Wanderers after returning from his pilgrimage to Bodhgaya in Northern India, the location where the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Sakaymuni, achieved enlightenment. Close Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. 2002. Songs of the Wanderers . Program. <http://archives.jacobspillow.org/index.php/Detail/objects/45023> The various sections that comprise the evening-length work reveal much about the human condition and essence of life.

In the program note “Journey to Bodhgaya,” Lin recalls his pilgrimage, writing “[o]n the bank of the Neranjra River, I for the first time in my life realized that Buddha was an ordinary mortal who also endured human confusion and struggle.” Close Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. 2002. Songs of the Wanderers . Program. <http://archives.jacobspillow.org/index.php/Detail/objects/45023> From this episode in Lin’s life, Songs of the Wanderers was birthed. The choreography theatricalizes quiet moments of reflection obtained by the side of Neranjra River, captures the grandeur of seeing the Mahabodhi Temple for the first time, and remembers meditative states gained under a Bodhi tree. Set designer Austin Wang and props designers Szu Chien-hua and Yang Cheng-yun collaborated with Lin to create visual effects that enliven the stage as the choreographic awakening unfolds. In 2014, Wang was awarded the National Award for Arts, one of the highest artistic achievements bestowed in Taiwan. Tagged the “magician of the theater” by Taiwan Today , he repeatedly establishes atmospheres that transport viewers to alternative realities. Close Her, Kelly. 2015. “Magician of the Theater.” Taiwan Today . Online. <http://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=20,29,35&post=26520> Together the stage and prop designs play a significant role in enacting the abstract representations of religious rituals present in the work.

Cloud Gate’s Songs of the Wanderers opens with a lone Buddhist monk standing still under a steady stream of golden colored rice. For nearly 70 minutes, a pool of amber lights bathes Wang Rong-yu—the performer who originated the part of the monk—as grains of rice cascade from the sky, falling upon his head. In an astonishing display of determination and concentration, Rong-yu remains seemingly motionless with hands held in a prayer position, eyes closed, and head slightly lowered. Gradually a mound of rice gathers around his lower body. The spatially isolated narrow stream of rice turns into an aggressive showering that covers every inch of the stage space. In fact, over 500 pounds of rice are used to create shifting landscapes throughout the work, forming mountains, deserts, and rivers through which the dancers enact a spiritual pilgrimage.

Commenting upon the cultural and personal significance of rice, Lin remarks “[r]ice is sacred in Asia. When we were children, rice was everything. Farmers would spread the rice in the courtyard or even on the road to let it dry. It held such a great fascination, but if you were caught playing with it you really got in trouble, because you were ruining the food.” Close Sims, Caitlin. 2000. “The Serenity Of Meditation On the Move”. New York Times. 150 (51556). Online. <http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/29/arts/dance-the-serenity-of-meditation-on-the-move.html> In Songs of the Wanderers , the rice remains sacred, but the hesitation to handle it disappears as dancers playfully animate the grains, tossing them into the air in a manner that extends lines of energy infinitely into space. The video clip from Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive below elucidates the powerful partnership between the movement and design elements.

Songs of the Wanderers premiered in Taiwan in 1994 and was performed at Jacob’s Pillow in 2002. Founded in 1973, Cloud Gate is considered Taiwan’s first professional contemporary dance company.

Jonah Bokaer’s CURTAIN (2012)

A fortunate stroke of serendipity brought Jonah Bokaer and Daniel Arsham together. Bokaer, an alumnus of the School at Jacob’s Pillow, is a choreographer and media artist who became the youngest member ever to join the Merce Cunningham Company in 2000. During Bokaer’s seven-year stint with the company, Cunningham invited Arsham to create the stage design for eyeSpace (2007). Arsham would later go on to design for Cunningham’s Tour de Paris and Park Avenue Armory Events. The design for the latter was informed by the former. As audience members entered the cavernous space of the Park Armory’s Drill Hall, they were met with beams of white light that projected upward and fell upon Arsham’s installation looming in the sky; clusters of gray polyethylene balls hung in cloud formations. As described by Ted Loos of the New York Times , “The shape and color of the clouds, which took six months to construct, are based on pixelated photographs of clouds [Arsham] has taken around the world while on tour with the company.” Close Loos, Ted. 2011. “Cunningham Fostered Serendipity in Set Design.” New York Times , 161 (55634). Online. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/arts/dance/daniel-arsham-on-designing-sets-for-merce-cunningham.html> The shared sensibilities forged by these overlapping experiences and common histories, undoubtedly, continue to influence the collaborative partnership between Bokaer and Arsham.

The ghostly presence of Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, who served as resident designer of the Cunningham Company from 1954-1964, make it impossible to restrain oneself from projecting into the future, prematurely identifying Bokaer and Arsham as among the most influential collaborative partnerships of the twenty-first century. The two began collaborating in 2009 with the work Replica ; later creating Why Patterns (2010) and Recess (2010), each having their U.S. premieres at Jacob’s Pillow in 2011. With an interest in the intersect between movement, visual arts, and architecture, this collaborative pair reconfigures theatrical spaces through innovative experimentations with form and matter. For Why Patterns , seen below, the artists incorporate over 10,000 ping-pong balls that pour from above, imposing their own random design onto the work.

Jonah Bokaer

Why Patterns

For Bokaer, “[t]he act of combining visual arts and dance has initiated [his] entire oeuvre. This is a life-long project which continuously questions and challenges the role of a choreographer’s participation in fine art.” Close Bokaer, Jonah. <http://jonahbokaer.net/> With CURTAIN , Bokaer and Arsham continue to probe the potential of incorporating fine art and physical objects into choreographic structures.

CURTAIN commences with a curious image—Bokaer stands with his back to the audience opposite a decaying human-sized figure rising out of a sand pile. There is something defiant about Bokaer’s stance. His right arm hangs straight with fist clutched, as his left arm caresses his lower back to grasp the other elbow. Despite the energy of resistance, the movement that unfolds is tender with Bokaer using self-touch to explore the architecture of his body. The atmospheric composition by Chris Garneau lulls the audience into a meditative state as fellow performers James McGinn and Adam H. Weinert enter the space, intriguingly wearing headphones. For fleeting moments, the trio’s movement overlaps and yet they seem to exist in disparate worlds.

Bokaer dispenses a moment of shock when he circles the human-like figure, delivering an aggressive blow which brings the statue to its knees. He assumes the empty void left by the fallen creature. Stepping into the pile of sand, Bokaer once again turns his back to the audience and extends his arms stiffly to the side. A mysterious white substance begins a slow descent from the ceiling. In a review for the Miami Herald , contributor Jordan Levin contemplates this curious moment writing, “ CURTAIN sets up all sorts of fascinating questions about the way we define the qualities of things. The white stuff moves, but it’s not alive. Is it fluid or solid? How can it be both?” Close Levin, Jordan. 2015. “Bokaer and Arsham’s Curtain —Mater meets Movement.” Miami Herald. Online. < http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/ent-columns-blogs/jordan-levin/article13023851.html> Throughout its duration, the work encourages spectators to question the relationship between agents—liquid and solid, human and non-human, organic and inorganic—in manners that challenge any clear distinction between perceived dichotomies. Even the dichotomous relationship between nature and culture seems to be challenged as the entirety of this performance event seeps beyond the theater walls after enormous barn doors situated upstage open to the wooded world yonder.

The following clip from Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive captures the quality of contemplation established through Arsham’s design and Bokaer’s movement vocabulary.

Arsham and Bokaer returned to Jacob’s Pillow in 2017 to present their newest work, Rules of the Game (2016). As scholar-in-residence Maura Keefe discusses in the PillowNote for the production, Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author inspired this collaboration. An original score by GRAMMY Award-winning artist Pharrell Williams, arranged and co-composed by David Campbell, accompanies the choreography. Bokaer considers his work to be a “cross-over” between dance and the visual arts. With this collaboration, might there also be room to consider a cross-over between the avant-garde and popular?

Outside/In: Four Examples

The Inside/Out performance series at Jacob’s Pillow has a long history of presenting dance against the natural landscape of the Berkshire mountains.

Choreographies like Cloud Gate’s Songs of the Wanderers (1994) and Bokaer’s CURTAIN (2012) offer an inverse to this experience, bringing elements of the outside into the performance space. Both works combine dance and the visual arts through scenography that harkens to life-giving sources. Compagnie Jant-Bi’s Le Coq est Mort ( The Rooster is Dead , 1999), Company Wang Ramirez’s Monchichi (2011), LeeSaar The Company’s Grass and Jackals (2013), and MadBoots’ Beau (2015), among other works, join Songs of the Wanderers and CURTAIN through their incorporation of natural elements as transformative agents in the space.

An intercultural collaboration between Germaine Acogny’s Senegal-based company Jant-Bi, German choreographer Susanne Linke and her assistant, Israeli Avi Kaiser, Le Coq est Mort ( The Rooster is Dead ) fills the stage with sand.

Company Jant-Bi

Le coq est mort (The Rooster is Dead)

Designer Ida Ravn helps establish the environment for Honji Wang and Sebastian Ramirez’s Monchichi by creating a barren birch tree that the dancers partner with throughout the work.

Company Wang Ramirez

When asked “What will we see in Grass and Jackals?,” Israeli choreographers Lee Sher and Saar Harari respond stating, “I think life. You know. Our life. Our sensation or wills, or desires.” Close The Dance Enthusiast: Dance Up Close. 2014. “ Grass and Jackals w/ LeeSaar The Company.” Online. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT2Bky3zA3M> Visions of isolated and lonely creatures resolve in the work’s concluding moments with lighting and stage designer Bambi’s curtain of rain.

LeeSaar The Company

Grass and Jackals

Choreographers Jonathan Campbell and Austin Diaz’s MadBoots stages “[m]an’s alienation from the sources of life—nature, earth, water—[as] an analogy for his alienation from his own physicality” in the work BEAU . Close MadBoots. 2015. BEAU. Program. <http://archives.jacobspillow.org/index.php/Detail/objects/53997> A neatly assembled arrangement of fallen flowers contained within the confines of a square box outlined on the floor slowly exceeds their boundaries in a gesture of sweet release.

MADBOOTS DANCE

Choreographies that use space in unconventional ways, in these instances by opening the theater to the outside, not only make the architecture stutter, they cause all those contained within it to stutter too. Following philosopher and scholar Elizabeth Grosz, these dances ask: “What is it to open up architecture to thought, to force, to life, to the outside?” Close Grosz, Elizabeth A. 2001. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. In these choreographies, the partnership between dance and the visual arts renders visible energetic forces that bodies and environments possess, highlighting the transformative capacities of each.

PUBLISHED April 2019

More Essays in This Theme

The jacob’s pillow costume collection, pointe spread: the marvel of regional ballet, when the ballet came to jacob’s pillow, what is dance’s relationship with live music, contemporary bharatanatyam at jacob’s pillow, uncovering jazz elements in the work of contemporary choreographers, the israeli delegation: artists from the holy land, broadway in becket: the american musical theater and jacob’s pillow, introduction to bharatanatyam and t. balasaraswati, explore themes | essays, women in dance, men in dance, dance and society, dance of the african diaspora, discover more, get the latest in your inbox.

Receive a monthly email with new and featured Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive videos, curated by Director of Preservation Norton Owen.

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

Essay Database >
Essay Examples >
Essays Topics >
Essay on Art

Visual Arts Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Art , History , Communication , Athens , Family , Painting , World , Greece

Published: 01/02/2020

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

Visual arts

In arts, one of the oldest forms is visual arts. These forms of art convey their meaning though what they depict. These forms of art can be described as the arts that communicate though any form which makes use of eyes and sometimes touch. In this paper, we will explore two forms of visual arts names the sculptures and painting (Metropolitan history, n,d).

Sculptures are one of the most common forms of visual arts. It appears to be rooted in every society and is still in use till today. A sculpture is a two or three dimensional projection which in most cases stands on its own. It requires little of no attachment to other materials but only at the base or at point of attachment for support (Hark, 1994).

Throughout the history of art, sculptures have been use to communicate certain thoughts and aspects of the artists. This evolved over time and the outlook of the sculptures where used to depict emotion, political and religious environments (History of painting,n.d). There are very many examples of sculptures in the world of arts but the most significant sculptures are from ancient Greece and Mesopotamia not forgetting Athens. They include the naked boy from Athens depicting on lifestyles and a mother and son sculpture found in Italy presumed to be created on imagination of the Holy Mary and her son (History of painting,n.d).

In creation of sculptures, the original piece of materials (wood, stone) might have some parts removed (curving) or added in creating the sculpture. This usually results in a sculpture depending on the intended information to be depicted. One of the modern uses of sculptures is the coinage system in currency.

Looking into painting, it also traces back to almost the age of mankind. It depicts a lot of information in terms of governance, emotions and other aspects of the artist or art period. Painting involves application of substances on a surface to create a visually attractive image which depicts the above mentioned aspects (merian webstar, n.d).

Turning to types of paintings, the classification can be done by the techniques employed, materials and painting media. This results in many classes of paintings which have different characteristics. Painting has also evolved with time to have Arabic paintings, modern western paintings and other genres of painting. A good example of such painting is the wet and dry frescos from ancient Egypt and the neoclassical painting on a beach where the atmosphere appears to be perfect for love (merian webstar n.d).

Metropolitan history of art, art history timeline (n.d) retrieved from http//www.metmuseum.org.

Hark, J.C. 1994, The Art and Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent, Yale University Press Pelican History of Art History of painting(n.d) retrieved from www.history world.com Merian webstar online.retrieved from http//www.marian Webster.com

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 2454

This paper is created by writer with

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Critical analysis literature reviews, holiness biographies, ireland biographies, perception biographies, ernest hemingway biographies, microsoft biographies, investigation biographies, magic biographies, logic biographies, example of shortage of nurses essay, example of essay on same sex marriages in the usa, sampling plan essay examples, example of research paper on apple iphone, example of essay on what is global warming, comparison of the us and the polish constitution course work examples, are cellular phones dangerous research paper sample, making moral decisions essay example, essay on dawkins and the principle of gradualism, place matters case study sample, free essay about are organizations rational, free essay about cooperative nursing work experience, example of essay on supporting mathematical standards in preschool education, free research paper on how technologys social side effects, good example of jorge ramos a true leader essay, good example of essay on solar power, sick building research paper samples, good companies with good and bad service case study example, good research paper on first argument, good course work on the leadership style of jesus, good essay on smokings effects on human system, good report on the never event initiative, are citizens of a state obliged to obey every law order of their state essays examples, pareto analysis of employee turnover course work examples, book summarization book review sample, herp essays, aris essays, althea essays, my creature from the black lagoon essays, biodegradation essays, caci essays, child centered learning essays.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Share full article

Supported by

The Mind-Expanding Value of Arts Education

As funding for arts education declines worldwide, experts ponder what students — and the world at large — are losing in the process.

By Ginanne Brownell

This article is part of our special report on the Art for Tomorrow conference that was held in Florence, Italy.

Awuor Onguru says that if it were not for her continued exposure to arts education as a child, she never would have gotten into Yale University.

Growing up in a lower-middle-class family in Nairobi, Kenya, Ms. Onguru, now a 20-year-old junior majoring in English and French, started taking music lessons at the age of four. By 12, she was playing violin in the string quartet at her primary school, where every student was required to play an instrument. As a high school student on scholarship at the International School of Kenya, she was not only being taught Bach concertos, she also became part of Nairobi’s music scene, playing first violin in a number of local orchestras.

During her high school summer breaks, Ms. Onguru — who also has a strong interest in creative writing and poetry — went to the United States, attending the Interlochen Center for the Arts ’ creative writing camp, in Michigan, and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio . Ms. Onguru, who recently returned to campus after helping organize Yale Glee Club’s spring tour in Kenya, hopes to become a journalist after graduation. She has already made progress toward that goal, serving as the opinion editor for the Yale Daily News, and getting her work published in Teen Vogue and the literary journal Menacing Hedge.

“Whether you’re in sports, whether you end up in STEM, whether you end up in government, seeing my peers — who had different interests in arts — not everyone wanted to be an artist,” she said in a video interview. “But they found places to express themselves, found places to be creative, found places to say things that they didn’t know how else to say them.”

Ms. Onguru’s path shows what a pivotal role arts education can play in a young person’s development. Yet, while the arts and culture space accounts for a significant amount of gross domestic product across the globe — in the United Kingdom in 2021, the arts contributed £109 billion to the economy , while in the U.S., it brought in over $1 trillion that year — arts education budgets in schools continue to get slashed. (In 2021, for instance, the spending on arts education in the U.K. came to an average of just £9.40 per pupil for the year .)

While experts have long espoused the idea that exposure to the arts plays a critical role in primary and secondary schooling, education systems globally have continually failed to hold it in high regard. As Eric Booth, a U.S.-based arts educator and a co-author of “Playing for Their Lives: The Global El Sistema Movement for Social Change Through Music,” said: “There are a whole lot of countries in the world that don’t have the arts in the school, it just isn’t a thing, and it never has been.”

That has led to the arts education trajectory heading in a “dark downward spiral,” said Jelena Trkulja, senior adviser for academic and cultural affairs at Qatar Museums , who moderated a panel entitled “When Arts Education is a Luxury: New Ecosystems” at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Florence, Italy, organized by the Democracy & Culture Foundation, with panels moderated by New York Times journalists.

Part of why that is happening, she said, is that societies still don’t have a sufficient and nuanced understanding of the benefits arts education can bring, in terms of young people’s development. “Arts education is still perceived as an add-on, rather than an essential field creating essential 21st-century skills that are defined as the four C’s of collaboration, creativity, communication and critical thinking,” Dr. Trkulja said in a video interview, “and those skills are being developed in arts education.”

Dennie Palmer Wolf, principal researcher at the U.S.-based arts research consultancy WolfBrown , agreed. “We have to learn to make a much broader argument about arts education,” she said. “It isn’t only playing the cello.”

It is largely through the arts that we as humans understand our own history, from a cave painting in Indonesia thought to be 45,000 years old to “The Tale of Genji,” a book that’s often called the world’s first novel , written by an 11th-century Japanese woman, Murasaki Shikibu; from the art of Michelangelo and Picasso to the music of Mozart and Miriam Makeba and Taylor Swift.

“The arts are one of the fundamental ways that we try to make sense of the world,” said Brian Kisida, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Public Affairs and a co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts-sponsored Arts, Humanities & Civic Engagement Lab . “People use the arts to offer a critical perspective of their exploration of the human condition, and that’s what the root of education is in some ways.”

And yet, the arts don’t lend themselves well to hard data, something educators and policymakers need to justify classes in those disciplines in their budgets. “Arts is this visceral thing, this thing inside you, the collective moment of a crescendo,” said Heddy Lahmann , an assistant professor of international education at New York University, who is conducting a global study examining arts education in public schools for the Community Arts Network. “But it’s really hard to qualify what that is.”

Dr. Lahmann’s early research into the decrease in spending by public schools in arts education points to everything from the lack of trained teachers in the arts — partly because those educators are worried about their own job security — to the challenges of teaching arts remotely in the early days of the Covid pandemic. And, of course, standardized tests like the Program for International Student Assessment, which covers reading, math and science, where countries compete on outcomes. “There’s a race to get those indicators,” Dr. Lahmann said, “and arts don’t readily fit into that.” In part, that is because standardized tests don’t cover arts education .

“It’s that unattractive truth that what gets measured gets attended to,” said Mr. Booth, the arts educator who co-authored “Playing for Their Lives.”

While studies over the years have underscored the ways that arts education can lead to better student achievement — in the way that musical skills support literacy, say, and arts activities lead to improved vocabulary, what have traditionally been lacking are large-scale randomized control studies. But a recent research project done in 42 elementary and middle schools in Houston, which was co-directed by Dr. Kisida and Daniel H. Bowen, a professor who teaches education policy at Texas A&M, is the first of its kind to do just that. Their research found that students who had increased arts education experiences saw improvements in writing achievement, emotional and cognitive empathy, school engagement and higher education aspirations, while they had a lower incidence of disciplinary infractions.

As young people are now, more than ever, inundated with images on social media and businesses are increasingly using A.I., it has become even more relevant for students these days to learn how to think more critically and creatively. “Because what is required of us in this coming century is an imaginative capacity that goes far beyond what we have deliberately cultivated in the schooling environment over the last 25 years,” said Mariko Silver, the chief executive of the Henry Luce Foundation, “and that requires truly deep arts education for everyone.”

New Collections: Felix Gonzalez-Torres letters to María Martínez-Cañas

Detail of display of a letter written on blue-striped paper with read ink, a postcard written in brown ink with a canceled Canadian stamp, and a photograph if three cats laying a chair pad from a dining set on a white tiled floor.

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue (vol. 63, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current .

Display of a letter written on blue-striped paper with read ink, a postcard written in brown ink with a canceled Canadian stamp, and a photograph if three cats laying a chair pad from a dining set on a white tiled floor.

“It was a real pleasure to meet you. I miss Miami Beach, miss the light, the ocean, the blue skies & all the palm trees.” So opens a circa 1988–89 postcard from Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) to fellow artist María Martínez-Cañas (b. 1960). Accompanying the postcard in this collection is a handwritten letter on lined notebook paper and a snapshot picturing three cats cuddling on a seat cushion that has fallen from its perch to a white tile floor. Dating from 1988–1992, this three-item collection is the first donation made in response to the call for submissions to the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Correspondence Archive , a unique partnership between the Archives and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation that was launched in 2020.

Gonzalez-Torres had an ongoing practice of sending correspondence to a range of people, including friends, individuals from the art world (such as collectors and curators) with whom he both intimately and casually engaged, and family. The first donation to the Correspondence Archive comes from not only an artist peer, but one who, like Gonzalez-Torres, was born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico. The families of both Gonzalez-Torres and Martínez-Cañas eventually settled in Miami, and the artists shared a love of the city’s topography and culture. Gonzalez-Torres writes in the letter on notebook paper that is part of this collection, “Extraño la luz de Miami Beach, el olor a platano maduro frito, y el azul de la playa.” [“I miss the light of Miami Beach, the smell of fried ripe plantain, and the blue of the beach.”] The practice of listing is prevalent throughout Gonzalez-Torres’s letters, as well as his artwork. The artists’ correspondence thus presents an opportunity to engage with the idea of multiple simultaneous possibilities, which was intrinsic to Gonzalez-Torres’s thinking.

Other facets of Gonzalez-Torres’s character and practice emerge in this collection, including his thoughtful regard for fellow artists and his participation in the New York-based art collective Group Material (which the artist considered separate from his practice). On the reverse of the snapshot of cats, for example, he notifies Martínez-Cañas that Group Material is going on sabbatical. From 1987 to 1994 Gonzalez-Torres was a core member of the group, which often invited contributions from contemporaries, such as Martínez-Cañas. She had apparently sent some slides for Group Material’s consideration (the specific project is unspecified), and Gonzalez-Torres was kindly returning them so they could be reused. This gesture evokes a pre-digital world and the once common practice of distributing 35mm slides as work samples. It also prompts us to imagine how Martínez-Cañas’s art might have been incorporated into one of Group Material’s politically charged installations.

Though his life was cut short by AIDS-related causes, Gonzalez-Torres remains a powerful presence in the contemporary art world, where his work continues to be shown widely. As well as attesting to the wide network of friends, family, and colleagues he maintained in his lifetime, Gonzalez-Torres’s correspondence material is relevant in how it may add perspective to the artist’s work. This inaugural gift from Martínez-Cañas suggests a future where Gonzalez-Torres’s presence is equally ensured in the Archives.

Josh T. Franco is the head of collecting at the Archives of American Art.

Add new comment

No HTML tags allowed.
Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Get Involved

Internship, fellowship, and volunteer opportunities provide students and lifelong learners with the ability to contribute to the study and preservation of visual arts records in America .

Archives of American Art in the Smithsonian Transcription Center

You can help make digitized historical documents more findable and useful by transcribing their text .

Visit the Archives of American Art project page in the Smithsonian Transcription Center now.

Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections

A virtual repository of a substantial cross-section of the Archives' most significant collections.

Visit the Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections

IMAGES

📚 Art Visual Analysis Essay
Visual Arts Essay
Contemporary Artist Visual Art Essay Band 6
Defining the Visual Arts Essay Example
🎉 Essay about visual arts. How to Write a Visual Arts Essay. 2019-02-13
Visual Arts Essay: Artist's Practice

VIDEO

What is Visual Art l Drishya Kala Kya Hai l B.Ed l Art Education l Kala Siksha l Smita Minz
The Curious Case of the Emoji Rosetta Stone
Exploring the Power of Video Essays in Film Criticism
SBA REQUIREMENTS for CSEC and CAPE VISUAL ARTS 2021
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Malayalam Summary and Notes
What is art?

COMMENTS

Free Visual Arts Essay Examples & Topic Ideas
Visual arts are the works of art we see with our eyes. It is a broad definition that includes a large number of disciplines and elements. From Wassily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, from sculptures and paintings to filmmaking and interior design - the term covers it all. If you are writing an essay about visual arts, the chances are that you ...
Visual Arts Essay
Visual Arts Essay 1 (100 words) A visual arts essay offers a captivating journey into the universe of art, where words translate the language of visuals. It decodes the silent dialogue between the viewer and the artwork, providing a platform for in-depth analysis and interpretation. Whether focusing on a single masterpiece or an entire artistic ...
Visual Analysis: How to Analyze a Painting and Write an Essay
A visual analysis essay is a type of essay written mostly by students majoring in Art History and Communications. The process of visual analysis can be applied to painting, visual art, journalism, photo-journalism, photography, film, and writing. Works in these mediums are often meant to be consumed for entertainment or informative purposes.
The Importance of Visual Art
The Importance of Visual Art. Gift of Sydney Smith Gordon. Visual art is a fundamental component of the human experience reflecting the world and the time in which we live. Art can help us understand our history, our culture, our lives, and the experience of others in a manner that cannot be achieved through other means. It can also be a source ...
Visual Arts Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas
88 essay samples found. Visual arts encompass a wide range of artistic expressions that are created to be appreciated primarily for their aesthetic or emotional impact. Essays on visual arts could delve into the exploration of different art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, and digital art. Discussions might also explore the ...
Art
art, a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination. The term art encompasses diverse media such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation. (Read Sister Wendy's Britannica essay on art appreciation.) memorial board. Memorial board, wood.
1.2: What is Visual Art?
1.2.1.2 Communication. A later attempt at defining art comes from the nineteenth-century Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy wrote on many subjects, and is the author of the great novel War and Peace (1869). He was also an art theorist. He proposed that art is the communication of feeling, stating, "Art is a human activity consisting in this ...
Unveiling the Art of Visual Essays: A Comprehensive Guide
Unleash your inner raconteur as you weave a narrative that enthralls your audience. Utilize visual cues, pacing, and sequencing to guide viewers seamlessly through your essay. Craft a story that ...
The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the ...
The visual essay is an invitation to other researchers in the arts to create their own kind of visual essays in order to address their own work of art or that of others: they can consider their ...
The Arts: Visual Arts
Choosing a Topic. The visual arts are here broadly defined also to include architecture, design and contemporary forms of visual culture. The outcome of a student's research should be a coherent piece of writing that effectively addresses a particular research question appropriate to the visual arts, and including any relevant images or illustrations.
IB Visual Arts EE examples
EE Visual Arts A. To what extent has the Indian culture influenced the architect Gajanan B Mhatre in the design of the Empress court in Mumbai during the British colonization. EE Visual Arts B. An exploration into the theme of motherhood in art during the early Weimar Republic, as seen through the works of Otto Dix and Käthe Kollwitz.
Keystone Academy Libraries: Extended Essay: Visual arts
Total marks awarded. 24/28. Although in places more descriptive than necessary, overall this is an intelligent, insightful and analytical extended essay. The candidate has reflected both upon the films in question and secondary sources, with an appropriate focus on cinematic themes relevant to an extended essay registered in the Visual Arts.
The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever
The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever. By Will Fenstermaker. June 14, 2017. Dr. Cornel West. There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world's artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different ...
How to Write a HSC Visual Arts Essay Using a Scaffold
When it comes to HSC Visual Arts there's lots of ways to practice and prepare for your exams, but writing an essay for it can be difficult — if only there was a scaffold you could use to make things easier…. Even if you know you want to memorise an essay, or just go in with key points, knowing how to actually write your response is the most important factor.
50+ Visual Arts Extended Essay Topics for IBDP
Art Conservation Techniques: Exploring the methods and challenges of art conservation. Restoration Ethics: Investigating ethical considerations in the restoration of artworks. Preserving Digital Art: Analyzing the strategies for preserving and archiving digital art. These categories offer a broader range of topics for an Extended Essay in ...
Visual Arts : Visual Art Essay
2. graphics, including: a) film and video. b) photography. c) printmaking. d) computer graphics. 3. sculpture. 4. textiles. By studying Visual Arts you will develop an understanding of various aspects of Fine art and different areas of design while exploring your own artistic abilities.
Essays on Visual Arts
Essays on Visual Arts. Essay examples. Essay topics. Topics in this category. 1 Achievements of Roman Civilization . 1 page / 661 words . The Roman civilization is widely regarded as one of the most influential and significant in history. Spanning over a thousand years, from its legendary founding in 753 BCE to the fall of the Western Roman ...
Visual Arts Extended Essay: The Complete Guide for IB Students
An extended essay in visual arts allows you to conduct study in a particular area of visual arts that is of interest to you. The conclusion of the study should be a clear and structured piece of writing that tackles a topic or research question pertinent to the visual arts in an effective manner.. The strongest EE in arts is the one that demonstrate a thoughtful selection of socially and ...
Dance and the Visual Arts
Set and Reset (1983), choreographed by Brown with designs by Rauschenberg, is indicative of the sensuous saturation that can take place when dance and the visual arts converse. The creation of the work was supported by Jacob's Pillow through the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and has been presented at the festival several times.
Essay About Visual Arts
Visual arts. In arts, one of the oldest forms is visual arts. These forms of art convey their meaning though what they depict. These forms of art can be described as the arts that communicate though any form which makes use of eyes and sometimes touch. In this paper, we will explore two forms of visual arts names the sculptures and painting ...
PDF How Visual Arts Education Helps Students Learn, Achieve and Thrive How
Visual arts education cultivates skills for learning. Visual arts education helps students develop critical thinking skills, which in turn lead to a deeper understanding of educational content — both within the arts and in other core subject areas. Visual arts education also fosters creativity in students and increases student engagement in the
Essay On Visual Arts
The visual arts are the art forms or creations that we see. This category usually includes things like paintings, drawings, photography, architecture, sculpture, crafts, film and printmaking. "Visual Arts" is a modern term for a broad category of art which includes many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, fine arts, decorative ...
How To Write a Band 6 Worthy Visual Arts Extended Response
To write a strong Visual Arts extended response, you'll need to write about at least 2 artists and at least 2 of each of their artworks (4 artworks all up). Essentially 1 paragraph per artwork, per artist. This helps you structure your response, but is also central to making it a "complex" essay with "evidence/cases" as examples.
The Mind-Expanding Value of Arts Education
Ms. Onguru's path shows what a pivotal role arts education can play in a young person's development. Yet, while the arts and culture space accounts for a significant amount of gross domestic ...
Blog
The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue (vol. 63, no. 1) of ...

Visual Analysis: How to Analyze a Painting and Write an Essay

What Is Visual Analysis?

Need Help With Your Visual Analysis?

Formal Analysis of Art: Who Does It?

How to Conduct Visual Analysis: What to Look For

A Detailed Process of Analyzing Visual Art

Step 1: General Info

Step 2: Describe the Painting

Step 3: Detailed Analysis

Got Stuck While writing your paper?

The Structure: How to Write a Visual Analysis Paper

Learn From a Visual Analysis Example

Need Someone to Write Your Paper?

Related Articles

National Museum of African American History & Culture

The Importance of Visual Art

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

Visual Arts - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Visual Arts Analysis: ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’

Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo

The Art between the Creation of Adam and Mona Lisa

Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Raphael – Essay

The Evolution of Art in Mexican Culture

Frida Kahlo: a Bibliography and Analysis

Religion and the Renaissance

Extended Essay Final Draft By: Esther Natal

Andy Warhol’s Life and Career

Caravaggio and Caravaggisti in Th-Century Europe

High Renaissance and the Amazing Artists

Renaissance Art: the Madonna of the Rocks

1300 Italian Art

Art : Mona Lisa

Biography of Frida Kahlo

Leonardo Da Vinci and his Artwork

“The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne” by Leonardo Da Vinci

Effect Science had on the Art during the Three Major Art Periods

Caravaggio a World-renowned Painter

A Tour of Five Eras

Frida Kahlo’s Broken Canvas: Pain, Perseverance, and the Quest for Freedom

Analyzing Changes in the ‘Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’ Painting

Mexican Artist – Frida Kahlo

Biography of Leonardo Da Vinci

Every Artist has a Different Muse

Painting of Mona Lisa

“A Picture Says a Thousand Words”

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Y Calderon

Advances in Arts: Exploring the Evolution from Renaissance to Rococo

An Analysis of Great Quattrocento and High Renaissance Art

Related topic

Margin Size

1.2: What is Visual Art?

1.2.1 Historic Development of the Idea of Art

1.2.1.1 Mimesis

1.2.1.2 Communication

1.2.1.3 Significant Form

1.2.1.4 Art world

1.2.2 Definition of Art

1.2.3 The Distinction of Fine Art

1.2.4 Why Art Matters

The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities

Introduction

Case study: step by step reading of a visual essay

Concluding remarks

Author information

Corresponding author

Additional information

Rights and permissions

About this article

Share this article

Quick links

Extended Essay: The Arts: Visual Arts

Extended Essays in the Arts

Assessed Student Work

IB Visual Arts EE examples

Extended Essay

Visual Arts: Sample A

Related Articles

Current Shows

INSIDER ACCESS TO THE WORLD'S BEST ART

Collect the world's best