The Meaning of ArchitectureAuthor(s): Christopher ReedSource: Art Journal, Vol. 54, No. 3, Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey(Autumn, 1995), p. 91Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777606 .

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Family Pictures CHRISTOPHER REED

T his project is the brainchild of my colleague Donna

Cassidy, who uses it in conjunction with Margaretta Lovell's "Reading 18th-Century American Family

Portraits," Winterthur Portfolio 22, no. 6 (Winter 1987): 243-64. I have used it with Carol Duncan's "Happy Mothers

and Other New Ideas," in Norma Broude and Mary D. Gar-

rard, eds., Feminism and Art History (New York: Harper and

Row, 1982). We ask students to bring in a picture that

represents their family (a term they define, leading, poten-

tially, to a discussion of changes in the idea of family). The

class discusses how poses, settings, gestures, and facial

expressions encode various notions of the family, comparing the persistance of eithteenth-century conventions in formal

portraiture with the visual rhetoric of the snapshot.

The Period Eye CHRISTOPHER REED

After reading chapter 2 of Michael Baxandall's Paint-

ing and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1972), students are asked to

bring in examples of images that reflect our current "period eye" (magazines are a good source). The point is to question what we mean when we call a picture "realistic" and to show how "ways of seeing" are neither natural nor universal but

culturally constructed and changeable over time. Common

examples of images made to attract the current "period eye" include so-called international symbols, various forms of

trick photography (i.e., images that appear to have been shot

through a water droplet), microscopic images, computer graphics, and other images that suggest what we normally see on computer screens. Ultimately, students can debate whether shifts in habits of vision associated with modern media culture represent as profound a change in ways of

seeing as that associated with the invention of Renaissance

systems of perspective.

The Meaning of Architecture CHRISTOPHER REED

After reading Nikolaus Pevsner, "The Architecture of Mannerism" (1946; reprinted in Harold Spencer, ed., Readings in Art History, 2d ed., vol. 2 [New

York: Scribner's, 1976]), students write a paper applying his

vocabulary and modes of analysis to a postmodern building in their vicinity, preferably one that is a pastiche of older

architectural forms and elements. At the conclusion of the

paper, students are asked to engage Pevsner's (much-

disputed) connection of Mannerist architecture to the corrup- tion of the society of fifteenth-century Italy, as they relate

postmodernist forms to the culture of the present. Even by

drawing the obvious analogy, students here take an important

step in moving beyond the uncritical "art appreciation" atti- tude generally fostered by the survey mode.

Improving Visual Literacy DIANNE STRICKLAND

oo often we as art historians become so involved with

lecturing on the sweep of history that we neglect both the specific human meanings artworks carry and the

visual skills our students desperately need in a culture where so much information is conveyed through imagery. In order to

address both these issues, I often ask students to answer

specific questions during class time about one of the works I am discussing. For example, I ask them to examine the women in Frans Hals's Women Regents of the Old Men's Home at Haarlem (1664) and to choose either the one they like best or least and to write for five minutes explaining why. Students are then encouraged to share their perceptions with the class.

BRADFORD R. COLLINS is guest editor of this issue of Art Journal.

BETSY FA H LM AN teaches American art in the School of Art, Arizona State University.

NA NC Y K NEC HTEL teaches Western survey courses in the Fine Arts Division, Niagara County Community College, Sanborn, N.Y.

M A-RK MOIL A N E N teaches art education and art appreciation courses in the Department ofArt, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

CHRISTOPHER REED teaches twentieth-century art and women's studies at the University of Southern Maine. He is

currently working in Philadelphia on a J. Paul Getty postdoctoral fellowship.

DIANNE STRICKLAND teaches art history courses in the Renaissance to the present as well as gender studies courses at Southwest Missouri State University.

ART JOURNAL

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