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Extended Essay A,B,C Criteria-class of 2027

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Extended Essay A,B,C Criteria-class of 2027

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Screenshot 2026-05-15 at 2.21.19 in the afternoon

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Extended Essay-Criteria D,E-class of 2027

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Extended Essay-Criteria D,E-class of 2027

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Screenshot 2026-05-15 at 2.22.24 in the afternoon

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Another EE that got a 7 with annotations for criteria

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Another EE that got a 7 with annotations for criteria

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Preparing for the AQA GCSE exams feels like a bit of a marathon. With seven GCSE exam themes to resource, coming up with artists and ideas can really test your creative thinking! Still, I've ploughed on through and finished all seven themes and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Each mind-map is an A3 interactive PDF - meaning you can click on the artists names and images to link to relevant websites, when looking on a computer. They also make inspiring posters to have up in the classroom providing subtle inspiration to students who might be inclined to think quite narrowly about the themes.

Here they are:

GCSE exam themes are available singly or as a bundle from my Teachers Pay Teachers shop, just click here . Or the bundle of seven PDF files is available for £5 by clicking here:

Hopefully these will provide some inspiration and save a bit of work too!

Other resources which might be useful for the exam can be found at the links below:

And the AQA GCSE theme mind-maps from 2017 are downloadable here - for free.

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Preparing for the AQA GCSE exams feels like a bit of a marathon. With seven GCSE exam themes to resource, coming up with artists and ideas can really test your creative thinking! Still, I've ploughed on through and finished all seven themes and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

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The marketing guys at Ikea have earned themselves some kudos, and - of course - a lot of publicity - with a new series of ads in which the British photographer Tim Cole recreates three famous works of art. Understandably, perhaps, many people feel uneasy about the appropriation of fine art by base commerce, but as long as the artists whose work is being 'paid homage' are long dead, who's really in a position to object? And if the appropriation/homage is well done (and in the case of Cole's Nighthawks it would have to be said it is - spookily so) then why would you bother.

These ads are just the latest in a long and not always proud, but by no means always shameful tradition that is just about as old as advertising itself. Indeed the Swedish meatball purveyors themselves have form in their use of The Shining in a previous campaign. And if their version of Nighthawks is spooky, their take on Kubrick's horror masterpiece is truly terrifying: the prospect of being stuck overnight in a branch of Ikea surely being scarier to anyone with a modicum of sanity than that of an entire winter snowed in with Jack Nicholson at The Overlook Hotel...

And while it's undeniable that there are living artists who have felt ill treated, not to say ripped off by the advertising industry, it also has to be acknowledged that it's not a one way street, that artists too have appropriated images from the commercial realm. The most obvious example of course being Andy Warhol and, most famously, his Campbells soup cans. More recently YBAs Jake and Dinos Chapman have hijacked the marketing imagery of McDonalds for their Family Collection.

The Chapman's too, of course, are prime examples/suspects of that phenomenon far more common than either the appropriation of art by advertising or vice versa: the appropriation of one artist's work by another (or two others in Jake and Dinos' case...). Francesco Goya, had he been around to witness it, would have found himself serially both paid homage to and defaced by the former enfants terribles, and, had he objected, the brothers might reasonably have pointed to the 17 etchings of works by Velázquez he himself had made early in his career as a court artist, (one of which is itself later reproduced in the background of a portrait of Zola by Manet).

17 etchings, though, is as nothing compared to the 58 versions of Las Meninas by Velázquez done by Pablo Picasso. But in case one is tempted towards the belief that this might just be a case of Spanish art eating itself, consider the more than 20 years Francis Bacon spent reworking Velázquez's Pope Innocent X. Which was itself closely modelled on Raphael's (and so it goes on...).

Velázquez, it turns out, must be one of the most homaged artists of all time, at least if the Wikipedia page for Picasso's reworkings of Las Meninas is to be believed, listing as it does 26 other artists who have done versions of that painting alone. The list runs alphabetically from Bravo to Witkin and includes not only Goya but Dali, Degas, Hamilton, Singer Sergeant, Wall and Whistler. That said, the Jeff Wall piece - Picture for Women - at least is widely regarded (including I believe by the artist himself) as a reworking of Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère - itself generally regarded as a reworking of Las Meninas, although, oddly enough it doesn't make the Wikipedia list.

Manet, as well as being a fan of Goya, was - probably not unconnectedly - greatly influenced by Velázquez, and also got 'done' by Picasso, who surpassed his own 58 versions of Las Meninas, with 27 paintings, 140 drawings, 3 linogravures and cardboard maquettes for sculptures based on Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe.

Neither was Manet the only painter re-made by Wall, whose The Destroyed Room is based on Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus, which also serves as the source for rather younger British artist Tom Hunter, whose work also includes remakes of (most famously, perhaps) , and, obviously, Velázquez. In its stillness and gently but strikingly lit melancholy, Hunter's work often recalls that of Edward Hopper, who has often been used as a source for painters, photographers and now, of course, Ikea.

The final word, however, on the subject of artists work being appropriated by others must go to actor turned model/poet/artist/all round Renaissance man, James Franco or, rather, to Cindy Sherman for her appreciation of his homage.

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Like what you see? A brief history of the art of appropriation

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The marketing guys at Ikea have earned themselves some kudos, and - of course - a lot of publicity - with a new series of ads in which the British photographer Tim Cole recreates three famous works of art.

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A modern like Frida Kahlo that could be good for comparison?

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A modern like Frida Kahlo that could be good for comparison?

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Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh has lived the majority of her life in the Northern Hemisphere. Having left Ethiopia at a young age, Muluneh spent her early years bouncing between Yemen, England, and Cyprus before moving to Canada and later the United States, where she took up a position as a photojournalist for the Washington Post. Muluneh developed her skills as a documentary photographer at the Post, but found herself gravitating toward a more artistic mode of expression as she simultaneously nurtured a growing desire to reconnect with the land of her birth.

Nine years ago, Muluneh moved back to Ethiopia to satisfy both urges. She has since created several exhibitions' worth of work and founded the Addis Foto Fest, Ethiopia's first biennial exhibition of photography from around the world. Muluneh also established (Developing and Educating Society Through Art), a cultural development organization that runs workshops, exhibitions, and creative exchanges.

Muluneh described her return to Ethiopia, in a statement, as "a lesson in humility, and what it means to return to a land that was foreign to me." For her latest solo show, " The World is Nine on view through April 16 at David Krut Projects in New York, Muluneh further expounds upon the insights she gained from repatriation, borrowing the show's title from an expression her grandmother often used: "The world is 9; it's never complete and it's never perfect."

The title's origin also mirrors the sense of reflexivity present in the exhibition. "Some of these images are like a personal diary," Muluneh said of her series of vivid, almost surrealistic portraiture. That isn't to say the works are autobiographical, however. Muluneh describes this show as a "symbolic" attempt to delve into the many layers of her uniquely multifaceted diasporic culture, and through that complicate both her and our own ideas about how we live "as people, as nations, as beings."

In our conversation below, which has been lightly edited and condensed, Muluneh discusses the significance of these themes in her photographs as well as the motivations behind their creation.
ARTnews: What draws you to such bold color palettes in your photography?
Aida Muluneh: Subconsciously, it probably has to do with the fact that I tend to be an aggressive person, and I like extremities. When I do something, I do it passionately. I want a passionate color-something that's both beautiful and disturbing at the same time, like a car accident you can't help but look at. When I did a show in Paris, somebody said my work had a Pop element to it, which was something I hadn't considered before.
What sort of reaction would you say you are trying to provoke?
I'm trying to make art digestible, no matter whether you're a bourgeois blah blah or someone from any other spectrum of society. I also want to make Africa digestible in a different way. When people think about Africa right now, they often only think about animals, war, and famine. I'm trying to distort that impression to provoke questions in a different sense.
You've mentioned before that your focus is on "capturing light." What exactly does that process entail?
I start with an idea-a poem, or what have you-and I sketch it out. From that sketch, I have fashion designers make the clothes for that image. The shooting process feels like a film script. That's how I see these painted faces-as different characters void of nationality and ethnicity, like blank slates. The sentiment behind the images are supposed to be things that exist within all of us regardless of where we come from. So, when I talk about capturing light, it's not just about the physical light that comes into the room, but about a sense of enlightenment as well. That's what I'm trying to show with my work.
In your exhibition catalogue, there's a wonderful essay by the poet Lemn Sissay. One line in particular stood out for me: "Our homelands are inside of us, and when we return a more truthful experience emerges." Would you say that's happened to you since you moved back to Ethiopia?
It's about inspiration. In that sense, if you're drinking a [country's] water and breathing its air, that will have an impact in itself. The validation came for me when I realized I had to stop fantasizing about my birthland of Ethiopia without being inside of it. As Ethiopians, we tend to be very nostalgic people. I see that creeping into Ethiopian artwork, which is why I wanted to understand [Ethiopia] from the inside.
What prompted you to permanently move back to Addis Ababa and create art?
I came back to Addis in 2007 to work on a documentary for three months. When I got here, I realized this place was too dynamic to be fantasizing about from somewhere else, so I left my life in Canada. My participation in this conversation is much more than the work you see hanging on the wall; it's about the advocacy of cultural ownership. Africa is so rich in culture, and I don't mean only in terms of food and fashion. I'm talking about the element of beauty.
How does that sentiment relate to your work with DESTA?
I'm interested in how we use culture as part of development. The activities we do through DESTA are meant to engage society, but also, because we're a business, we try to find sustainable solutions that show it's possible to create work through culture. On many levels, social entrepreneurship must be encouraged, as it's way more beneficial than any NGO. The work for me is about communication, rebranding my country, and teaching other photographers.

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'I Want to Make Africa Digestible in a Different Way': Aida Muluneh on Her Show at David Krut Projects -

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Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh has lived the majority of her life in the Northern Hemisphere. Having left Ethiopia at a young age, Muluneh spent her early years bouncing between Yemen, England, and Cyprus before moving to Canada and later the ... Read More

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Tips to Dive into Art Development, by Art Movements | Tipsographic

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Project management software reviews. Free PMP® certification online training. Project management news, analysis, blogs, tools.

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Linking words and phrases - learn English,linking,words,english

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Although movies are sometimes cast in a bad light by administrators and parents, we know that a good movie can help bring art to life. If you like to use occasional movies in your high school classroom, then this AOE List is for you! Thanks to all of our amazing FB fans that helped us put the list together.

NOTE: Depending on your comfort level, the maturity of your students, and your school's policies, some language and/or scenes from the movies below may not be appropriate for your classroom. ALWAYS preview movies in their entirety before showing them to your students.

Click the links in the PDF for more information about each movie.

Click to Download Free AOE List!

We hope this list is a useful reference tool for you. If you are short on time in your classroom, one FB fan had a great tip to search through the "Special Features" sections of DVDs for inspiring and informative "behind the scenes" information to show instead. Genius!
What movies would you add to this list? Which of these have you used in your classroom?

This article was written by AOE Team member and Senior Editor Amanda Heyn. Amanda is a passionate K-4 educator from Madison, Wisconsin. She's focused on dynamic curriculum development, technology integration, and cross-curricular projects.

About Amanda | Amanda's Articles

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24 movies to show in your high school art room

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24 Movies to Show in Your High School Art Room (The Art of Education)

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Although movies are sometimes cast in a bad light by administrators and parents, we know that a good movie can help bring art to life. If you like to use occasional movies in your high school classroom, then this AOE List is for you!

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BBC art and culture dicussions

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What part did national motifs play in the creative work of Russian avant-garde artists of the Knave of Diamonds society?

Should the old neon signs of Warsaw be moved to a new Museum of Modern Art?

In what ways did men’s and women’s fashion convey the ideals of National Socialism?

How does the work of Yinka Shonibare illustrate the changing role of African art in a global society?

Le Corbusier: Chapel at Ronchamp. How does Le Corbusier use both cubist and organic architecture to create aesthetic and functional harmony?

What were the origins of the Romanesque in Arles?

Are there influences of pop art in the decorations on Pakistani trucks?

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Perspectives:

• What are the justifications for, and implications of, claiming that there are absolute standards for “good art”?

• Who determines what art is valued, and on what criteria?

• Should your judgments about art be given the same weight as those of an expert?

• What role does the history of an artform play in evaluating present work?

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In what ways are moral judgments similar to, or different from, aesthetic judgments?

• Do the arts play a role in the development of our personal value systems?

• How important is the study of literature in our individual ethical development?

• Is the production and enjoyment of art subject to ethical constraints?

• On what criteria could it be decided if the state has the right to censor art that is deemed immoral or blasphemous?

• Do the arts have the power to challenge established moral values?

• Are moral and aesthetic judgments more a matter of taste than a matter of truth?

• Can we separate the moral character of the artist from the value of the artwork?

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Like others in the arts, I often find myself thinking about the word beauty, what it means in art and in the world today. Has beauty been largely forgotten or relegated to an inferior position? (If you are feeling cynical, save this reading for another day).

There are many marvelous writers on the subject and articles and books dedicated to it. This humble blog post does not intend to tackle questions of aesthetics but is merely to share with you some gleanings from various authors and thinkers that I have been reading. You could use these quotes as the basis for a lively TOK and Art discussion or debate on the importance of beauty, or maybe just as a pause for thought, and a recognition of something beautiful.

Whenever you see people doing art, whether they are amateurs at a swing dance class or a professional painter, you invariably see them trying to get better. "I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart," Vincent van Gogh wrote. (from David Brooks NYT article below)

Everybody approves of art

David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times writes...

"...These days we all like beautiful things. Everybody approves of art. But the culture does not attach as much emotional, intellectual or spiritual weight to beauty. We live, as Leon Wieseltier wrote in an essay for The Times Book Review, in a post-humanist moment. That which can be measured with data is valorized. Economists are experts on happiness. The world is understood primarily as the product of impersonal forces; the nonmaterial dimensions of life explained by the material ones.

Over the past century, artists have had suspicious and varied attitudes toward beauty. Some regard all that aesthetics-can-save-your-soul mumbo jumbo as sentimental claptrap. They want something grittier and more confrontational. In the academy, theory washed like an avalanche over the celebration of sheer beauty - at least for a time." read the full article When Beauty Strikes in the New York Times, January 16, 2016

Have the arts abandoned beauty?

"The arts, whose task once was considered to be that of manifesting the beautiful, will discuss the idea only to dismiss it, regarding beauty only as the pretty, the simple, the pleasing, the mindless and the easy. Because beauty is conceived so naively, it appears as merely naïve, and can be tolerated only if complicated by discord, shock, violence, and harsh terrestrial realities. I therefor feel justified in speaking of the repression of beauty" -James Hillman

Beauty is a joke?

Beauty is the most dangerous idea in art. It's the most dangerous idea in life, too. It tantalises and confuses, inspires and crushes. Beauty has been worshipped as the highest artistic value and denigrated as a pagan temptation. Today, though, it is simply treated by the art world as a joke, a con, an idiotic, old-fashioned idea. This makes much art irrelevant, because beauty is everywhere and obsesses everyone (whatever your idea of beauty happens to be).....

So, galleries are full of serious art that shuns beauty. And we look at it earnestly, then go and look at gorgeous photos, films, magazines - the true art of our time.- Read the rest of this article in the Guardian :When did modern art become so reluctant to embrace beauty

Is ugliness the standard?

"Beauty is mostly forgotten and made to seem naïve or romantic. The blindness of property development creates room, buildings, suburbs which lack grace and mystery. Socially this influences the atmosphere in workplaces, in schools, and the community. It also results in the degradation of the environment that we are turning more and more of our beautiful earth into a wasteland. Much of the stress and emptiness that haunts us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. Internally the mind becomes course and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts which hold the radiance of beauty." John O'Donahue
"Internally the mind becomes course and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts which hold the radiance of beauty."
Beauty is calling
Irish poet John O'Donahue in his book Divine Beauty writes
"In Greek the word for " the beautiful" is to kalon. It is related to kalein which includes the notion of "call". When we experience beauty, we feel called. The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in it and us...it unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life... "

Mistaking glamour for beauty

"It has become the habit of our times to mistake glamour for beauty. Beauty is not glamour, glamour, like the art world itself, is highly fickle and commercially driven enterprise that contributes to...the humdrum. It appears and disappears...no one ever catches up to glamour " - Robert C Morgan

Beauty is the Mystery of Life

Painter Agnes Martin writes

"When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection...."

Form is beauty

"Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life. Beauty is the overriding demonstration of pattern that one observes. . Why is form beautiful? Because I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and without meaning...." Robert Adams from Beauty in Photography

What are your thoughts on beauty?

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Like others in the arts, I often find myself thinking about the word beauty, what it means in art and in the world today. Has beauty been largely forgotten or relegated to an inferior position? (If you are feeling cynical, save this reading for another day).There are many marvelous writers on the subject and articles and...

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Umber is a conundrum, a rusty riddle of a colour. A cross between the deep redness of blood and the blasé blandness of mud, umber is a havering hue with a haunting humidity all its own. Umber's ability to ebb and flow between shades of our interior self and those of the exterior world we inhabit make it the perfect pigment for painters as diverse as Bosch and Modigliani, Titian and Velázquez, to create scenes of enduring urgency - scenes we feel as much as see. Swipe umber from the paintbox of art history and the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio's canvases and the meditativeness of Rothko's 1962 work Untitled (Umber, Blue, Umber, Brown) would dissolve into drabness.
More like this:
- The disgusting origins of the colour purple
- The colour that means both life and death
- The murky history of the colour yellow

So complex a mixture is umber's identity of the inner and outer worlds, its very name (originally in Italian ' terra d'ombra', or 'earth of shadows') is pulled in two directions. Some maintain the word is merely an echo of an actual location, Umbria, the mountainous region of central Italy where, sometime in the 15th Century, the pigment was first professionally concocted from soil rich in manganese and iron oxide.

Others contend that the colour's name is less a geographical allusion and more a mystical designation inspired by the spiritual depths that the pigment enables artists to plumb, one that owes its origin instead to the Latin ' umbra ', meaning 'shadow'. If we mix the two hypotheses together, we discover perhaps something closer to the truth: a paradoxical shadow-land of a hue, one that binds into a single substance the material grittiness of this world and the immaterial gloom of one that lies just beyond our perception.

The use of umber by artists dates back to our earliest image-making ancestors who smeared soil on cave walls as a suitable approximation for the auburn fur of beasts. Flash forward a few millennia, from the neolithic age to the cusp of the Renaissance, and umber begins to come into its own as a subtle aesthetic force - adding a ruddy depth to more garish pigments when combined on the artist's palette.
Down to earth
Reacting against the naiveté of simplistic perspective and the crispness of colours often found in Medieval altars and icons, artists began to experiment with more realistic figurative proportions as well as with greater complexities of pigment, adding earth-tones such as umber and sienna (which hailed from an adjoining province), in both their raw and burnt forms, to their inventories. Without a rich assortment of browns to keep things rooted and real, Humanism might never have got off the ground.

Years before Hieronymus Bosch began work on the carnal carnival of colours for which he would be most remembered, his famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1515), the Early Netherlandish master would find himself seduced by the shabby solemnity of umber. Bosch's teasing tondo (or round painting) The Wayfarer, undertaken around 1500, captures a limping pedlar, overburdened by the wares and weariness of this world.

Although the laden figure appears to be heading for a gate that leads to pastoral purity, he looks back in the direction of a squalid house of sin behind him. This structure, from which he may have recently emerged, relies for its sense of shadiness on an admixture of shadowy umber and sickly, syphilitic ochre. Caught between the temptations of the flesh and spirit, Bosch's subject is forever halted in his progress towards salvation by the lures of a debauched world - a paralysis intensified by the pallid gloom of umber that shadows him.

Soon after Bosch created his allegory, umber can be found unsettling the ambience of another Renaissance masterpiece, this time at the orchestration of the Italian prodigy Raphael, then in his early 20s. Raphael's oil-on-wood portrait of Catherine of Alexandria, completed around 1507, depicts the 4th-Century Christian martyr leaning against a wooden 'execution wheel' - a bone-crushing torture device to which Catherine had been sentenced after refusing the advances of the Roman Emperor Maxentius. According to legend, the implement, also known as a 'breaking wheel', broke the instant Catherine touched it.

Catherine's ecstatic gaze upwards is intended to fix our focus on the promise of heaven hinted at in the gleaming clouds above her, but our eyes cannot help drifting back to earth and to that brutal wheel against which she strikes a strangely casual pose. Raphael has carefully fashioned the horrendous hoop's wood grain from a sophisticated cocktail of yellow, azurite and vermillion. But it is the secret ingredient of umber - newly introduced into the artist's palette - that keeps both the wheel (forever about to shatter into splinters at Catherine's touch) and the painting itself, grounded and real. The umber wheel is what helps the painting navigate its course through the shadowy realms of suffering and faith.

Umber began to emerge from the shadows to define shadows in its own right

By the end of the 16th Century, umber was no longer content to play merely a supporting role in paintings, and began to emerge from the shadows to define shadows utterly and in its own right. Caravaggio's high-contrast canvases, for example, where the drama of dimly-lit interiors is articulated by the gutter of an unseen candle that flickers somewhere outside the frame, would not be possible without the artist's wholesale reliance on the profound power of umber.

The young musician in The Lute Player (1596), for instance, which the artist believed was "the best piece that he ever painted", plucks himself into melodious existence against an umbral abyss echoing behind him. Here, the heaviness of umber's encroachment, intensified by carbon black, threatens to engulf the lutist, yet is held in eternal abeyance by music's mystical light.

In the centuries since Caravaggio steeped his subjects in umber, no artist would experiment with its moving metaphysics more profoundly than Rembrandt. Umber is the inexhaustible bog from which the 17th-Century Dutch master dredged the faces and stares of those who sat for his soulful portraits.

Rembrandt's incessant self-portraiture, moreover, is itself a ceaseless churning of earthiness and shadow, made possible by the potency of umber as a colour that can conjure simultaneously the fleetingness of flesh and durability of spirit.

For the lyrical landscape artists of the ensuing 18th and 19th Centuries, and particularly for the Romantic visionaries J M W Turner and John Constable, umber would come to dominate the foregrounds of scenes that feel as if they depict as much an aspect of mind as an actual spot of time and place. Though historians might wear themselves out parsing the relative achievement of these rivals, they share a reverence for the rituals of umber.

The affecting pencil-and-watercolour sketch Coast of Yorkshire (c. 1806-7), over which a wash of unadulterated umber alchemises the dramatic scene into nostalgia, is testimony to Turner's total faith in the colour. "When we speak of the perfections of art," Constable asserted in a lecture in 1836, "we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shades, umber or soot". The primary colours of being in the world are recalibrated by Constable and Turner - and umber is among their number.

Umber fell from favour towards the end of the 19th Century with the arrival of an Impressionist movement allergic to the allure of sombre browns. Kept embering in the soaring branches that scrape Vincent van Gogh's anguished skyscape The Starry Night, the colour then enjoyed a resurgence in the 20th Century thanks, in part, to the earthiness of African art and tribal masks with which avant garde artists became obsessed.

Perhaps no painting in Modern art more poignantly reasserts umber's ability to draw us into its mysteries than Amadeo Modigliani's haunting portrait of his lover and muse Jeanne Hébuterne, created a few months before the artist died of tubercular meningitis in January 1920. Two days later, the grief-stricken Hébuterne leapt to her own death from a fifth-story window. At first glance, Hébuterne's own eerie eye-less glare - a disconcerting trademark of the Italian artist's expressively inexpressive portraits - gives us the uncanny impression of staring at an empty mask, the wearer having already departed.

Bracketing the barren countenance, and determining the temperature of the space, are carefully calibrated modulations of umber traceable in Hébuterne's umber-rich hair and in the curdling golds of the armchair, tinged by the same pigment, upon which her life-in-deathness and death-in-lifeness is precariously poised. It is umber that summons us to the strange space she inhabits - one that is neither warm nor cold, real nor imagined, remembered nor prophesied.

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Umber is a conundrum, a rusty riddle of a colour. A cross between the deep redness of blood and the blasé blandness of mud, umber is a havering hue with a haunting humidity all its own.

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Extended Essay - Course Companion - Kosta Lekanides - Oxford 2016

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MIrrors and Reflections in Art and the symbolism behind them

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MIrrors and Reflections in Art and the symbolism behind them

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The ancient world believed a person's soul was contained in their reflection. If someone died, it was customary in some cultures to cover up all the mirrors in the house to ensure safe passage of the soul to the afterlife.

Mirrors hold us. Like ancient souls, we are prone to being ensnared in the pane of a looking glass. When we look at ourselves in a mirror, our gaze is returned by the very gaze that looks. We see ourselves watching ourselves. Like Narcissus, whom Ovid tells was punished for spurning the love of Echo, we can become entranced by our own reflection, pining after the mysterious other in the mirror or pool.

Something of the ambiguity of mirrors is apparent when we see someone else looking at their reflection. Is their expression not curiously altered? A loved-one peering into a mirror adopts a 'mirror face', usually a more solemn and noble version than their real set of shimmering expressions. It is somehow a fleeting thing, this pretend face, one that is released from existence as soon as they step away from the mirror. The truth they imagine they find in their reflection is thus revealed as a kind of distortion.

In the same vein, the symbolic meaning of mirrors in art is wonderfully ambiguous. Two contradictory themes emerge, one associated with the virtue of truth (for the mirror is said not to lie) and the other with a perversion of truth, with vanity and the dark quality of luxury.

But perhaps the two themes are not so contradictory after all, for what unites them is the sense of something being revealed: the idea is that mirrors reflect a hidden truth, perhaps a window to an 'anti-world', a more unvarnished version of our own. We are accustomed to demons and supernatural creatures having no reflection on account of being dispossessed of a soul. Thus, as a means of disclosure, the image that appears in a mirror can be thought of as being more revealing that the mere surface appearance.

Hence, in art, the depiction of a mirror is usually for some allegorical purpose. It is a way of saying, "There lies a deeper truth here."

Several personifications of the Deadly Sins are shown holding mirrors. Pride (Latin Superbia) is sometimes shown holding a mirror in which the image of Satan can be seen. The sin of Lust (or 'Luxury'; Latin Luxuria, Libido) often holds a mirror too, symbolizing woman's vanity and hence her power to seduce. (Lust was thought to pertain principally to women; for men, Avarice or greed was the equivalent vice.)

In such a way, the mirror as a symbol in art became closely connected with women, so that images of women peering into mirrors are a commonplace theme in art history.

Sometimes represented in the Renaissance as a naked woman on a couch, or else a woman in her private chamber, the mirror is one emblem of Vanitas. A 'vanitas' painting is a symbolic work of art expressing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. She is usually attending to her hair with a comb and looking into a mirror as she does so. Sometimes an inscription on a scroll announces the Latin 'Omnia Vanitas' - 'All is vanity', with the figure surrounded by the earthly pleasures of jewels and gold coins. To underline the link between vanity and futility, the figure of Death sometimes appears too.

During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the recumbent nude became merged with images of Venus, identified with the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility. One of the most well-known mirrors in art is that gazed into by Venus as painted by Diego Velázquez in 1644. Here, Venus is shown in her private chamber, stretched out on silk bedclothes whilst her mischievous offspring Cupid holds up a mirror so she can enjoy her own beauty (whilst we, the viewer, are meant to do the same).

In Renaissance times, humanist scholars began to associate the sensual gratification of Lust with Love in the person of Venus, conflating beauty, vanity, and sexuality to symbolize the seductively illicit. The motif of the mirror helps to make this conflation yet more tantalizing, for it becomes difficult to tell if Velázquez's Venus is more concerned with herself or if she is secretly looking at us in the reflection. Such games of hide-and-seek would have provided a 17th century viewer with a teasing form of entertainment.

Truth and Prudence

Allegory of Prudence (1645) by Simon Vouet. Oil on canvas. Fabre Museum, Montpellier, France. Source Wikimedia Commons

Yet whilst Vanitas art flourished, it is important to account for the other symbolic meaning of mirrors that emerged during the Renaissance period.

The allegorical figure of Prudence - one of the four Classical Virtues - is often shown holding a mirror to signify wise conduct through self-knowledge. For the bearer of the mirror, to be able to see her or himself as they really are is a sign of wisdom. Hence Prudence is personified as a woman looking into a mirror whilst holding onto a snake - the latter being derived from Matthew (10:16) 'Be ye wise as serpents'.

Like Prudence, the figure of Truth is similarly shown holding a mirror, the reflection of which is not meant to lie. The figure of Truth is often depicted alongside that of Time, based on the idea that truth will be revealed over time, supported by the ancient saying 'Veritas filia temporis' - 'Truth is the daughter of Time'.

In the painting An allegory of Truth and Time (1584) by Annibale Carracci, Truth can be seen holding a mirror, with Father Time having just 'revealed' her from the depths of the well out of which he climbs. Truth radiates light while two-faced Deceit is trampled under her feet.

Modern Female Artists

The subtle ambiguities of mirror symbolism were not lost on modern artists, most notably female artists who were able to reclaim the mirror as a means of disrupting the centuries-old stereotype of the vanity of women.

In the tradition of self-portraiture, many female artists have engaged with the interplay of 'views' offered by a mirror, highlighting the artist's awareness of the audience's participation in the image and the possibility of subverting the normal interrogation of the female subject as an object of masculine desire.

In a work like Self-portrait by Ilse Bing, the photographer takes her own photo by pointing the camera out at the viewer; meanwhile her own image is captured twice, once from the front and once from the side. The inclusion of a mirror serves to give the artist a sense of agency, destabilizing the power-play between audience and subject, and opening up the work to a more intricate reading.

The relationship between reality and appearance is not less complex in our age. Building upon the deep ambiguities of mirrors, modern artists have continued to use this ancient symbol to explore the endlessly perplexing notions of identity that the modern world continues to find pressing.

Christopher P Jones' is the author of Exploring Art History, an introduction to some of the most pivotal topics in art history and appreciation.

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The ancient world believed a person's soul was contained in their reflection. If someone died, it was customary in some cultures to cover up all the mirrors in the house to ensure safe passage of the...

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So many great topics to explore

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BBC Radio 4 - A History of Ideas - A History of Ideas

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Explore some big questions about how we live today.

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Something funny has been happening with painting lately - it seems in terrible shape and yet also in better health than ever. The endless boom of the art market, which privileges painting and especially abstraction, has given us a new generation of 'zombie formalists', churning out safe, easily sellable pictures that look good in digital reproduction and in the booths of ever-multiplying art fairs. And yet, beyond the frenzied market scene, the art of painting seems to be thriving. Biennials that used to contain nothing but video and installations now bulge with not just abstraction but also figurative painting - last year's Gwangju Biennale in Korea was a feast of representational art.

Is painting healthy or sick? And why is it so hard to tell? The Forever Now, a divisive show of contemporary painting now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, argues that painting is as healthy as it's ever been - it just isn't interested in being novel anymore, and instead recycles or redeploys pre-existing styles for new purposes. Whether or not that argument convinces you or not ( it didn't convince me), the very fact that MoMA has organised a contemporary painting show for the first time since 1984 attests that the stakes of painting are higher than they've been for a while.

Painting Now, a new book by the art historian Suzanne Hudson, takes a much deeper and more historical look at the status of contemporary painting than MoMA's The Forever Now. It takes in the work of more than 200 artists, and yet it's much more than the usual coffee-table survey. Hudson shrewdly looks away from style as she assesses the state of painting, and instead insists that "a painting [be] tested or evaluated relative to the history and tradition of the medium". That gives her the welcome freedom to think not only about paintings themselves, but about their motives, their production and distribution, their framing and their institutions. It also means that, unlike many fans of painting happy to brush away recent history, Hudson dives headfirst into the choppy waters of painting's status among the arts.
Twin blows
Painting has been declared dead so many times over the past 150 years that it can be hard to keep track. But in her introduction, Hudson pinpoints two developments in the history of art that shook painting to its foundations, in both cases almost fatally. One was the invention of photography in the 1830s. Photographs did more than just depict the world better and faster than painting; they also made entire painterly languages defunct, from military painting to academic portraiture. ("From today, painting is dead," the academic painter Paul Delaroche is purported to have said after seeing a daguerreotype for the first time.) Ever since, painting has in some ways functioned in dialogue with the camera. In some cases that dialogue takes the form of rejecting photographic realism, such as in the unnatural colour of Van Gogh. Or the dialogue is between equal partners. That can be via the use of silkscreened imagery, most famously by Andy Warhol; via a hyperrealism of Richard Estes or Franz Gertsch, whose paintings are 'more photographic' than photographs; or via more painterly effects that nevertheless advertise their photographic source, as in the art of Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close.

After photography, the other body blow to the primacy of painting came in the 1910s, when Marcel Duchamp elevated a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack and an upturned urinal to the status of art. Even more than photography, the ready-made object struck at the heart of painting's self-justification. Not only did Duchamp recalibrate the terms of artistic success, privileging ideas over visuals. He also eliminated the need for the artist's hand in a way photography never entirely did. (Indeed, many photographers of the early 20th Century, from Ansel Adams to Edward Steichen, consciously imitated painting techniques.) Duchamp's insurrection removed technical skill as a painterly virtue, and by the 1960s an artist like the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd could confidently say, "It seems painting is finished."

Some styles of painting really did undergo a kind of death in the 20th Century. So-called neo-expressionism, whose big bad canvases by such figures as Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente fetched millions in the 1980s, may have pleased the market but had little to offer anyone who cared about the history and potential of the medium. Today's 'zombie formalism' is much the same. But painting that acknowledges the challenges the medium has faced and builds from there is doing very well indeed. "Painting, too, is capable of manifesting its own signs," Hudson writes. "Painting has become more, rather than less, viable after conceptual art, as an option for giving idea form and hence for differentiating it from other possibilities."
Premature burial
In the last century abstraction was seen as the supreme, even the only, form of advanced painting. But in recent decades, as painting has thrown off the yoke of avant-garde prescriptivism, figurative painting has been on a noted upswing. Some make use of appropriated media imagery, notably Luc Tuymans, whose colour-sapped paintings of Condoleezza Rice or Patrice Lumumba redeploy photographic representations. (Last month, he lost a plagiarism suit against the photographer of one of the images he painted; he is appealing.) Others prefer observation without cameras, such as Josephine Halvorson, who paints modest tableaux of rural buildings from arm's length, or Liu Xiaodong, whose plein-air paintings of young Chinese students recall Manet and Courbet. Perhaps the biggest omission from Hudson's book is Catherine Murphy, who is not only one of America's greatest painters but also a professor who taught generations of students at Yale Art School.

Painting has also moved off the canvas, and even off the walls. Imran Qureishi, from Pakistan, makes not only miniature paintings but also all-encompassing installations drawn directly on the floor and the walls, often featuring blooming floral motifs in blood-red acrylic. Jim Lambie plays off the architecture of the spaces in which he exhibits, covering the floors with multi-coloured vinyl tape. Paintings also now function frequently not as stand-alone artworks, but as elements of a larger network of artistic procedures. The influential painter Jutta Koether, for instance, does not only paint; she also designs the presentation of her paintings, complete with special lighting and ad hoc viewing platforms, and sometimes performs in the gallery alongside them.

Koether's expansive practice of painting is a good counterweight to the big question surrounding the rude health of the medium - a question that goes unasked in Hudson's fine book. That is the question of the market. When I visited her studio a few years ago, the artist RH Quaytman - known for her brainy, reflexive paintings organised into chapters, like a book - lamented how the demands of collectors and markets were powerful enough to move art history. "Art fairs, jpegs and the entire bloated art market are responsible for the resurgence of painting as opposed to all other art forms," she told me. "I'm sad that it is the structure of the art market that has revalidated and reinvigorated painting.... It's easy to store, it's easy to transport, it works well enough on the internet: it turned out that painting was, despite itself, the perfect tool. The problem is, whose tool is it?" Every painter should ask themself that question when they turns to the empty canvas.
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Something funny has been happening with painting lately - it seems in terrible shape and yet also in better health than ever. The endless boom of the art market, which privileges painting and especially abstraction, has given us a new generation of 'zombie formalists', churning out safe, easily sellable pictures that look good in digital reproduction and in the booths of ever-multiplying art fairs.

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BBC article

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The backdrop to the portraits is Tahiti. The sitters are feminine, sensual, proffering ripe fruits and wearing flower garlands. The colours are bright: tropical yellows, hot pinks, mango orange and cobalt blue.

This description applies to some of the paintings in a new exhibition, Gauguin's Portraits, at the National Gallery. It is, astonishingly, the first major show to focus on Paul Gauguin's portraiture - strikingly odd as it often is, filled with symbolism, narrative, strange juxtapositions, and frankly, unflattering angles.

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But that description also applies to a series of photographs by Swiss-Guinean photographer Namsa Leuba, part of the inaugural exhibition at Boogie Wall, a new London gallery dedicated to female artists. Entitled Illusions - The Myth of the Vahine Through Gender Dysphoria, Leuba's series of photographic portraits adopt the colour palette of Gauguin's most famous works, but subvert the stereotyped imagery of exoticised, eroticised Polynesian women ( vahine) by using transgender sitters.

"Gauguin's depictions of Tahiti have very much become the default visual legacy of Tahiti in an art-historical sense, which has emphasised the sense of 'otherness'," says Leuba, who divides her time between Europe and French Polynesia. "In Gauguin's colonial depictions, Polynesian women were beautiful and subservient." She wants her work to form an "ideological challenge to the visual codes initiated by Gauguin and his search for the 'primitive'".

Gauguin's portraits from Tahiti, and later the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, have certainly long attracted controversy: while there is something heady, lush and swimmily off-kilter in his colour and compositions, the works also embody a crude colonial attitude. The French artist (1848-1903) first went to Tahiti in 1891, abandoning his family, and having sexual relationships with girls he claimed were as young as 13, giving many of them syphilis.

Co-curator at the National Gallery, Christopher Riopelle, says that "Gauguin radically expanded the parameters of portraiture", in part through this mixing of aspects of traditional Western portrait-painting with apparent celebrations of indigenous Polynesian culture. But he has also been accused of merely looting other cultures' traditions for 'exotic' imagery to make his paintings of a fantasy version of Tahiti more floggable to wealthy Parisians. Gauguin played fast and loose with his Primitivist, mystical imagery: the hieroglyphs in the background of The Ancestors of Tehamana are nonsensical, for instance, while various deities in his paintings were copied from photographs of statues of Indonesian and Indian gods.
Separating the art from the artist
And can we - should we - be willing to overlook the predatory sexual behaviour of an artist, when considering their paintings of young women? It is not a good look in 2019, frankly. Art critic Alistair Sooke has used the show as an opportunity to dub Gauguin a "19th-Century Harvey Weinstein" (although he still gave it five stars). But there is perhaps no winning for the gallery here: The Guardian's critic accused the curators of cowardice, for actually showing very few of Gauguin's more overtly sexual nudes - and thereby swerving the discomfort, and the debate. Most of his pictures that depict young Polynesian girls in the exhibition are ones where they're covered up by the brightly coloured, high-necked dresses introduced by Christian missionaries.

Leuba doesn't condemn the show - but she certainly wants to open up the conversation about how Gauguin's oeuvre speaks to us, and how our view of Polynesian culture has been coloured by a Western art tradition.

"For my Illusions series, I picked up Gauguin's colour palette and staging, and used it to reframe the image of Polynesian women in art, pushing past the boundaries of binary gender representations, and creating an empowered portrait of indigenous Polynesian femininity," Leuba tells BBC Culture. But while her photographs might use familiar signifiers - the fruit, the flowers, the colours - the images also have a smooth, glossy, hyper-real quality.

Rather than exoticise the sitters' brown skin (as, arguably, Gauguin did), Leuba takes a more surreal approach: her models are painted with very bright body paint, in hot, tropical colours. Painting literally on the body reminds the viewer of the way Western art has painted such bodies as 'exotic' and 'other', on canvas. By blurring the boundaries between myth and reality in her pictures, she hopes to "question the reality of the primitivist depictions and narratives produced by Western gaze and art history".

And by painting her transgender sitters with eye-poppingly bright purple or pink, Leuba also highlights the similar artificiality of the accepted narrow narratives told about Polynesian women - or, indeed, women in general. What is femininity; how has it traditionally been coded and signified in art - and who is allowed to perform it, to paint themselves that way?
The third gender
Within Tahitian society, there has in fact long been an established place and role for a third gender, the feminine male. Leuba's subjects were biologically male at birth, but now identify as female, or perform femininity, in various ways. Broadly, these come under two terms in Tahiti: Māhū, an effeminate man, and Rae-rae, a transgender woman.

" Māhū all have the manhood of a man and all the sensitivity of a woman. They have existed since the beginning of time and they have always been part of Polynesian society and culture," Leuba elaborates. "When the missionaries came to Tahiti, Māhū were arrested and not accepted by the Christian society. However, luckily things have changed, and in today's society they are accepted as they are." Many Māhū are dancers and performers, and she found working with them "a culturally rich and joyous experience".

"The difference between Rae-rae and Māhū was distinguished around 1960s, when transgender people had opportunities to start transforming and changing themselves," says Lueba. Māhū are regarded as an integral part of the Māori tradition but Rae-rae are generally less accepted in Tahiti. Rae-rae are regarded more of an equivalent to the drag queens of the Western world and they have closer ties to homosexuality, in contrast to Māhū which identify more with femininity and 'sweetness'."

Leuba wanted to work with the sitters in order to "reframe the ideas of sexualised Tahitian women by reclaiming their identity and empowering themselves". But she's not the first artist to be inspired by the Māhū. Gauguin himself depicted androgynous figures in his paintings; it's been suggested that the 'man' in Marquesan Man in the Red Cape, a painting included in the Portraits show, could have been inspired by Māhū, as has the ambiguous figure in Pape Moi. Likewise, the central character in his masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? has been claimed by some art historians as Māhū.

Indeed, it was a sense that Gauguin's possible images of Māhū were also eroticised that prompted another contemporary visual artist to take Māhū as their subject. Just earlier this year, Kehinde Wiley - Obama's official portraitist - exhibited a show in Paris called Tahiti. It featured portraits of Māhū painted against brightly patterned backgrounds, in poses that recall those of Gauguin's works - but with a direct gaze and bags of added attitude.

Wiley has made a career of innovative portraiture that uses the traditions of Western art to celebrate and give status to people of colour, depicting them in the style of Old Masters, with a revisionist lens. But Wiley's aim with Tahiti was to "reference and confront Paul Gauguin's celebrated works... fraught with historical undertones of colonialism and sexual objectification".

He didn't just tear Gauguin down, however: that would be trite, the artist told Artnet at the time, adding that he thought his job was to "somehow imagine a newness within that bankrupt vocabulary". His portraits - like Leuba's - were made in collaboration and conversation with his Māhū sitters, to give them personal agency in their own self-presentation, as they crafted "counter-poses" to the old familiar narratives from Gauguin. Some choose traditional clothing and elaborate feathered headdresses; some preferred red lace minidresses.

Who is allowed to make art about whom - and whether we can still appreciate 'good' work by 'bad' people - are questions that, today, arise with increasing regularity, force, and thorniness. It can be hard to simply revel in the heat and colour of Gauguin's Polynesian portraits today, knowing what we do about him. They are strange and beautiful images, artistically exploratory, but also exploitative. And it's impossible to look at them without feeling discomfort at the work's very male, very colonial gaze.

And unlike Wiley's portraits, we can't look Gauguin's subjects in the eye: there is something deeply troubling in the women's placid, averted, side-eyed expressions, their gaze always sliding away from us. Is this the wish-fulfilment of artist/sexual predator, an image of idealised, languid feminine passivity and cultural serenity? Is it a reflection of their powerlessness? Or could it be defiance - a glazed, protective, you'll-never-really-know-me stare? Well, we'll never know either.

Perhaps one solution to the discomfort around the continuing celebration of work that now feels so problematic is - rather than dismissing it all outright or attempting to hide the awkward bits - to multiply the narratives we tell elsewhere, to make sure we offer new perspectives. A different lens, and a different gaze. Which is why it feels particularly cheering that Leuba's work is being shown at an art gallery dedicated to women. Her photographs, and Wiley's paintings, both invite the viewer to look a little closer, to ask if the stories and stereotypes we've become used to may be nothing more than illusions.
Illusions - The Myth of the Vahine Through Gender Dysphoria is part of the group show Notre Dame / Our Lady at Boogie Wall until 27 October 2019.
Gauguin's Portraits is at the National Gallery until 26 January 2020.
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Gauguin's 'strange, beautiful and exploitative' portraits

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The backdrop to the portraits is Tahiti. The sitters are feminine, sensual, proffering ripe fruits and wearing flower garlands. The colours are bright: tropical yellows, hot pinks, mango orange and cobalt blue. This description applies to some of the paintings in a new exhibition, Gauguin's Portraits, at the National Gallery.

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Art is Pretentious* | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

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How you could structure essay research Q

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How you could structure essay research Q

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An Art EE that got a 7 with annotated bits to show which criteria it is under

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An Art EE that got a 7 with annotated bits to show which criteria it is under