Art Education & Appreciation

• Art Education is the study of the elements and principles of art or design and their applications to all things made by man.
• Art Appreciation is the ability to interpret or understand man-made arts and enjoy them.
• Art Education & Appreciation deals with learning or understanding and creating arts and enjoying them.
• Prehistoric art is the earliest known art, dating back earlier than 40,000 years ago, with examples including sculptures and paintings on rocks in caves about hunting and wild games.
• Art is both form and content, with the former being the idea and the latter being the actual, physical materials.
• Art is anything created by man for his benefit and enjoyment through the use of certain materials or medium for its expression.
• The elements of art are what the artist means to portray.
• The principles of design are what the artist actually did portray.
• The actual, physical materials are how we react to the art.
• The oldest art objects in the world are a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old, discovered in a South African cave.
• Cubism is a style of painting that emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honored theories of art as the imitation of nature.
• Expressionism was opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe and emphasized artist's subjective emotion, which overrides fidelity to the actual appearance of things.
• In the first Manifeste du surrealisme, Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus contrary to artistic expression.
• Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, color, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.
• Surrealism came into being after the French poet Andre Breton published the first Manifeste du surrealisme in 1924.
• Fauves earned their name ("les fauves" - wild beasts) by shocking exhibit visitors on their first public appearance, in 1905.
• The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art.
• Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature, theatre and graphic design.
• The Venus of Willendorf sculpture is an example of Paleolithic era art.
• Fauvism is a movement in French painting that revolutionized the concept of color in modern art.
• Dadaism influenced later movements including Surrealism.
• The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted, or otherwise altered.
• The fauves rejected the impressionist palette of soft, shimmering tones in favor of radical new style, full of violent color and bold distortions.
• Ancient art began when ancient civilizations developed a form of written language, with their art works surviving and transmitting to other cultures and later times.
• Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia (now Iraq), India, China, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome are ancient civilizations that influenced the foundation of art.
• Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, characterized by the dominance of the church, insisted on the expression of biblical truths, produced in many media, with works that remain in large numbers including sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, metalwork, and mosaics.
• Renaissance period is characterized by a return to valuation of the material world, and a dwelled less on spirituality and the afterlife, characterized by humanism, realism, and searching for human emotion in art.
• Impressionism is a movement in French painting, sometimes called optical realism because of its almost scientific interest in the actual visual experience and effect of light and movement on the appearance of objects.
• Expressionism developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Ruskin defines art as the mingling of nature and human nature.
• John Dewey defines art as an expression with a particular combination of mediums to satisfy senses, to express human imaginations, emotions, and intellect, and make use of them in practical life through the use of artistic principles, taste and skill.
• Various movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video, are described as postmodern.
• Collins & Riley define art as a way of life, of doing, of thinking, of feeling, of making choices, of living in a fine way.
• Van Dyke defines art as the medium by which an artist communicates himself to his fellows.
• Modernism is a term applied to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the arts that emerged from the middle of the 19th century, as artists rebelled against traditional Historicism, and later through the 20th century as the necessity of an individual rejecting previous tradition, and by creating individual, original techniques.
• Arthur Dow defines art as man’s response to his experiences with his environment through materials.
• Plato defines art as that which brings life in harmony with the beauty of the world.
• Margaret Mathias defines art as the satisfying quality imparted to a thing through the skillful application of design principles.
• C.R. Wallace defines art as an attitude of spirit, a state of mind.
• Vicente A. Dizon defines art as three things common in all artworks: it must be man-made, it must benefit and satisfy man, and it must be expressed through certain medium or material.