History of Art

Teacher-In-Charge - Mr D G Parr, DipFA (Canterbury), DipTchg
Email: d.parr@kingscollege.school.nz

 

Why do Art History?

Sight is perhaps the most precious of our senses. Seeing comes before words: the child looks and recognises before it can speak. Art History is the only subject offered in our curriculum that educates the way in which we see.

Art History involves the study of visual images and objects, and visual culture, in various media: painting and drawing, sculpture, architecture, photography, film, video, and printmaking.

Works of art are part of the society from which they spring: Art History involves the investigation of visual images and objects in their particular social and cultural contexts. It can therefore tell us a lot about social and cultural developments through history.

Art History is an academic discipline that can provide valuable knowledge and understanding of the function of art in society, both past and present, and in terms of relationships between the past and the present and between different societies and cultures.

Art History, ideally, encourages and fosters a critical independence in its students and an openness to, and tolerance of, various and differing intellectual viewpoints and cultural practices. As such it is of fundamental value in a liberal and democratic society, such as New Zealand.

Where does Art History lead?

There are many advantages in having taken Art History at school: some are indirect, others are direct.

Art History helps to develop your interpretive thinking, critical and analytical independence, and essential research and writing skills. All these skills are essential to a wide range of vocations. The importance of the arts and humanities in education is now widely recognized, especially in vocational areas that value intellect and independence of thought, such as medicine and law. Employers increasingly are rating qualities such as sensitivity, creativity and social awareness more highly than mere job-specific skills from applicants, which in many cases can be taken for granted. There are direct vocational and practical uses should you wish to pursue your interest in Art History into areas of specialization, chiefly in gallery and museum curation, secondary and tertiary education, consultancy and curatorial positions.

FOR UNIVERSITY: The Year 12 and 13 Art History syllabuses provide you with further choices and opportunities when designing or applying for your university course, as both are repeated in Art History papers for Stages One and Two: these can be used to complement majors taken in other departments in the Faculty of Arts. Studying the visual images used by different cultures in history and throughout the world can enhance and deepen an understanding of a number of other disciplines.


History of Art - Year Twelve NCEA Level 2


The NCEA Level 2 syllabus requires the study of two options. At King's College the options selected are:

 

  1. French Painting of the Nineteenth Century - a study of French painting from Neo-Classicism to Impressionism
  2. Cubism - a study of the development of Cubism from 1907 to 1922.



History of Art - Year Thirteen

From 2004, we will be offering a local AS level Cambridge Art History syllabus.

The objectives of the course are that candidates should be able to:
  • demonstrate knowledge of art historical fact
  • demonstrate knowledge of the different periods in the history of art
  • compare and differentiate styles of art
  • place works of art in their historical, social and cultural context
  • show understanding of composition, structure, use of colour, movement, the handling of space, techniques
  • demonstrate close scrutiny of individual works
  • demonstrate skills of research from appropriate sources
  • synthesize knowledge from a number of sources and present an informed interpretation
Four options must be selected from a choice of four Renaissance and four modern options: those offered at King's College are:

The Renaissance:
Option 2: Naturalism and Science in Fifteenth-Century Italian Painting
(Masaccio, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci)
  1. Renaissance theorists and the application of pespective
  2. Developments in landscape naturalism and science
  3. Gesture, expression and portrayal of narrative
Option 4: The Renaissance in Northern Europe
(The van Eycks, van der Weyden, Dürer, Bosch)
  1. The depiction of interiors and landscape
  2. Symbolism in Northern renaissance painting
  3. Northern portraiture
Modern Art:
Option 1: Towards Abstraction
  1. Analytical Cubism (including the influence of Cézanne and Primitivism) and Synthetic Cubism (Picasso, Braque, Gris)
  2. The impact of the machine on painting and sculpture in France and Italy
  3. Concepts of Abstraction (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Brancusi, Malevich)
Option 3: American Art since 1945
  1. Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Newman)
  2. Pop Art (Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rauschenburg)
  3. The Women's Art Movement and Feminist Art (Chicago, Hesse, Kruger, Sherman. Guerilla Girls)


Assessment will be by two one-and-a-half hour examinations.