visual arts essay

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 essential in studying Communication, English, and Art History. It's a fundamental part of writing about art found in scholarly books, art magazines, and even undergraduate essays. You might encounter a visual analysis as a standalone assignment or as part of a larger research paper.

When you do this type of assignment, you're examining the basic elements of an artwork. These include things like its colors, lines, textures, and size. But it goes beyond just describing these elements. A good analysis also considers the historical context in which the artwork was created and tries to understand what it might mean to different people.

It also encourages you to look closely at details and think deeply about what an artwork is trying to say. This kind of analysis makes you appreciate art more and teaches you how to explain your ideas clearly based on what you see in the artwork.

What is the Purpose of Visual Analysis?

The purpose of a visual analysis is to recognize and understand the visual choices the artist made in creating the artwork. By looking closely at different elements, analysts can learn a lot about how an artwork was made and why the artist made certain choices.

For example, studying how colors are used or how things are arranged in the artwork can reveal its themes or the emotions it's trying to convey. Also, understanding the time period when the artwork was created helps us see how societal changes and cultural ideas influenced its creation and how people reacted to it.

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How to Write a Visual Analysis Step-by-Step

To create an insightful visual analysis, you should not only examine the artwork in detail but also situate it within a broader cultural and historical framework. This process can be broken down into three main steps:

Identifying, describing, and analyzing the visual material
Situating the visual material in its context
Interpreting and responding to the content of the visual material.

Let’s discuss each of these steps in more detail.

Step 1: Identify, Describe, and Analyze the Visual Material

Begin by clearly identifying the visual material you will analyze. This could be a painting, photograph, sculpture, advertisement, or any other visual artwork. Provide essential information such as the title, artist, date, and medium.

Next, offer a detailed description of the visual material. Focus on the key elements and principles of design, such as:

Composition

Describe what you see without interpreting its meaning yet. For instance, note the use of bright colors, the placement of objects, the presence of figures, and the overall layout. This descriptive part forms the foundation of your analysis, allowing your reader to visualize the artwork.

Afterward, consider how the artist uses elements like contrast, balance, emphasis, movement, and harmony. Analyze the techniques and methods used and how they contribute to the overall effect of the piece.

Step 2: Situate the Visual Material in its Context

To fully understand a piece of visual material, you need to consider its historical and cultural context. Start by researching the time period when the artwork was created. Look at the social, political, and economic conditions of that time, and see if there were any cultural movements that might have influenced the artwork.

Next, learn about the artist and their reasons for creating the visual material. Find out about the artist's life, other works they have made, and any statements they have made about this piece. Knowing the artist’s background can give you valuable insights into the artwork's purpose and message.

Finally, think about how the visual material was received by people when it was first shown and how it has impacted others over time. Look for reviews and public reactions, and see if it influenced other works or movements. This will help you understand the significance of the visual material in the larger cultural and artistic context.

Step 3: Interpret and Respond to the Content of the Visual Material

Now, combine your description, analysis, and understanding of the context to interpret what the visual material means. Talk about the themes, symbols, and messages the artwork conveys. Think about what it reveals about human experiences, society, or specific issues. Use evidence from earlier steps to support your interpretation.

Afterward, consider your own reaction to the visual material. How does it personally resonate with you? What emotions or thoughts does it provoke? Your personal response adds a subjective aspect to your analysis, making it more relatable.

Finally, summarize your findings and emphasize the importance of the visual material. Highlight key aspects from your identification, description, analysis, context, and interpretation. Then, it concludes by reinforcing the impact and significance of the visual material in both its original setting and its enduring influence.

Who Does Formal Analysis of Art

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.

6 Questions to Answer Before Analyzing a Piece of Art

According to our experienced term paper writer , there are six important questions to ask before you start analyzing a piece of art. Answering these questions can make writing your analysis much easier:

Who is the artist, and what type of art do they create? - To place the artwork in context, you should identify the artist and understand the type of art they create.
What was the artist's goal in creating this painting? - Determine why the artist created the artwork. Was it to convey a message, evoke emotions, or explore a theme?
When and where was this artwork made? - Knowing the time and place of creation helps understand the cultural and historical influences on the artwork.
What is the main focus or theme of this artwork? - Identify what the artwork is about. This could be a person, place, object, or abstract concept.
Who was the artwork created for? - To provide insight into its style and content, consider who the artist intended to reach with their work.
What historical events or cultural factors influenced this painting? - Understanding the historical background can reveal more about the significance and meaning of the artwork.

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Elements of the Visual Analysis

To fully grasp formal analysis, it's important to differentiate between the elements and principles of visual analysis. The elements are the basic building blocks used to create a piece of art. These include:

Art Element 🎨	Description 📝
✏️Line	A mark with length and direction, which can define shapes, create textures, and suggest movement.
🌗Value	The lightness or darkness of a color, which helps to create depth and contrast.
🔶Shapes	Two-dimensional areas with a defined boundary, such as circles, squares, and triangles.
🔲Forms	Three-dimensional objects with volume and thickness, like cubes, spheres, and cylinders.
🌌Space	The area around, between, and within objects, which can be used to create the illusion of depth.
🌈Color	The hues, saturation, and brightness in artwork, used to create mood and visual interest.
🖐️Texture	The surface quality of an object, which can be actual (how it feels) or implied (how it looks like it feels).

Principles of the Visual Analysis

The principles, on the other hand, are how these elements are combined and used together to create the overall effect of the artwork. These principles include:

Principle of Art 🎨	Description 📝
⚖️Balance	The distribution of visual weight in a composition, which can be symmetrical or asymmetrical.
🌗Contrast	The difference between elements, such as light and dark, to create visual interest.
🏃‍♂️Movement	The suggestion or illusion of motion in an artwork, guiding the viewer’s eye through the piece.
🎯Emphasis	The creation of a focal point to draw attention to a particular area or element.
🔄Pattern	The repetition of elements to create a sense of rhythm and consistency.
📏Proportion	The relationship in size between different parts of an artwork, contributing to its harmony.
🔗Unity	The sense of cohesiveness in an artwork, where all elements and principles work together effectively.

Visual Analysis Outline

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.

In the introduction, you should:

Introduce the Artwork : Mention the title, artist, date, and medium of the artwork.
Provide a Brief Description : Offer a general overview of what the artwork depicts.
State the Purpose : Explain the goal of your analysis and what aspects you will focus on.
Thesis Statement : Present a clear thesis statement that outlines your main argument or interpretation of the artwork.

The body of the visual analysis is where you break down the visual material into its component parts and examine each one in detail. This section should be structured logically, with each paragraph focusing on a specific element or aspect of the visual material.

Description: Start with a detailed description of the visual material. Describe what you see without interpreting or analyzing it yet. Mention elements such as color, line, shape, texture, space, and composition. For instance, if analyzing a painting, describe the subject matter, the arrangement of figures, the use of light and shadow, etc.
Analysis of Visual Elements: Analyze how each visual element contributes to the overall effect of the material. Discuss the use of color (e.g., warm or cool tones, contrasts, harmonies), the role of lines (e.g., leading lines, contours), the shapes (e.g., geometric, organic), and the texture (e.g., smooth, rough). Consider how these elements work together to create a certain mood or message.
Contextual Analysis: Examine how the context in which the visual material was created and is being viewed influences its interpretation. This includes historical, cultural, social, and political factors. Discuss how these contextual elements impact the meaning and reception of the visual material.
Interpretation: Discuss your interpretation of the visual material. Explain how the visual elements and contextual factors contribute to the meaning you derive from it. Support your interpretation with specific examples from the material.
Comparative Analysis (if applicable): If relevant, compare the visual material with other works by the same creator or with similar works by different creators. Highlight similarities and differences in style, technique, and thematic content.

The conclusion of a visual analysis essay summarizes the main points of the analysis and restates the thesis in light of the evidence presented.

Restate Thesis: Reiterate your thesis statement in a way that reflects the depth of your analysis. Show how your understanding of the visual material has been supported by your detailed examination.
Summary of Main Points: Summarize the key points of your analysis. Highlight the most important findings and insights.
Implications: Discuss the broader implications of your analysis. What does your analysis reveal about the visual material? How does it contribute to our understanding of the creator's work, the time period, or the cultural context?
Closing Thought: End with a final thought that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. This could be a reflection on the significance of the visual material, a question for further consideration, or a statement about its impact on you or on a broader audience.

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

Visual Analysis Example

In this section, we've laid out two examples of visual analysis essays to show you how it's done effectively. Get inspired and learn from them!

Key Takeaways

Visual analysis essays are fundamental early in your communications and art history studies. Learning how to formally break down art is key, whether you're pursuing a career in art or communications.

Before jumping into analysis, get a solid grasp of the painter's background and life. Analyzing a painting isn't just for fun, as you need to pay attention to the small details the painter might have hidden. Knowing how to do this kind of assignment not only helps you appreciate art more but also lets you deeply understand the media messages you encounter every day.

If you enjoyed this article and found it insightful, make sure to also check out the summary of Lord of the Flies and an article on Beowulf characters .

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What are the 4 Steps of Visual Analysis?

How to write a formal visual analysis, what is the function of visual analysis.

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.

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Duke University. (n.d.). Visual Analysis . https://twp.duke.edu/sites/twp.duke.edu/files/file-attachments/visual-analysis.original.pdf
Glatstein, J. (2019, December 9). Formal Visual Analysis: The Elements & Principles of Composition . Www.kennedy-Center.org. https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/articles-and-how-tos/articles/educators/visual-arts/formal-visual-analysis-the-elements-and-principles-of-compositoin/
MADA: Visual analysis . (n.d.). Student Academic Success. https://www.monash.edu/student-academic-success/excel-at-writing/annotated-assessment-samples/art-design-and-architecture/mada-visual-analysis

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How to Write a Visual Analysis Essay: Mastering Artful Interpretations 👌

Samuel Gorbold

Setting itself apart from other essays, visual analysis essays necessitate a thorough examination of design elements and principles. Whether it's the mysterious smile of the 'Mona Lisa' or a striking photograph capturing a fleeting moment, visual art has the power to move us. Writing this kind of paper is like peeling back the layers of a visual story, uncovering its meanings, and unraveling its impact.

Think of it as decoding the secrets a picture holds. Imagine standing in front of a famous painting, like the 'Mona Lisa' in the Louvre. Millions are drawn to it, captivated by the tale it tells. Your essay lets you share your perspective on the stories hidden in images.

If you're feeling unsure about tackling this kind of essay, don't worry—check out this blog for a straightforward guide. The expert team at our essay service online will walk you through each step of writing the essay, offering tips and examples along the way.

What Is a Visual Analysis Essay

A visual analysis essay is a unique form of writing that delves into the interpretation of visual elements within an image, such as a painting, photograph, or advertisement. Rather than focusing solely on the subject matter, this type of essay scrutinizes the design elements and principles employed in the creation of the visual piece.

Design Elements: These include fundamental components like color, size, shape, and line. By dissecting these elements, you gain a deeper understanding of how they contribute to the overall composition and convey specific messages or emotions.

Design Principles: Equally important are the design principles—balance, texture, contrast, and proportion. These principles guide the arrangement and interaction of the design elements, influencing the visual impact of the entire composition.

Purpose: The goal is not only to describe the visual content but also to decipher its underlying meaning and the artistic choices made by the creator. It goes beyond the surface level, encouraging the writer to explore the intentions behind the visual elements and how they communicate with the audience.

Stepwise Approach: To tackle this essay, follow a stepwise approach. Begin by closely observing the image, noting each design element and principle. Then, interpret how these choices contribute to the overall message or theme. Structure your essay to guide the reader through your analysis, providing evidence and examples to support your interpretations.

Tips for How to Write a Visual Analysis Essay Successfully:

Use clear and concise language.
Support your analysis with specific details from the visual piece.
Consider the historical or cultural context when applicable.
Connect your observations to the overall artistic or rhetorical goals.

Sample Visual Analysis Essay Outline

This sample outline offers a framework for organizing a comprehensive structure for a visual analysis essay, ensuring a systematic exploration of design elements and principles. Adjustments can be made based on the specific requirements of the assignment and the characteristics of the chosen visual piece. Now, let's delve into how to start a visual analysis essay using this template.

I. Visual Analysis Essay Introduction

A. Briefly introduce the chosen visual piece

Include relevant details (title, artist, date)

B. Provide a thesis statement

Express the main point of your analysis
Preview the key design elements and principles to be discussed

II. Description of the Visual Piece

A. Present an overview of the visual content

Describe the subject matter and overall composition
Highlight prominent visual elements (color, size, shape, line)

III. Design Elements Analysis

Discuss the use of color and its impact on the composition
Explore the emotional or symbolic associations of specific colors

B. Size and Shape

Analyze the significance of size and shape in conveying meaning
Discuss how these elements contribute to the overall visual appeal
Examine the use of lines and their role in guiding the viewer's gaze
Discuss any stylistic choices related to lines

IV. Design Principles Analysis

Discuss the visual balance and how it contributes to the overall harmony
Analyze whether the balance is symmetrical or asymmetrical
Explore the use of texture and its impact on the viewer's perception
Discuss how texture adds depth and visual interest

C. Contrast

Analyze the contrast between elements and its effect on the composition
Discuss whether the contrast enhances the visual impact

D. Proportion

Discuss the proportion of elements and their role in creating a cohesive visual experience
Analyze any intentional distortions for artistic effect

V. Interpretation and Analysis

A. Explore the overall meaning or message conveyed by the visual piece

Consider the synthesis of design elements and principles
Discuss any cultural or historical context influencing the interpretation

VI. Conclusion

A. Summarize the key points discussed in the analysis

B. Restate the thesis in the context of the insights gained

C. Conclude with a reflection on the overall impact and effectiveness of the visual piece.

An In-Depth Guide to Analyzing Visual Art

This in-depth guide on how to start a visual analysis essay begins with establishing a contextual foundation, progresses to a meticulous description of the painting, and culminates in a comprehensive analysis that unveils the intricate layers of meaning embedded in the artwork. As we navigate through each step of writing a visual analysis paper, the intention is not only to see the art but to understand the language it speaks and the stories it tells.

Step 1: Introduction and Background

Analyzing the art requires setting the stage with a solid analysis essay format - introduction and background. Begin by providing essential context about the artwork, including details about the artist, the time period, and the broader artistic movement it may belong to. This preliminary step allows the audience to grasp the significance of the painting within a larger cultural or historical framework.

Step 2: Painting Description

The next crucial phase in visual analysis involves a meticulous examination and description of the painting itself. Take your audience on a vivid tour through the canvas, unraveling its visual elements such as color palette, composition, shapes, and lines.

Provide a comprehensive snapshot of the subject matter, capturing the essence of what the artist intended to convey. This step serves as the foundation for the subsequent in-depth analysis, offering a detailed understanding of the visual elements at play.

Step 3: In-Depth Analysis

With the groundwork laid in the introduction and the painting description, now it's time to dive into the heart of writing a visual analysis paper. Break down the visual elements and principles, exploring how they interact to convey meaning and emotion. Discuss the deliberate choices made by the artist in terms of color symbolism, compositional techniques, and the use of texture.

Consider the emotional impact on the viewer and any cultural or historical influences that might be reflected in the artwork. According to our custom essay service experts, this in-depth analysis goes beyond the surface, encouraging a profound exploration of the artistic decisions that shape the overall narrative of the visual piece.

How to Write a Visual Analysis Essay: A Proper Structure

Using the conventional five-paragraph essay structure proves to be a reliable approach for your essay. When examining a painting, carefully select the relevant aspects that capture your attention and analyze them in relation to your thesis. Keep it simple and adhere to the classic essay structure; it's like a reliable roadmap for your thoughts.

Introduction

The gateway to a successful visual analysis essay lies in a compelling introduction. Begin by introducing the chosen visual piece, offering essential details such as the title, artist, and date. Capture the reader's attention by providing a brief overview of the artwork's significance. Conclude the introduction with a concise thesis statement, outlining the main point of your analysis and previewing the key aspects you will explore.

Crafting a robust thesis statement is pivotal in guiding your analysis. Clearly articulate the primary message or interpretation you aim to convey through your essay. Your thesis should serve as the roadmap for the reader, indicating the specific elements and principles you will analyze and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the visual piece.

The body is where the intricate exploration takes place. Divide this section into coherent paragraphs, each dedicated to a specific aspect of your analysis. Focus on the chosen design elements and principles, discussing their impact on the composition and the intended message. Support your analysis with evidence from the visual piece, providing detailed descriptions and interpretations. Consider the historical or cultural context if relevant, offering a well-rounded understanding of the artwork.

Conclude with a concise yet impactful conclusion. Summarize the key points discussed in the body of the essay, reinforcing the connection between design elements, principles, and the overall message. Restate your thesis in the context of the insights gained through your analysis. Leave the reader with a final thought that encapsulates the significance of the visual piece and the depth of understanding achieved through your exploration.

In your essays, it's important to follow the usual citation rules to give credit to your sources. When you quote from a book, website, journal, or movie, use in-text citations according to the style your teacher prefers, like MLA or APA. At the end of your essay, create a list of all your sources on a page called 'Sources Cited' or 'References.'

The good news for your analysis essays is that citing art is simpler. You don't need to stress about putting art citations in the middle of your sentences. In your introduction, just explain the artwork you're talking about—mentioning details like its name and who made it. After that, in the main part of your essay, you can mention the artwork by its name, such as 'Starry Night' by Vincent van Gogh.

This way, you can keep your focus on talking about the art without getting tangled up in the details of citing it in your text. Always keep in mind that using citations correctly makes your writing look more professional.

Visual Analysis Essay Example

To provide a clearer illustration of a good paper, let's delve into our sample essay, showcasing an exemplary art history visual analysis essay example.

Unveiling the Details in Image Analysis Essay

Have you ever gazed at an image and wondered about the stories it silently holds? Describing images in visual analysis papers is not just about putting what you see into words; it's about unraveling the visual tales woven within every pixel. So, how do you articulate the unspoken language of images? Let's examine below:

Start with the Basics: Begin your description by addressing the fundamental elements like colors, shapes, and lines. What hues dominate the image? Are there distinct shapes that catch your eye? How do the lines guide your gaze?
Capture the Atmosphere: Move beyond the surface and capture the mood or atmosphere the image evokes. Is it serene or bustling with energy? Does it exude warmth or coolness? Conveying the emotional tone adds layers to your description.
Detail the Composition: Dive into the arrangement of elements. How are objects positioned? What is the focal point? Analyzing the composition unveils the intentional choices made by the creator.
Consider Scale and Proportion: When unsure how to write an image analysis essay well, try exploring the relationships between objects. Are there disparities in size? How do these proportions contribute to the overall visual impact? Scale and proportion provide insights into the image's dynamics.
Examine Textures and Patterns: Zoom in on the finer details. Are there textures that invite touch? Do patterns emerge upon closer inspection? Describing these nuances enriches your analysis, offering a tactile dimension.
Cultural and Historical Context: Consider the broader context in which the image exists. How might cultural or historical factors influence its meaning? Understanding context adds depth to your description.

Final Thoughts

As we conclude our journey, consider this: how might your newfound appreciation for the subtleties of visual description enhance your understanding of the world around you? Every image, whether captured in art or everyday life, has a story to tell. Will you be the perceptive storyteller, wielding the brush of description to illuminate the tales that images whisper? The adventure of discovery lies in your hands, and the language of images eagerly awaits your interpretation. How will you let your descriptions shape the narratives yet untold?

Keep exploring, keep questioning, and let the rich tapestry of visual storytelling unfold before you. And if you're looking for a boost on how to write a thesis statement for a visual analysis essay, order an essay online , and our experts will gladly handle it for you!

How Do You Make a Good Conclusion to a Visual Analysis Essay?

How do you write a visual analysis essay thesis, what is a good approach to writing a visual analysis paper formally.

Samuel Gorbold , a seasoned professor with over 30 years of experience, guides students across disciplines such as English, psychology, political science, and many more. Together with EssayHub, he is dedicated to enhancing student understanding and success through comprehensive academic support.

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IB Visual Arts EE examples

Filter exemplars, to what extent can the interior design of hospitals provide a healing aspect for patients, in what ways has mark rothko's exploration of primary emotions challenged traditional arts, want to get full marks for your ee allow us to review it for you 🎯, an exploration of values visible in painter’s yi hyeong-nok’s works completed during the second half of 19th century, political messages in pablo picasso's "guernica", to what extent does the street art in downtown athens, greece politically and socially charge the city, fast track your coursework with mark schemes moderated by ib examiners. upgrade now 🚀, how did pablo picasso develop intimacy with the original audience and the impact on the contemporary audience through his artworks during his blue period, 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, to what extent did hilma af klint’s artworks (1906-1922) bridge science and spiritualism, how do andy warhol and thierry guetta's artwork demonstrate the controversies between intertextuality and plagiarism in pop art culture, 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, 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"..

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.

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The Art between the Creation of Adam and Mona Lisa

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Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Raphael – Essay

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Free Visual Arts Essay Examples & Topics

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 will find yourself a bit lost for words. After all, the subject matter may seem contradictory to the task at hand. However, there is no need to panic.

In this article, our experts have outlined the best way to write your very own visual arts essay step-by-step. You will see that your academic paper can be a work of art in itself. We have also included 19 outstanding visual arts essay topics from which you can choose.

Even a brief essay about visual arts can be overwhelming. It’s usually the case when you don’t know where to begin and how to organize your thoughts. That’s why creating an outline is so crucial. In this section, we have listed what can help you in writing your visual arts essay.

Try following these steps:

Choose your topic . Of course, it’s the most critical step for your paper. The idea you pick should be narrow enough for a detailed analysis. Yet, it should not prevent you from doing extensive research. Try browsing through visual arts essay collections. For example, check Bending Concepts by Walter Benn Michaels et al. There, you can get ideas on what to write about.
Finding relevant art. Unsurprisingly, essays on visual arts require you to interact with the artwork. To offer proper art critique, you might want to conduct a visual analysis of your subject. Besides, it is a great idea to look into art history surrounding your topic. Figure out the context of the work and incorporate it into your paper.
Brainstorming. Jotting down all your feelings and ideas can be an excellent exercise. Everything that you think on the topic may come in handy. So, write down your thoughts about the style and technique of the artist, what message the work is trying to send, etc. When you’re done, make sure to look at your assessment criteria. Compare them to what you have thought of so far.
Grouping information. Here is where you might want to begin thinking of a thesis statement. Begin by grouping all the information you’ve gathered so far by themes. These will later become the foundation for the outline. Sort through all your findings and decide what ideas fit well with your topic. With this in mind, write down an excellent thesis by formulating your message in one sentence. Or our thesis generator can do that for you!
Writing the outline. Now that everything is organized, create a structure of your paper using your ideas and thesis. Begin by making an introduction to visual arts. Explain what you will be talking about in your essay. Your research and formal analysis go into the main body. Finally, your final reflection about visual arts should be left for the conclusion. This is where you get to sum up your interpretation of the work and what you see in it.
Browse through samples. Before you begin your essay writing, you might want to spend some time looking at examples. This can give you further ideas for your outline. Besides, good samples can inspire writing your very own visual arts essay. After all, art appreciation isn’t easy!

Whether you are writing a brief response piece or an entire extended essay, following these steps will improve the quality of your work. With enough practice, you will be composing visual arts essays with your eyes closed.

Still uncertain whether to write about Pablo Picasso or The Color Theory? Take a quick look at this list! Or allow our title generator to create an idea for you.

Here are 19 visual arts essay topics we have compiled just for you:

From painting to filmmaking: a brief history.
Leonardo da Vinci and the Golden Ratio.
Baya Mahieddine – the girl that inspired Picasso.
What do we mean by ‘contemporary art’?
Victorian beauty standards and their depiction in art.
How World War I gave birth to Dadaism.
The symbolism in Frida Kahlo’s paintings.
Cave paintings as very first artworks.
What is the difference between art and design?
Bollywood: how cinema evolved in India.
How the Edo period in Japan defined its arts and culture.
Salvador Dali’s influence on the surrealist movement.
Perpetuation of stereotypes in modern art.
Women in art: why are female artists often overlooked or forgotten.
Is graffiti a legitimate form of art?
The history and evolution of graphic novels.
Greek and Roman sculptures: similarities and differences.
Iconoclasm during the French revolution and its impact on art.
The evolution of Islamic Arts.

Thank you for reading! We hope that you will find inspiration among these visual arts topic ideas. Check out our visual arts essay examples that you will find below.

359 Best Essay Examples on Visual Arts

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3D Animation: Main Inspirations and Personal Experience

Visual and performing arts, comparison of indian and chinese art.

Words: 1675

Phenomenon of Embroidery Stitches

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Aspects of Graffiti as Art Therapy

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Gender Roles Set in Stone: Prehistoric and Ancient Work of Arts

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The Power of Female Characters in Horror Stories: “Nosferatu” and “Coraline”

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Visual and performance arts in creative process.

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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

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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

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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

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Received : 29 June 2017

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Published : 31 October 2017

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

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Visual Arts - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas

Visual arts is a form of creative expression that includes a wide range of mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, and printmaking. These forms of art often require a high level of skill and creativity to create a visually stunning and thought-provoking piece. Whether it’s abstract or representational, visual art can evoke different emotions and reactions from its audience, making it a powerful tool for communication and self-expression. Visual arts have been used throughout history to document and reflect cultural beliefs, political views, personal experiences, and aesthetic values.

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How to Write a HSC Visual Arts Essay Using a Scaffold

Artist surrounded by portraits - Visual Arts Essay Scaffold Featured Image

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.

Fortunately we’ve come up with this awesome article that lets you know exactly how to use a Visual Arts essay scaffold to write a strong essay!

So follow along, figure it out and then give it a go and you’ll be on your way to a Band 6 in no time!

What Is Scaffolding? Introduction Body Paragraph 1a Body Paragraph 2a Body Paragraph 1b Body Paragraph 2b Conclusion

What Is Scaffolding in the HSC Visual Arts Essay?

Scaffolding basically involves laying out the individual elements of an essay one by one so that you can see exactly what you need to include .

Throughout high school you probably filled out a scaffold or two for different class tasks and assignments.

Essentially they work by making you aware of exactly what you need to be including in any given response and how to make sure you create the best essay possible.

For the purpose of our scaffold, we’ll be going through and breaking down each paragraph of a Visual Arts extended response/essay. We’ll identify the individual points or ideas you need to include, as well as the best ways to work them into your response.

That way you’ll be bale to go into any art essay knowing exactly what you need to write.

We’ve included example sentences for our introduction and conclusion , as well as one body paragraph to show you exactly what kind of things you should and could be writing.

Download your very own Visual Arts Essay Scaffold

Introduction of the HSC Visual Art Essay

Step 1: thesis sentence responding to the question.

This should be concise and to the point, as you want your thesis to be super clear to whoever is reading your essay. Make sure that whatever you’re saying is answering/responding to the question being asked and try to avoid overly long or complex theses.

Example Question: Art is about reflecting reality. Thesis sentence: “While art may reflect reality, it also acts as an expression of imagination.”

Step 2: Context about artists and artworks

First of all you’ll have to introduce each of your artists and at least two of their artworks, as you’ll be analysing these in your essay. You may then want to add some brief context – even if it’s just one or two descriptors, such as mentioning that one artist is Australian, or that both are women. Whatever context you do mention should be relevant to or play a role in your thesis or main ideas.

Example “Del Kathryn Barton is one such artist, who uses symbolism and decorative patterns to convey concepts of femininity and imagination in her works That’s when I was another tree 2 and She appeared as a lover might. On the other hand artists such as Barbara Kruger, who uses boldly coloured text in her works Untitled (Pro-life for the unborn/Pro-death for the born) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) , show how reflecting reality can be pivotal to an artwork.”

Step 3: Signpost the main ideas of the essay

Signposting is the art of telling the reader what you’re going to talk about without actually starting to talk about it. This means you’ll want to briefly name or mention the key ideas or arguments you’ll focus on in your essay, but don’t go into any detail yet! That’s for your body paragraphs.

Example “These two artists despite their differences in style and subject matter both show a respect for that which is real and imagined in their artworks and practice. Hence they reveal through their works that art may reflect reality, but it expresses imagination as well.”

Body Paragraph 1a

Step 1: introduce the first idea you signposted.

It’s time to start detailing your main ideas or arguments from your introduction. You want to use your strongest idea first, so pick the one you know the best or can argue the best and explain it here in a little more detail. Make sure your sentence also makes it clear how this idea links to your thesis and/or the question.

Example “ That’s when I was another tree 2 is one of Barton’s works that uses visual language to express the abstract concept of femininity, using line and symbolism to express an imaginative interpretation of the idea.”

Step 2: Introduce Artist 1 and the artwork you’re analysing

Bring in your first artist by giving some more context on them as is relevant to the idea you’re writing about. This may include their nationality, when they lived, their social background, etc. You’ve already named the artwork you plan to analyse for this paragraph so briefly describe it for the audience. You don’t need to get too in-depth in your descriptions, but make sure the reader knows enough for the rest of your paragraph to make sense.

Example “Barton’s own role in society as a woman clearly influenced both her experiences of reality and her choice to create imaginative, expressive works about it. The image shows a nude girl holding a cat and looking upward, with ribbon wrapped around her arms and hair.”

Step 3: Analyse the artwork using the principles and elements of design, the frames and the conceptual framework

This is the trickier part – actually analysing. You need to make sure you know and understand the artwork and how it relates to or proves the ideas you’re trying to argue.

Analysing how the work interacts with the elements and principles of design, the frames and the conceptual framework is usually the best way to do this. Brush up on analysing the principles of design, the frames, and conceptual framework of art !

Example “The use of thin, jagged line work in the outlines and details of the image create a sense of sharpness and fragility, reminiscent of the edges of broken glass. Meanwhile the inclusion of the ribbons tied to and around the naked figure acts as a symbol for being trapped; trapped by society, trapped by reality and trapped by the expectations of young women in modern times. The cat also acts as a symbol, often tied to the idea of female manipulation, however the dark pink of it paws contrasted with its white claws highlight the way it cuts into the girl’s hand, yet another symbol of physical entrapment.”

Step 4: Explain how Artist A reflects the idea

Usually most of these connections will be made in your analysis, but you need to really drive home the point you’re making about why this idea is relevant to your artist and vice versa. Do this with a simple sentence stating exactly how the two are linked.

Example “In this work Barton uses imaginative imagery to create an image that expresses an idea without being rooted in reality, thus she is able to accurately and interpretively reveal the abstract idea of femininity.”

Step 5: Sum up the idea and link back to your thesis

You need to end your paragraph solidly, so make sure your concluding sentence brings your idea, analysis and thesis all together. Make sure to use high modality words like “proves”, “exemplifies”, etc.

Example “Therefore Barton and her work That’s when I was another tree 2 act as evidence that while art may reflect reality, it is also an expression of imagination.”

Body Paragraph 2a

Step 1: reiterate the first idea you signposted.

Restate the idea from your last paragraph but this time focus on how it links to your second artist. You may want to throw in some simple comparative language as well to begin the contrasting between your two artists, such as “on the other hand”, “in contrast to”, etc.

Step 2: Introduce Artist 2 and the artwork you’re analysing

Do this in the same way as you did in paragraph 1a, making sure to point out any relevant context that may be relevant for your analysis. Also make sure to comment on any important similarities or differences between this artist/artwork and the first artist/artwork.

Just as you did in paragraph 1a you now need to analyse the artwork. Remember you’re analysing comparatively, so comment on whether this artwork is similar or different to the first artwork you looked at, or if it has both different and similar elements.

Step 4: Compare and contrast Artist 1 with how Artist 2 reflects the idea

Really drive home your comparison here by stating how your idea is relevant to this new artist, then comparing and contrasting with how it was relevant to your first artist. This just makes sure you’re covering all bases and making sure your comparative analysis is on point.

Do the same as what you did for paragraph 1a, just make sure to add in a little mention of your comparison. Sentence starters such as “Similar to Artist 1, Artist 2 has proven…” are a great way to do this.

Body Paragraph 1b

Step 1: introduce the second idea you signposted.

Even though your first idea was the stronger one, you want to make sure your second idea is argued and analysed just as well. Introduce the idea in more detail just like you did before, making sure to mention how it connects to your thesis of your HSC Visual Arts Essay.

Step 2: Reintroduce Artist 1 and the artwork you’re analysing

Add any extra context we may need for this artist and then get into naming and describing the new artwork you’re analysing. You have less to write here this time around so don’t worry if you feel you’ve written a little less.

Do this just as you did for paragraph 1a, focusing on the elements and principles of design, the frames and the conceptual framework. Try to avoid analysing all the artworks in the same way, so if you focused on colour symbolism last time, try analysing the use of line or the materials used this time round.

Step 4: Explain how Artist 1 reflects the idea

Again, this is just as you did it in paragraph 1a. One thing you can add would be a comment on how the different or similar ways in which the artist reflects each of the ideas you’ve presented. For example maybe their exploration of your first idea was very obvious, whereas the second was more subtle.

This is the same as you did the first time – make it punchy and powerful and you’re good to go.

Body Paragraph 2b

Step 1: reiterate the second idea you signposted.

Take the idea from paragraph 2a and restate it focusing on your second artist/artwork, including some comparative language for extra punch.

Step 2: Reintroduce Artist 2 and the artwork you’re analysing

Do this just like you did in paragraph 1b – you’ll totally have the hang of this by now.

At this point you’ll be an analysis whiz, so keep it up like you did in paragraph 1b by analysing and comparing at the same time for the best effect.

Step 4: Compare and contrast Artist 2 with how Artist 1 reflects the idea

Smash that comparative analysis out of the park with some final summary on how the two artists/artworks relate in regards to the idea you’re looking at.

This is your last body paragraph so sum it up superbly and you’re almost at the finish line. Make sure to really drive home your idea and how it links to your thesis as well, just to make sure your essay is super cohesive and clear.

hsc visual arts essay example of painting with sky

Conclusion for the HSC Visual Arts Essay

Step 1: summarise and restate your thesis responding to the question.

Your conclusion is just reminding readers of what they’ve read, so create a punchy sentence that reminds them what your thesis was and how it was responding to the question posed.

Example “While art may reflect reality, the fact of the matter is that it also acts as an expression of imagination, as proven in the works of Barton and Kruger.”

Step 2: Sum up the ideas you originally signposted

Grab those ideas you signposted in the beginning and sum them up succinctly in 1-2 sentences, making sure it’s super clear how and why you argued/proved them. Make mention of your artists and artworks here as well just to sum everything up at the end of your HSC Visual Arts Essay!

Example “While Barton and Kruger are two contrasting artists with vastly different art styles and practices, looking at both demonstrates that reality and imagination may both be explored by any artist. Though each may appear more skewed towards either reality or imagination, their works prove that both ideas play an important role in their artmaking.”

Step 3: Conclude the essay with a strong, snappy sentence

Go out with a bang by creating an awesome finishing line that totally sums up what you’ve said in your essay. This may be a reiteration of your thesis with an “I proved it” twist, or you can use a suitable quote from one of your artists if you’re feeling fancy!

Example “Thus there can be no argument that both reality and imagination are pivotal aspects of both the art world and the worlds and lives of artists themselves.”

And there you have it! By following the steps we’ve laid out in our scaffold it’s totally simple to create your own awesome HSC Visual Arts Essay.

Make sure to focus on the key elements we identified and you’ll be heading straight for those top marks!

Looking for some inspiration for your Visual Arts Major Work ? We’ve created an article to get the ideas flowing!

On the hunt for other HSC Visual Arts resources?

Check out some of our other articles/guides below!

The Master List of HSC Visual Arts Practice Papers

How to Write Effective HSC Visual Arts Study Notes
How to Nail HSC Visual Arts Section 1 by Using a Scaffold

Looking for some extra help with using this scaffold for your Visual Arts essay?

We pride ourselves on our inspirational hsc visual arts coaches and mentors.

We offer tutoring and mentoring for Years K-12 in a variety of subjects, with personalised lessons conducted one-on-one in your home or at one of our state of the art campuses in Hornsby or the Hills!

To find out more and get started with an inspirational tutor and mentor get in touch today!

Give us a ring on 1300 267 888, email us at [email protected] or check us out on TikTok !

Maddison Leach completed her HSC in 2014, achieving an ATAR of 98.00 and Band 6 in all her subjects. Having tutored privately for two years before joining Art of Smart, she enjoys helping students through the academic and other aspects of school life, even though it sometimes makes her feel old. Maddison has had a passion for writing since her early teens, having had several short stories published before joining the world of blogging. She’s currently deferring her studies until she starts her Bachelor of Communication at UTS in the spring.

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How to Write a Visual Arts Essay explained.

Do you know how to write a great essay on visual arts? Some students have no idea how to write it correctly and thus they seek some essay writing services. However, with our complete guide, you will be aware of how to write it successfully.

Visual Arts Essay: How to Reveal the Topic Correctly

Visual art essays is a creative way of representing art in a word form. It is a way of explaining what is really in the art . It talks about art in painting, sculpture, drawings, and portraits. The main aim is to make people understand the art better by painting a visual image in words. It is a way of enhancing creativity as students paint a picture of a certain image vividly in words.

When writing visual art essays, use simple words to describe it. These are easy to understand. Look at the object in question keenly, slowly, carefully and repeatedly. If the art is made up of many parts, sort the parts out in the order of their importance. You do not have to dwell on all the parts. Look at each part carefully. Then now you can put this information into writing.

“And if you’re struggling with writing visual art essays, you can find a lot of useful sites that provide essay help at any time.”

In order to write about visual arts, you have to understand the art better. The following are top tips to guide you through writing.

The work context

In order to describe an art, you need to have a clear understanding of it. You need to have all the information about the given painter or photographer. You need to know his styles, the issues he is dealing with and what influences him/her to draw. Then you look at that particular work and familiarize yourself with. How does it look? What is its title? When was the art done? Such kind of questions will provide you with answers which will give you a better understanding of the essay.

The style and technique used

Like every other form of creative work, visual arts have a certain style and technique. This is particular for each person. The aim of the style is to improve the way the message will be sent. It enhances the message on the art. Every designer has their own way of style. In order to understand the art better, then you must identify the style and understand it too. Show how these styles have been used in the specific art.

What intrigues you about the art

Writing is a passion. Especially for visual art writers. Before you settle on describing any form of art, there is always a drive. This is the most important part of the essay. What particularly interests you in this type of art. Why do you want to write an essay about it? Describe what you want others to learn about the particular art. Arouse the curiosity of the reader.

Personal interests

Follow your personal interests. It is easier to write what you as a writer love. Narrow down the topics to areas you are familiar with. This way you dwell on a topic you have vast knowledge in. You are able to express yourself out well.

Hidden context of the art

In this section, you tell us the hidden bit about the art. The hidden meaning which we are not able to see. The aim of these essays is to explain out the meaning behind the art Carefully examine the painting and look at the objects on it. In most cases, best images contain vague images. It takes a careful observer to pick out such. These values images are what gives the art a deep meaning. It reveals the artist’s emotions and feelings behind the art. When you pinpoint this part of the art, then you now have a clear understanding of the art.

Interpretation

This is where you start your essay. After the careful observation, tell us what you feel about the art. Interpretation differs from each and every one. It depends on how they have personally viewed the art. In your own way, describe your feelings in the best possible way. What do you see, which you wish others should see. Describe it.

During visual essay writing, you encounter some pitfalls. It is not an easy writing assignment. It requires a lot of research and preparation. It needs a lot of creativity and logic. You have to understand the art first before writing it. The major task is understanding the art.

There are a lot of sources to use when writing visual essays. If you have no idea on how to write your essay, you can check out Essay Zoo samples .

Visual Arts Essay Topics

There are plenty of visual essay topics. They include:

Leonardo Da Vinci
Ancient Roman structures
The Pieta of Michelangelo
Flemish Baroque in the 17th century
The graphics of modern day art
Impressionism era of art in the Netherlands
Differences between Bernini and Borromini
Insinuations behind ‘The Thinker’
The Mona Lisa
The inspiration behind famous painting
The history of art in the Netherlands
The sculpture of nude women

Final steps

When you are through with writing the essay, proofread it. This aims at removing all grammatical errors. Ensure that the sentence structure is good, the language used is the required one and the outline is up to standards. Ensure that you have followed a good art essay structure . To grasp a general understanding of how it should look like, you can go through free essay examples .

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Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art. It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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Extended Essay

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

Visual Arts: Sample A

Extended Essay: Exemplar Commentary
Subject	Visual Arts	If applicable, theme for WSEE
If applicable, category for language essays		If applicable, subjects used for WSEE
Title of essay	Master of Suspense: Alfred Hitchcock Research Question: How does Alfred Hitchcock visually guide viewers as he creates suspense in films such as “The Pleasure Garden,” “The Lodger,” “Strangers on a Train” and “Psycho”?
Essay number		Examination session
Assessment of extended essay
Criteria	Mark awarded	Commentary
A: Focus and method [6]	5	The essay reaches achievement level 5-6 and deserves the lower mark. The topic of the essay is appropriate, interesting and made sufficiently clear, as is the purpose and focus of the research. The candidate does a good job of frequently bringing the discussion back to the research question. Evidence of an effective and informed selection of sources is to be found throughout the essay.
B: Knowledge and understanding [6]	5	The essay reaches achievement level 5-6 and deserves the lower mark. The source material is clearly relevant and appropriate. The analysis of the films in question is well handled and appropriate historical and critical texts have been consulted. The use of subject specific terminology is accurate, if not perspicacious, and the use of language demonstrates effective knowledge and understanding.
C: Critical thinking [12]	10	The best-fit approach is needed here. The research is clearly appropriate and in places effectively applied to the argument and analysis, although not consistently so (11). The inclusion of less relevant research (Hitchcock’s influence on Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island) does not significantly detract from the quality of the overall analysis (11). An effective series of arguments has been developed, although in a somewhat piecemeal manner that does not entirely lead to the summative conclusion (9). In terms of the films, the research has been critically evaluated. Some of the secondary sources, such as reference to Donald Spoto, is well handled, while other sections, e.g. reference to Edward Munch’s The Scream and the discussion of mirrors in Psycho, may be interesting, but are not clearly linked to the research. (10)
D: Presentation [4]	4	The essay meets the expectations for the formal presentation. Although it would have been more impressive if a side-by-side comparison with Munch’s The Scream had been presented, this should not be seen as an expectation and such an omission does not prevent the formal presentation from being deemed “good.”
E: Engagement [6] (not included)		The assessment of an accompanying RPPF will affect the overall mark awarded and the grade achieved.
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. In several instances the analysis is good and leads to a rather convincing argument. Please note: as a result of modifying existing extended essays for illustrative purposes, not all exemplars have an accompanying RPPF for assessment under criterion E (this is a mandatory element for all essays as of 2018). As a result this essay has been marked out of 28 rather than 34.

Visual Arts: Sample B

Extended Essay: Exemplar Commentary
Subject	Visual Arts	If applicable, theme for WSEE
If applicable, category for language essays		If applicable, subjects used for WSEE
Title of essay	Title: Emotions in the Surrealist Works of Salvador Dali Research Question: How did Salvador Dali's Use of the Surrealism Movement Evoke Emotion?
Essay number		Examination session
Assessment of extended essay
Criteria	Mark awarded	Commentary
A: Focus and method [6]	4	The research topic is communicated and focused, but the discussion in the essay is only partially focused and connected to the research question – the emotional content of the paintings considered in the essay, and how Salvador Dali used surrealist strategies to communicate emotional sensations to viewers of his work, receives superficial treatment. The selection of sources is limited – much of it appears to be of a general nature and internet based.
B: Knowledge and understanding [6]	4	The selection of source material is mostly relevant and appropriate to the research question. Both application of sources and demonstration of knowledge of the topic are only partially effective. Subject specific terminology is for the most part adequate, but no real distinction is made between emotion, idea, anxiety and the subconscious. As it is, these concepts seem to be applied almost interchangeably.
C: Critical thinking [12]	5	The best-fit approach is called for in applying Criterion C: The application of the research presented is limited and its relevance to the RQ, “How did Salvador Dali's Use of the Surrealism Movement Evoke Emotion?” is not entirely clear (level 3). There is some good analysis of the paintings discussed in the essay, partially relevant to the research question (level 6). The discussion and evaluation are adequate, but the reasoning contains inconsistencies. Although the candidate does not stick to the research question, some of the points made are valid, clear and connected with the research (level 5).
D: Presentation [4]	2	The essay only partially meets the requirements for the formal presentation. Images are appropriately referenced, but do not appear in the body of the text. Most, but not all quotations have been referenced. Quotation marks are placed after parenthetical citations, rather than after the last word of the actual quote. Citations are provided for general information from the research, but URLs for sources indicated in the main text, e.g. Salvador-dali.org and theartstory.org, are not listed as such in the bibliography.
E: Engagement [6] (not included)		The assessment of an accompanying RPPF will affect the overall mark awarded and the grade achieved.
Total marks awarded	15/28	For an essay ostensibly about how Dali used surrealist strategies to evoke an emotional response in viewers of his work, there is little discussion about what these emotions are supposed to be, as if they are either too obvious or too mysterious to mention. Instead, descriptive accounts of the three paintings in question are followed by brief analysis of their content and palette, accompanied by references to a limited number of internet sources. Please note: as a result of modifying existing extended essays for illustrative purposes, not all exemplars have an accompanying RPPF for assessment under criterion E (this is a mandatory element for all essays as of 2018). As a result this essay has been marked out of 28 rather than 34.

Visual Arts: Sample C

Extended Essay: Exemplar Commentary
Subject	Visual Arts	If applicable, theme for WSEE
If applicable, category for language essays		If applicable, subjects used for WSEE
Title of essay	The Depiction of Women in the Paintings of Joaquin Sorolla and Marc Chagall Research Question: To what extent does the culture and emotional background of Chagall and Sorolla impact their depiction of women?
Essay number		Examination session
Assessment of extended essay
Criteria	Mark awarded	Commentary
A: Focus and method [6]	2	Although the research question itself is sufficiently focused and its intent is understandable, it has not been clearly expressed. Identification and explanation of the topic is limited and the purpose and focus of the research is unclear. Given the research topic, sources and methods are limited, as is evidence that their selection has been informed.
B: Knowledge and understanding [6]	2	Although early in the essay there are a few appropriate quotes from art scholars, these are mentioned in passing and not used effectively. In several instances, subject-specific terminology and concepts are inaccurate, demonstrating a rather basic knowledge and understanding. The candidate uses “dyed” as a synonym for “painted” and the term Giclée (a digital-printing technique), is completely inappropriate for the context in which it is used.
C: Critical thinking [12]	2	The application of the research presented is limited and its relevance to the research question is not clear. The student survey referred to in the essay does not appreciably further the discussion. Some of the analysis of the two works under discussion is good – especially the point about the relationship between the man and woman in the Marc Chagall painting – but in several sections is limited and not based on evidence. There are a few valid points made in the argument, but much of it is unstructured, insufficiently focused on the research question and based on limited evidence.
D: Presentation [4]	1	The formal presentation is barely acceptable. The essay layout is sufficiently well organized, but several elements are either weak or only partially in place: Under the new requirements this essay must be referred as a possible case of academic misconduct due to incorrect and inconsistent citing and referencing.
E: Engagement [6] (not included)	3	Clearly some personal engagement with the topic area and some insights into the decision making process. However, these do not move beyond general observations about decisions made and the impact of these on the research.
Total marks awarded	10/34	While the essay topic itself is interesting and some attempt is made at providing structure to the analysis and argument, much of what is presented appears to be based on the candidate’s feelings and (limited) knowledge of the subject, rather than applying critical analysis to appropriate research. As the conclusion makes all too clear, the candidate’s knowledge and understanding of modern art is rather basic.

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Visual Arts Extended Essay: The Complete Guide for IB Students

by Antony W

June 24, 2024

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 culturally relevant topics, which frequently have a personal significance for the candidate in respect to his or her cultural identity, a potential university program, or present creative interests, such as studio work.

It is discouraged to rely solely on textbooks and the Internet, and no long essay in visual arts should rely solely on such sources.

You should only read your textbooks to the extent that they generate unique ideas, give models of disciplined, organized, and informed methods, and foster direct and personal engagement with the essay topic.

Choice of Arts Extended Essay Topic

When it comes to choosing a visual arts extended essay, we strongly recommend that you avoid themes that rely solely on summarizing generic secondary sources and those that are likely to result in an essay that is mostly narrative or descriptive in nature.

You must address a pertinent subject or research question and reach a specific, ideally individual, conclusion.

Choosing a topic that encompasses several areas of art history or a lengthy time span is likewise unlikely to result in a great essay. Restriction of the essay’s scope will help you to establish a clear focus and create opportunities for exhibiting in-depth comprehension and critical evaluation of your extended essay.

How Should You Treat Visual Arts Extended Essay Topic?

The topic you choose must have a clear and direct connection to visual arts. If the relationship is only tenuous, you risk introducing irrelevant material, which will confuse the investigation and undermine the case.

You should construct a research issue that is of personal interest and use a range of materials to support your claims, including textual analysis, the study of actual artworks or designed artifacts, and interviews with practitioners and subject-matter experts.

Questions that do not provide a systematic examination that exhibits critical creative analysis and in-depth comprehension are unlikely to be appropriate. In certain cases, it may become apparent early in the research process that there are insufficient sources to conduct such an examination. In such situations, consider a shift in emphasis.

In visual arts extended essays, the incorporation and discussion of pertinent visual reference material is of special relevance. However, such material must directly support and be relevant to the analysis/argument. It should be cleanly presented, appropriately acknowledged, and appear as near as feasible to the first reference in the body of the essay.

To stimulate personal investment in the extended essay, your work should include local and/or original sources wherever feasible. However, you may not have access to original materials in some circumstances. In such instances, high-quality replicas, movies and films , or photographs/Internet pictures are acceptable sources.

An argument should be well supported, with remarks and conclusions supported by evidence that is relevant and well-founded, as opposed to being based only on preconceived notions.

Visual Arts Extended Essay Topics Examples

Now that you know about the kind of topic you should choose for you visual arts extended essay, let’s consider some good and bad examples.

The worst example can be something like:

The variation within human perception
Architecture is functional art.
Postmodernism
Islamic architectural design

You want avoid these types of examples because they’re broad and therefore can’t fit within the scope of extended essay requirements .

You want to consider only the best topic for the project, particularly making sure you pick a subject that’s specific enough to form a research question that you can answer within the respective scope of the assignment.

Some of the best examples include but not limited to the following:

What role did national themes have in the creative activity of Russian avant-garde artists associated with the Knave of Diamonds society?
How did men and women’s clothes communicate National Socialist ideals?
How does Yinka Shonibare’s work represent the evolving importance of African art in a global society?
What are the origins of Romanesque architecture in Arles?
Are there pop art elements in the design of Pakistani trucks?
Titles for Protracted Essays
Appropriateness of Picasso’s usage of the Mbangu mask in ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ in terms of cultural borrowing
How does Ketna Patel’s work reflect the increasing influence of media culture on Asian cultures?
How does Yinka Shonibare’s work represent the evolving significance of African art in a global society?
How far did Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series develop his interest in morbidity?
How Jesse Trevino’s cultural experiences influenced his artwork
How would one identify the crucial balance between design and function for four pedestrian bridges of the 21st century?
In what way does Damien Hirst’s art tackle the themes of Life and Death? (2013)
To what degree has Federation Square’s design proven successful?
When does photojournalism become an art form?
How does Fra Angelico’s picture of The Annunciation represent him in Renaissance Florence?

Tips for Writing a Visual Arts Extended Essay

You are supposed to assess critically the sources you consulted while writing the essay by asking yourself the following questions:

Which sources are essential to my ideas, beliefs, and assertions?
Which sources are irrelevant to the analysis?

For the research question, you can:

Utilize primary and secondary sources to develop and evaluate diverse perspectives.
Use these primary sources to explore and explain particular aspects of the visual arts, with emphasis on a particular aspect of the visual arts collecting and analyzing reproductions of artwork.

You must also exhibit an understanding of various topics associated with the studied work.

Demonstrate a knowledge of the worth and limitations of the work you’re studying by analyzing its origin and function
Show a continuous high level of creative comprehension by addressing the study subject comprehensively and effectively.

Relevant findings from this analysis must feature in your argument, not to mention that you should carefully support the arguments.

About the author

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

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Stop seeing and learn to look: Discover the importance of visual literacy

Odra Noel. Yellow Lichen on Rock . n.d. Wellcome Collection.

“Learn to Look” offers actionable guidance and sample lesson plans

You and your students see visuals of all kinds every day, but how often do you slow down and really “look” at and consider them?

Visual literacy describes the ability to encounter, seek, interpret, use, and create visual content. If you want to learn to be a more visually literate person, or want to teach your students the valuable skill of visual literacy, the JSTOR Daily column “Learning to Look” and Artstor on JSTOR are excellent places to start.

In “Learning to Look”, Virginia Seymour, Head Librarian of Research and Instruction at Savannah College of Art and Design, takes us progressively deeper into lessons that help us stop and consider how the objects, images, and videos we encounter operate in the world. What is their meaning? Their purpose? How have history, society, and culture shaped this visual content, and how are they shaped by it? Seymour helps students and teachers develop visual literacy skills to unlock a way of learning about and understanding our world that cannot be supplanted by text .

She says in her introductory column,

“In my own classroom, I often watch students struggle with images. They interact with images almost constantly in their daily lives but are hesitant to extract meaning and draw conclusions from them when a text source isn’t provided to verify what they are seeing. Yet images can be one of the richest sources of information and can reveal what text may not. .

Discover a new way of looking

The Cow as Mother of the World: With Pictures of Hindu Deities All over Its Body. Coloured Lithograph. n.d. 1 print : lithograph, with watercolour. Wellcome Collection.

In the column’s twelve posts, Seymour explores a range of lessons that begin with cultivating the art of slow looking, which requires sustained attention and curiosity in the face of visual stimuli. She then poses the question, “What is the difference between a painting and a photograph?” The query encourages us to consider “how a visual medium shapes interpretations of a work’s subject matter,” and the unique perspectives that begin to emerge when viewers bring certain expectations to a medium and its capabilities.

Other posts guide us to think about contextual information and what might be missing in an image, how color communicates meaning and creates visually compelling experiences, the principles of composition, how to interpret the meaning of an image, and ways to understand and use metadata to search for and find exactly the right images for your project.

“Learning to Look” posts are as engaging and compelling as they are enlightening. If you haven’t considered teaching this rewarding skill to your students, Seymour’s column may persuade you of its value and importance . And the images and multimedia available on Artstor on JSTOR offer endless opportunities for visual literacy play, experimentation, and discovery.

Samantha Krukowski. Goblet Cells, Illustration. n.d. Wellcome Collection.

Lesson plans and resources you can use

The column provides a robust collection of lessons you can use as a casual, self-guided course in visual literacy, but Seymour also created the following structured lesson plans you can use in your classroom.

Close Looking with Mystery Images
Exploring Images In (and Out of) Context
Connecting Elements of Art to Principles of Composition
What is a Symbol? Symbolic Imagery Think-Pair-Share

In her post “How to Find and Choose the Best Images for Your Project”, Seymour guides us through the process of identifying what visuals we are looking for before we even begin our search. Why do you need the image? What is your topic? Who created the image? Finding high-quality images, she reminds us, is not just about identifying high-quality image sources, but the exploration that is required before we start looking for those sources. That said, she also provides a list of resources that provide access to high-quality images online—besides Artstor on JSTOR ! Seymour suggests:

The Library of Congress
AP Newsroom
Getty Images
Digital Public Library of America
Asia Art Archive
Digital South Asia Library
South Asia Open Archives (SAOA)

Share your visual literacy stories

How do you teach or learn visual literacy using Artstor on JSTOR? Have you created lesson plans that include visual literacy techniques and explorations? Would you like to share those plans, or the insights you’ve gained from using them? If so, please enlighten our community .

We love to hear from you!

About the author

Ann Guidry is Senior Copywriter for ITHAKA. After earning her B.A. in English at the University of Texas at Austin, she put her degree and passion for reading, writing, and art to extensive use. A mission-driven writer, editor, and brand messaging specialist, Ann is excited to help ITHAKA affect positive change in the world by expanding access to knowledge.

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When Art Talks Back: Jonathan Lethem on Graffiti As Visual and Written Expression

Exploring artistic scribbling in a rapidly gentrifying new york city.

In Lucy Ives’s new novel, Life is Everywhere , she writes: “Everyone who has ever lived was born into something that was already taking place.”

As children in New York City in the 1970s, we were born into a world covered with paint. Walls, baseboards, moldings, even radiators might be six or seven layers deep with it, architectural edges and corner blurred into globs, approximate shapes. Sometimes you’d find paint over old black-and-white checkerboard tile on the floor of a bathroom, or covering leaky pipes beneath a sink. Old landlord strategy: Throw on another heavy coat. It might be holding the building together.

The layers peeled and chipped. We were warned not to eat it. That made us curious: Was it good to eat?

At the dawn of gentrification, some of the layers were being undone. Chipped at or stripped away. People dragged sinks or sections of marble fireplaces into the street and poured and scrubbed poisons, hoping to free their old forms. A summer afternoon went rank with solvent.

Soon enough, some of our number went out armed with paint and shouted back with our own application.

These efforts called forth more layers of paint, in a struggle to conceal the visual funk that had birthed overnight.

The ’80s explosion of graffiti caused the IRT to slather its rolling stock with graffiti-resistant paint, first fat white and later forest green and burgundy.

Not that a coat of graffiti-proof paint stopped my brother, although he was chased off before he could complete this panel.

In the ’90s, he got a go at this Redbird—but only because it was in the scrapyard, waiting to be sunk into the ocean to create an artificial reef.

Sometimes art is a game of survival. Live long enough, like my brother and some of his affiliates, and you might get celebrated, even paid, for that for which you’d earlier been prone to be arrested.

But graffiti artists from my brother’s era didn’t call themselves “painters.” They called themselves “writers.” Broadcasting your adopted name, however gnomic or illegible to those not schooled in the stylistics of graffiti font, was a language act. Writing graffiti was an action not only in visual space but a verbal blurt, a gesture aloud.

The flamboyance of the major panel work was grounded in the baseline activity of “tagging”: marker or spray paint calligraphy, word-as-icon, a signature on the city’s face.

When I left New York City for college in Vermont—where I would change myself from a painter to a writer—I stood one day with some friends beside a wall when one unveiled a spray can and undertook a little vandalism. (He drew a dick, as it happens.) Then he handed it to me, and, almost without thinking, I threw up a simulacrum of a tag I’d used in Brooklyn, on a warehouse wall or two, and once in a train tunnel, while accompanying friends who really wrote.

The response from my college friends was startling. They thought I’d hidden the fact that I was a graffiti kid. I explained otherwise, but they took it for modesty. I knew I wasn’t. I hadn’t done the time. The ethos of graffiti was that of endurance, repetition, diligence. You claimed the role in hours, in miles, in numbers of train cars or subway station pillars bombed. The X-Men, for instance, were celebrated as the last crew to have hit every line in the system. Far more than doggedness, this was the art itself.

There were days when I’d ride to high school on a train Zephyr had hit the night before and I’d count what seemed like a hundred fresh, dripping tags, as he’d roamed from car to car filling each available panel or door.

Like Sherwin Williams, it seemed one day Zephyr might Cover the City.

This value accounts for the eerie reverence held in the graffiti annals for PRAY, the old woman who managed to scratch her four-letter tag (or injunction) onto every single payphone in the five boroughs, as well as nearly ever pillar in every station in the system. Technically this wasn’t graffiti but “scratchiti,” yet the writers honored her with their awe. PRAY was an apparition, a rumor, an impossibility. She was also the Queen of the Boroughs, the greatest tagger who ever lived.

In the subways, the city’s unconscious, PRAY made it into movies, like Brother From Another Planet .

When Norman Mailer wrote his premature—but prescient—celebration of graffiti in 1974, he titled it “The Faith of Graffiti.”

This devotional, graphomaniac, filibustering dimension of graffiti haunts me. It suggests tagging as a version of call-and-response, within a city whose cacophony of advertising, decay, and squabbling vernacular voices begs reply.

Maybe it’s all a form of prayer—prayer to exist.

A flâneur, the walker-in-the-city, confronts the swaths of human reality that modern civilization has drawn into one place. But the classic image of the flâneur—from Baudelaire, by way of Poe—is of a silent, anonymous watcher, observing but unobserved, leaving no trace. The graffiti flâneur is equally driven to survey the city but also jabbers back at what they encounter, in the form of tagging. Their call is to anyone who’d care to notice. But, above all, to others of their type— those fellow graphomaniac walkers who comprise the rival crews.

I can’t outrun this image. Motherless Brooklyn ’s Tourettic detective is a form of verbal graffiti artist. Perkus Tooth, in Chronic City , is another, wheat-pasting his cryptic manifestos on lampposts and garage doors. And in the last line of The Fortress of Solitude I dubbed the book’s characters—those fated to have to carve their personal selves from the city’s havoc of simultaneity—“human scribble.” I’m not entirely certain what it means. The phrase suggests a kind of animation or vibrancy, but also that they might be subject to being overwritten, overpainted—erased from the scene.

Graffti inserts itself like the blade of a knife between creation and destruction, between publicity and furtiveness, between word and image, cartoon, icon, and hieroglyph. Beyond its incorporation of actual characters—Doctor Doom, Underdog, Cheech Wizard—the words and letters themselves slide toward mummery or Kabuki, cloaking their sense in costumes, in masks. That its meaning is inchoate is part of the point. If you can explain it, you probably don’t understand.

This is language you meet with your body, just as a kid leafs through a Marvel comic not quite bothering to read the captions and word balloons, letting the figures speak instead. Or like a whole train platform of morning commuters covertly gasping, thrilled or outraged by what’s just rolled in, the dream news from the night kitchen.

Katie Merz paints on buildings. Though it might appear more as though she’s peeled off their skin, to reveal networks of information agitating beneath.

Katie is another pure product of Dean Street. I don’t know when we first met, only that we knew immediately that we shared a subway stop, and a nervous system.

Like a few others, she figured out how to get paid to shout back in paint, or at least not get arrested. Not getting arrested: nice work if you can get it.

With The Flatbush Mural, she threatened to cover the city, or at least paint a whole street. The canvas is bigger than your eye—like an IRT train rolling through the station of your mind, only you provide the locomotion.

If you fear you might need special flâneur’s equipment to conduct this survey, Katie Merz has what you need. With these, you can break off a decorated chunk of the city with which to hightail it from the authorities.

Another Katie Merz artwork lives in my house. Painted on celluloid, as if waiting to be animated (though it is already animated), Loved What This Was renders a gnomic dream of Henry Miller’s Black Spring , or a film by Ralph Bakshi or a Philip Guston canvas, yet squeezed through the aperture of an ancient Bazooka Joe comic—something you’d find crumpled up on the sidewalk, and smooth out with your thumbs, squinting at the gnarled-up smears of language, trying to get the joke. But the joke is on you.

There it goes again, the voice in my mind, the voice of the street. Human cypher, human scribble, human dream.

__________________________________

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The story of art in the Russian Revolution

By Martin Sixsmith

Published on 20 December 2016

With a momentous exhibition marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Martin Sixsmith charts the course of a pivotal period in art, from euphoric creativity to eventual repression.

From the Winter 2016 issue of RA Magazine , issued quarterly to Friends of the RA .

In his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago , Boris Pasternak describes his hero’s and, by extension, his own response to the revolutionary fervour of 1917.

"Just think what extraordinary things are happening all around us!" Yuri said. "Such things happen only once in an eternity... Freedom has dropped on us out of the sky!"

Pasternak is talking about more than just politics. Yuri Zhivago is a poet, and his artist’s sensibility (in Russian his name is a play on zhivoy , or "alive") resonates with the visceral changes tearing through his native land. Pasternak’s imagery is febrile, hopeful, anticipating a new beginning and a new life. You can feel the excitement in the Russian air:

Everything was fermenting, growing, rising with the magic yeast of life. The joy of living, like a gentle wind, swept in a broad surge indiscriminately through fields and towns, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh. Not to be overwhelmed by this tidal wave, Yuri went out in the square to listen to the speeches...

What Pasternak is describing, very powerfully, is the birth of love. Zhivago’s outpouring of passion for the revolution coincides with the blossoming of his relationship with Lara. The two merge into the joy that only love can bring.

Pasternak’s reaction wasn’t a one-off. A generation of artists, writers and musicians would greet the perception of bewildering, miraculous freedom bestowed by the revolution with the exhilaration of a nascent love affair. From 1917 up to 1932 – the rough span of the RA’s survey of Russian art – they would experience the whole gamut of emotions that love engenders. The initial, youthful passion that overwhelms caution and sense would lift them to heights of creation. They were inspired, rewarded, fulfilled.

Then came love’s trials, the niggling suspicions, the dawn of mistrust. When doubts surfaced about the purity of their love object, they forced themselves to suppress them. When the faults of the regime became manifest, they looked away.

In the end, the revolution turned against them. Some she consumed in the killing machine of the gulag; others fled, or renounced their art. More than one, some of the best, succumbed to the despair of rejection. Spurned lovers, they found life was no longer worth living and they ended it.

Artistic innovation had smouldered before the revolution. Artists such as Lyubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Rodchenko and David Burliuk had produced striking avant-garde works earlier than 1917, as had Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. Distracted by having to fight a world war and by domestic unrest, the Tsarist regime had let art slip the leash. The conflict had reduced Russia’s contacts with the West and native talent had taken new directions. Several significant works by Malevich in the exhibition, including Red Square (below) – a red parallelogram, stark and challenging on a white ground – and Dynamic Suprematism Supremus (below), with its vortex of geometric shapes, date from the years before the revolution.

But it was 1917, with its promise of brave new worlds and liberation from the past, that set all the arts aflame. The poets Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely and Sergei Yesenin produced their most important work. Authors such as Mikhail Zoshchenko and Mikhail Bulgakov pushed at the bounds of satire and fantasy. The Futurist poets, chief among them Vladimir Mayakovsky, embraced the revolution while proclaiming the renewal of art. The Poputchiki or Fellow Travellers – writers nominally sympathetic to Bolshevism but nervous about commitment – clashed with the self-described Proletarian writers who brashly claimed the right to speak for the Party. Musical experimentalism broke through the barriers of harmony, overflowed into jazz and created orchestras without conductors. The watchwords were novelty and invention, with pre-revolutionary forms raucously jettisoned from the steamship of modernity.

In the visual arts, Malevich and his followers took painting to new regions in search of abstract geometric purity. The principles of Dynamic Suprematism, proclaimed in his 1926 manifesto The Non-Objective World , ring with the provocative self-confidence of culture in those years. "By Suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in art... The visual phenomena of the objective world are meaningless; the significant thing is feeling. The appropriate means of representation gives the fullest possible expression to feeling and ignores the familiar appearance of objects. Objective representation... has nothing to do with art. Objectivity is meaningless."

Malevich’s canvases had moved from early realism via a flirtation with Cubism to the ultimate abstraction of shape and colour. His Red Square (1915) is also titled Visual Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions ; her "meaningless" visual phenomenon had been distilled into "pure feeling". Like Kandinsky, who had returned to Russia from Germany in 1914, Malevich’s paintings in the decade following the revolution are alive with the rhythmic manipulation of form and space, packed with dynamic shapes that fly precipitously towards the viewer, full of the energy of the age of flight.

Kazimir Malevich image

Red square, 1915.

This painting was a milestone in Malevich's quest to attain "pure feeling" in his art, distilling the "meaningless" reality of objective phenomena to their inmost essence

Kazimir Malevich, Dynamic Suprematism Supremus

Dynamic Suprematism Supremus, c.1915

This painting added rhythmic movement to Malevich's experiments in geometrical abstraction

The Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Popova and Rodchenko (below) strove to square the circle between the concrete forms of architecture and photography and the values of art for art’s sake. Their structural designs were sharp and angular, a sort of three-dimensional Suprematism. They produced street art celebrating the revolution and denouncing its foes. In 1919 they covered buildings in Vitebsk in vibrant propaganda, with El Lissitzky’s emblematic Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge reducing the complexity of Russia’s civil war to a red triangle piercing a white circle, in a geometric confrontation of good and evil that even the least educated could comprehend. "The streets shall be our brushes," said Mayakovsky, "and the squares our palettes."

Art was spilling into every form of expression. The Bolsheviks were quick to identify the potential of film in influencing the masses, and directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and cinéma-vérité pioneer Dziga Vertov became skilled exponents of politically charged cinema. The newsreel series, Kinodelia ( Film Weekly ) and Kinopravda ( Film Truth ), run by Vertov, used Constructivist-inspired intertitles designed by Rodchenko, who also produced their advertising posters.

Lyubov Popova image

Space-force construction, 1921.

The Constructivists applied Suprematist ideals of geometric purity to architecture and design. This painting by Popova heralded three prolific years in textile, typography and stage design before the artist's death from scarlet fever aged 35

Alexander Rodchenko, Pioneer with Trumpet

Alexander Rodchenko image

Pioneer with trumpet, 1930.

This photograph by Rodchenko combines the political content demanded by the regime (the Pioneers were the Communist youth organisation) with the Constructivist credo that photography and architecture can achieve artistic purity of form

Film still from Dziga Vertov’s documentary, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 image

Vertov's documentary on Soviet life experiments with double exposure, fast motion, split screens and jump cuts

The Bolsheviks at first were tolerant, preoccupied with more pressing matters. But by the mid-1920s, the regime was looking disapprovingly at the radicalism and the abstraction, beginning to shape the doctrine that would subjugate all art to the aims of socialism. On 23 April 1932, the Central Committee announced the formation of the Artists’ Union of the USSR, tasked with imposing Socialist Realism as the only acceptable form of artistic expression. From now on, it decreed, art must depict man’s struggle for socialist progress towards a better life. The creative artist must serve the proletariat by being realistic, optimistic and heroic.

The experimentalism that had flourished since the revolution was now deemed un-Soviet. To further the cause of the revolution culture must be comprehensible by the masses; anything more complicated, innovative or original was by definition useless and potentially dangerous. Abstract art didn’t fit the bill. The era of freedom for the avant-garde was over.

With consummately bad timing, a 1932 jubilee retrospective of trends in post-revolutionary art took the celebration of diversity as its keynote. When Artists of the Russian Federation over Fifteen Years 1917–1932 opened at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad, it filled 100 rooms with nearly 2,000 works, ranging from heroic statues and paintings of Lenin and Stalin to the striking paintings of Pavel Filonov, teeming with figures. A whole room was devoted to Malevich’s geometrical canvases and his plaster blocks known as "architectons".

By the time the exhibition was due to move to Moscow in 1933, diversity was a dirty word and many of the contributors were on the Kremlin’s blacklist. Malevich, who had already been interrogated by the NKVD secret police, was far less visible in the show. ("From the first days of the revolution," he told his interrogator, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, "I have been working for the benefit of Soviet art..." and "Art must provide the newest forms... to reflect the social problems of proletarian society.") Neither was there much of Filonov’s work on view, and official disapproval would blight the rest of his life. Even his attempts to make acceptable paintings, including a portrait of Stalin, were rejected. He died from starvation during the siege of Leningrad in 1941.

Socialist Realism spawned much hackery, but also much to admire.

Martin Sixsmith

A great joy of the RA’s exhibition is that it reconstitutes large sections of the original Artists of the Russian Federation show, including the Malevich and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin rooms almost in their entirety. It presents the abstract and the avant-garde alongside art that overtly champions the regime. If we had tended lazily to assume that the former outstrips the latter in both brilliance of conception and quality of execution, this exhibition might make us think again. Socialist Realism spawned much hackery, but also much to admire.

The most visible face of official art was on the streets, where statues of the revolution’s forerunners and leaders proliferated, ever bigger, ever more heroic. Lenin was portrayed in the throes of revolutionary fervour, his arm extended in a dramatic appeal for commitment to the cause or striding purposefully forward towards the radiant Communist future. In paintings, he is also seen in more intimate settings, working at his desk; hearing petitions from peasants who have appealed to his infallible wisdom; constantly alert, always on guard to protect the Soviet people. Alongside the accomplished realism of artists such as Isaak Brodsky, others brought a quirkier vision. Petrov-Vodkin, who trained as an icon painter, depicts Lenin in his coffin with a glow of preternatural divinity about him (below).

As the Lenin myth grew, so did the intimations of saintliness. Lenin was a holy martyr, presiding Christ-like over the destiny of the nation. A party that had destroyed religion in a deeply Christian country needed something to replace it and holy Lenin, dedicated, ascetic and self-denying, was the answer. Russian peasants maintain a shrine in one corner of their home known as the krasny ugol – the beautiful corner – with a holy icon and a candle. The state was driving out the icons of Christ, replacing them with icons of Lenin.

Portraying Stalin was a tougher ask. Scarred by smallpox, with a withered arm and short of stature, he was not naturally heroic. But just as they turned a blind eye to the faults of the regime, there was no shortage of painters ready to gloss over the imperfections of the leader. Statues made him as tall as the powerfully built Tsar Alexander III and photographs were retouched to disguise his pockmarks. There were artists who persisted in loving the revolution, and some forms of love can make you blind.

It can’t have been easy to look away in the months after 1917. The structures of the state had collapsed under the pressure of world conflict, revolution and civil war. Law and order had broken down, millions were homeless and people were starving in the streets. In the name of War Communism – harsh, enslaving and repressive – Russia was subjected to militarised dictatorship. Challenges to Bolshevik rule, including a failed attempt to assassinate Lenin in August 1918, resulted in the launch of the Red Terror against political opponents and class enemies.

The writer Yevgeny Zamyatin described Petrograd as "a city of icebergs, mammoths and wasteland... where cavemen, swathed in hides and blankets, retreat from cave to cave". People bartered their possessions and family heirlooms for firewood. Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets to be made into "civil war sausage". Even the proletariat was fed up with the Bolsheviks. "Down with Lenin and horsemeat," said the graffiti. "Give us the Tsar and pork!"

Mayakovsky and other leading cultural figures produced billboards and slogans promoting state food stores. My favourite is his witty Nigde kromye kak v Mosselpromye – "You’d have to be dumb not to shop at Mosselprom". But food coupons on display in the exhibition tell another story. Hunger was everywhere. Members of the former middle class, denounced as "bourgeois parasites" and "non-persons" were placed on starvation rations and forced to do cruel, often deadly labour. City streets were filled with war orphans and child thieves. Begging, black-marketeering, crime and prostitution were rife. Bolshevik power was teetering on the brink.

In March 1921, the Bolsheviks were holding their Tenth Party Congress in Petrograd, when 30,000 sailors in the Kronstadt fortress, 50 kilometres away in the Gulf of Finland, rose up in revolt against the regime. The Party was in panic. Trotsky set out with 45,000 troops to march across the ice. Thousands died, but the Kronstadt rebellion was put down and its leaders executed.

It was a warning that Lenin could not ignore. He admitted the Bolsheviks were "barely hanging on". The people were sick of War Communism, weary of hunger and economic meltdown, no longer willing to suffer in the name of some future utopia. Six million people had died in famines across the country. A 70,000-strong peasant army was preparing to challenge Bolshevik power. Military force and mass terror were no longer enough to keep the lid on.

a city of icebergs, mammoths and wasteland… where cavemen, swathed in hides and blankets, retreat from cave to cave...

Yevgeny Zamyatin describing Petrograd

The New Economic Policy (the NEP) was Lenin’s crisis response to this existential challenge. It would loosen the control of the state and reintroduce some elements of private enterprise. Hardline Bolsheviks denounced it as a retreat from socialism, but the NEP, which ran from 1921 to 1929, was effective. Its tolerance of limited personal gain encouraged people to work harder and the peasants to produce more food. And it threw up a new class of speculators similar to today’s oligarchs.

The NEP years saw a rise in the urban population; cities were straining at the seams. The state squeezed workers into smaller and smaller spaces, evicting members of the former bourgeoisie to make way for them. To maximise space, a system of communal living was introduced with multiple families billeted in one apartment, sharing kitchens, bathrooms and even bedrooms. The kommunalka concept was in line with the Bolshevik rejection of bourgeois values such as private property and the nuclear family. But in practice it was a nightmare. Feuds broke out between residents, property was stolen and murders committed. With police informers everywhere, people felt spied on in their own homes. Mistrust was rife; tensions rose.

The grim reality made El Lissitzky’s plans for the perfect apartment look desperately utopian. As a 1927 model reconstructed for the RA exhibition demonstrates, his design is clean, spare and beautiful. It reflects the Constructivists’ insistence that functional houses could also be pure art. But with the economy falling apart and the new leader Stalin consolidating his power through military-industrial projects, such ideals were never going to be taken seriously.

When Stalin launched the first Five Year Plan for industrialisation he said it was a matter of national survival. "We are a hundred years behind the capitalist West," he told Soviet industrialists in 1931. "We must catch up with them in just ten years... or they will crush us!" A continuous working week was introduced, wages cut and harsh penalties introduced for slackers. Millions of labour camp prisoners, and members of the Komsomol (the Young Communist organisation), were used as unpaid labour, their efforts captured in the innovative photography of Arkady Shaikhet and others. Women were nominally accorded equal status with men and were expected to work to the same norms. Alexander Deineka’s paintings of all-female production lines foreshadowed the changed social role that women would play throughout the 70 years of the USSR.

The Five Year Plans set punitive timetables, but at first the Soviet people rose to the challenge. Output more than doubled and gigantic new industrial centres were built from scratch. The River Dnepr was harnessed by a hydroelectric dam that fuelled plants employing half a million people, an achievement celebrated in Isaak Brodsky’s Shock-worker from Dneprostroi (1932), with its towering backlit cranes rising from the earth under the command of the herculean figure of the New Soviet Man. The lightning-fast construction of the blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk in the Urals inspired Time, Forward! , a novel and a feature film about the world record for pouring concrete.

The drive to modernise Soviet industry made machines and technology obligatory subjects for the nation’s culture. The jagged, pounding rhythms of Alexander Mosolov’s overture The Iron Foundry (1926) caught the urgency of the times; Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925) and Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Tempered (1936) became instant bestsellers. Soviet propaganda was creating its own national mythology with the workers themselves as gods. A new breed of superheroes known as shock-workers would spearhead the charge, and the bard of the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, was on hand to deify them. His poem March of the Shock Brigades (1930) is agitprop at its best, marvellously inventive with a powerful, intoxicating message.

Onwards, shock brigades! From workshops to factories!...

Puff out our collective chest, And deep into the Russian darkness Hammer in the lights Like nails ...

Onwards, with no rest days; Onwards, with a giant’s steps.

The Five Year Plan Complete in four!

Now socialism will rise, Genuine, real, alive.

The successes didn’t last. I remember going with my parents in 1970 to the great Exhibition of the People’s Economic Achievements in Moscow. It seemed then to be the posthumous vindication of Stalin’s vision. Proud guides showed us around extravagant pavilions showcasing the achievements of Soviet industry and technology. But the whole thing was a sham. As we later discovered, the Soviet economy had been hamstrung by a central command system that replaced enterprise and initiative with duplication, inefficiency and waste. "We pretend to work," ran a popular joke, "and they pretend to pay us." The gleaming boasts of success were a façade built on lies and pretence.

A key pledge that helped sweep the Bolsheviks to power was that the land would be given to the peasants. It was a promise they had no intention of keeping. The collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the years from 1928 to 1940 caused human misery on an unprecedented scale. It unleashed the worst excesses of Communist social engineering and millions died because of it.

Stalin announced that forcing the peasants into large-scale collective farms, sharing labour and equipment would "solve our [food] problems... and remould the peasants’ mentality into the ways of socialism". But for the peasants the land was a sacred inheritance bestowed by God, not the Bolsheviks. They hid or destroyed their crops, and killed their livestock sooner than have it requisitioned. Pavel Filonov’s Collective Farm Worker (1931, below) expresses the sorrow and bewilderment that collectivisation caused.

Disastrous harvests followed, yields plummeted and a two million-tonne shortfall in grain supplies caused waves of famine. The state sent troops to seize peasants’ crops and execute those who resisted. "We must smash the kulaks [peasants who oppose collectivisation]", Stalin declared. "We must eliminate them as a class... We must strike so hard they will never rise again!"

The rhetoric was unhinged because the regime’s very survival was under threat. Soviet culture was told to glorify the shock-troops who were smashing the kulaks and to cover up the misery that existed on the ground. Paintings, poetry, songs and movies overflowed with burgeoning wheat fields and happy peasants on their new collectivised tractors. Malevich, too, complied with the Kremlin’s instruction to return to agriculture as a subject, although his faceless figures of peasants hint at the loss of individuality ( Woman with Rake , 1930–32, below).

Pavel Filonov image

Collective farm worker, 1931.

The ambiguous expression in this peasant's eyes seems to capture the pain of Stalin's ruthless collectivisation of agriculture

Woman with Rake, 1930–32

The realism of this work demonstrates how Malevich's art was subjugated to the demands of the Bolsheviks' state

Even the Bolsheviks, with their genius for manipulating the truth, could not pretend that all was rosy. They promised instead that present sacrifices would be rewarded by future happiness in an ideal socialist world. It followed that the task of Socialist Realism was to show the workers what they were working for. Deineka’s sports paintings are resolutely heroic, while Alexander Samokhvalov’s amazons ( Girl with Putting Stone , 1933, below) have much in common with those of 1930s Germany. Socialist Realism helped to create the ethos of hope in those years, when first Lenin then Stalin spoke of the utopia that was on the horizon (prompting jokers to point out that the horizon is an imaginary line that recedes into the distance as you approach it).

Not everyone was convinced. Pasternak’s fictional poet Yuri Zhivago falls out of love with the revolution as completely as he fell in love with it, revolted by Bolshevism’s destructive disregard for human values. Real poets and artists became disillusioned, too. Kandinsky and Chagall, both of whom had played public roles in the Bolsheviks’ cultural institutions after 1917, emigrated definitively in the early 1920s. Under political pressure, Malevich adopted a new enigmatic realism that seemed to contradict many of the fundamental values he had striven for ( Portrait of Nikolai Punin , 1933, below). In Sergei Yesenin’s poems, you can hear the writer trying to love the new order (" I want to be a poet/And a citizen/In the mighty Soviet state "), but unable to sing the words dictated to him:

I am not your tame canary! I am a poet! Not one of your petty hacks.

I may be drunk at times, But in my eyes Shines the glorious light of revelation.

The louder Yesenin expressed his doubts, the more his work met with official disfavour. In 1925 he wrote a poem in his own blood and hanged himself in a Leningrad hotel.

Alexander Samokhvalov, Girl with Putting Stone

Alexander Samokhvalov image

Girl with putting stone, 1933.

This painting is typical of the artist's female figures, depicted as intrepid amazons. It was made a year after the Central Committee declared that art must serve the revolution by being realistic, optimistic and heroic

Kazimir Malevich, Portrait of Nikolai Punin

Portrait of Nikolai Punin, 1933

When compared to the artist's pre-revolution works such as Red Square and Dynamic Suprematism Supremus (both above), this painting suggests a return to realism enforced by the Bolshevik state

Even more shocking was the death of the regime’s own lyricist, Mayakovsky. His poetry is a vigorous, inventive call to arms, a fervent appeal to rise up against the old world and hurry on the advent of the new. But the leaders of the revolution were cultural conservatives. Lenin dismissed Mayakovsky’s work as "nonsense, stupidity, double stupidity and pretentiousness".

By the late 1920s, Mayakovsky was out of love with the revolution, writing plays attacking the philistinism of Soviet society. In April 1930, he shot himself in his Moscow apartment. His suicide note is a poem lamenting the unrequited love that had overwhelmed him:

It’s past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed. The Milky Way streams silver through the night. I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams I have no cause to wake or trouble you. And, as they say, the incident is closed. Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind. Now you and I are quits. Why bother then To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts...

More writers, poets and artists died in the gulag. They were charged with ludicrous offences such as spying for foreign powers, but in reality their "crimes" were artistic. The work of the great theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold was experimental and avant-garde. He was opposed to the restrictive dogma of Socialist Realism and made a speech saying so. Tortured by the NKVD, Meyerhold wrote wrenching pleas for clemency from his cell in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.

They are torturing me. They make me lie face down and beat my spine and feet. Then they beat my feet from above... I howl and weep from the pain. I twist and squeal like a dog. Oh most certainly, death is easier than this. I begin to incriminate myself in the hope I will go quickly to the scaffold.

Meyerhold went to his execution in February 1940, reportedly shouting "Long live Stalin", believing, like many others, that the Father of the Nation could not possibly be aware of the crimes being committed in his name. But Stalin, and Lenin before him, were certainly aware. Art, poetry, music and love meant nothing to the Bolshevik zealots. As the critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote in the 1930s, "Art must move organically, like the heart in the human breast; but they want to regulate it like a train."

"I’m no good at art," Lenin famously said. "Art for me is a just an appendage, and when its use as propaganda – which we need at the moment – is over, we’ll cut it out as useless: snip, snip!"

Martin Sixsmith is a former Moscow correspondent for BBC TV who has written extensively about Russian history and culture. His new book, Ayesha's Gift , is published by Simon & Schuster in 2017

Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 , Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, 11 February – 17 April 2017.

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It is difficult to assess Margarita Tupitsyn’s new book, Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992 , because of its strong spirit of partisanship. It covers wide historical ground and brings in a lot of new material gathered from primary sources, but it is also unabashedly selective, its choices circumscribed by the author’s personal history. A well-known art historian and curator of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art, Tupitsyn belongs to the generation of intellectuals who came of age during the period of stagnation and decline of the Soviet Union. The history she narrates belongs to this period fully and inextricably. Her important contribution to the field is to be one of the first and most consistent specialists to write about the formerly marginal subject of Russian and Soviet art, which has come to the attention of mainstream art history in the West only in the past fifty years. The author’s personal participation in this history forms an important part of the book and contributes to its strengths and weaknesses. Beginning in the 1970s, she was first a participant and later an organizer of the key events and exhibitions described in her book. Thus, her narration comes not only from her vast knowledge of history and theoretical literature, but also from her own experience. This personal element is reflected in the fact that Tupitsyn writes only about artists from Moscow, Russia’s capital and its largest and most developed city, where she was born and raised and socialized with many of the artists she describes in her book. This focus is a positive aspect of the book, as the author narrows down the topic to what she knows best. Tupitsyn’s decision to embrace “vanguard” art under a wide chronological umbrella is more problematic because she traces a direct parallel between the avant-garde of the early 1920s and experiments conducted by Moscow artists after Stalin’s death during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Tupitsyn talks about art in terms of its accepting or, the contrary, confronting the dominant political structure. This argument makes sense within an oppositional framework of a “left” versus “right” political struggle, but it dismisses a “gray” area in-between, which may be most interesting of all in the realm of aesthetics as it questions and often negates the polar divisions. In this sense, Tupitsyn’s reading of “vanguard” art is limited by its insertion into this oppositional structure.

As an actual participant of the many events she chronicles, Tupitsyn certainly has a story to tell. The book captures this story vividly, documenting it with numerous illustrations and photographs, some featuring the author herself. In the introduction to the book, she explains some of her choices by referencing her interest in the particularity of a “milieu” surrounding the artist, “with its perpetual mechanism of conversing” (1). Tupitsyn’s story is connected with the tradition of experimental and political art or “art in context,” which, she explains, demonstrably veers away from the concept of aesthetic purity propagated by Clement Greenberg in particular. Bearing in mind the specificity of Tupitsyn’s point of view, the book uncovers layers of history from published and unpublished sources. As a counterbalance to her personal involvement in the history she writes, Tupitsyn aptly quotes liberal philosophers, cultural critics, and art historians from Ernst Bloch to Michel Foucault and her teacher Rosalind Krauss to make or amplify her argument about the experimental nature of avant-garde thinking and production and its continuity through generations of Moscow artists.

The book has seven chapters, roughly a chapter per decade of the narrated history. The first two cover the decades before World War II, before the author’s lifetime. Tupitsyn begins with a story of an ideological and personal rivalry between Kazimir Malevich, the leading painter of nonobjective art, and a certain Evgeny Katsman, his brother-in-law, who turned out to be among the leading propagandists of conservative visual culture, later endorsed by Stalin and the officially supported Academy of Arts. Tupitsyn weaves an intricate narrative based on Katsman’s diaries, which reads almost like a detective novel. It reveals Katsman as a man ruthless in his attempts to destroy his rival both in art and in life, going as far as meeting with Stalin personally to plead the cause against the avant-garde. Tupitsyn makes Katsman’s diary a foil against which she develops her story of the foundation and functioning of such conservative artistic collectives as AKhRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) and Malevich, the protagonist of the avant-garde’s fight against the reactionary tendencies exemplified by the ideology propagated by Katsman. In this chapter, she touches on the key issues of this standoff: the debate about the teaching tendencies in VKhUTEMAS (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops); the progressive role of Anatoly Lunacharsky, who promoted avant-gardists in the early 1920s; and the government support behind Die Erste Russische Ausstellung in Berlin in 1922, to which apparently only “left” artists were invited. It was interesting to learn, for example, that AKhRR was founded as a reaction to this exclusion as well as a means to associate with the Wanderers, an established group of nineteenth-century realist painters whose agenda, Tupitsyn insists, was much more progressive in its day than that of AKhRR. Tupitsyn’s listings of AKhRR’s exhibitions and her detailed chronicling of its confrontations with theoreticians affiliated with LEF (Left Front of the Arts) is helpful in reminding the reader of the fundamental difference between the approaches of the “right” and the “left” artistic factions: the rear guard aspired to study the conditions of people’s everyday lives and “depict [them] naturalistically,” while the avant-garde “imagined the proletariat not as subject of art, but as its participatory force” (11). This formulation of the pivotal ideological difference between the conservative and the progressive factions in Soviet art touches on the question of the conservatives’ idealization, the progressives’ utopia, and the loss of the reality principle in both camps. Tupitsyn weaves in the stories about other artists, such as Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and El Lissitzky, but in her choosing the Malevich-Katsman rivalry as the guiding thread of her argument, she creates a structure resembling that of a phallic, pre-oedipal standoff. In this dualistic confrontation, the raging competitors need each other in order to release their aggression against one another, but in fact the enemy they fight is invincible, because without it, their existence would be devoid of sense. This penchant toward analyzing art from the political perspective of the fight of the “left” against the “right” without giving the issues of aesthetics any consideration makes Tupitsyn argue against a growing interest of Western scholars in a comprehensive study of Socialist Realism, which she raises in the second chapter of her book.

In line with other histories of Soviet nonconformist art, Tupitsyn locates the possibility for a continuation of the spirit of the avant-garde with the death of Stalin, the concomitant end of terror, and the onset of Khrushchev’s thaw. The period from the 1940s to the 1950s is associated for the author with the resurgent interest of the Moscow artists in abstraction. In chapter 3, the author traces the development of this line of artistic thought in the work of Vladimir Nemukhin, Lydia Masterkova, Vladimir Yankilevsky, among others, including such relatively unknown names in the West as Vladimir Slepian and Mikhail Chernyshov. Artists doing three-dimensional work in open air, such as Francisco Infante, Lev Nussberg, and his Movement Group are also included, as well as early works by Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov. Kabakov and Bulatov are well-known artists who resurface in subsequent chapters dedicated chiefly to performance and immigrant art from the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s. While developing a convincing chronology of key exhibitions and events that spurred the development of the underground art scene, Tupitsyn excludes several notable names. In the section on abstractionists, important artists, such as Mikhail Shvartsman, are absent, for example. In the section on immigrant art in New York, a recently deceased Leonid Lamm is missing. This is especially surprising because Tupistyn worked with Lamm, having included him in her Sots Art exhibition at the New Museum in 1986, and authored essays and even a book about him. The reader is left guessing about the criteria of the author’s selection. The book has an index, but at times the page numbers do not correspond to the exact mention of a name, as is the case with the group Medical Hermeneutics.

Tupistyn’s book continues an impressive series of her publications, produced in the course of more than thirty-five years. She has always been a strong voice of support for the kind of art she writes about—politically involved and outspoken—which in many ways reflects her own personality. Perhaps partisanship in writing histories is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, nowadays it may be impossible to write a good history without taking sides and making clear which ideology you support. In this particular book, however, the author pushes this principle to its limit, making the reader wonder what is missing as a result of the personal choices she made.

Natasha Kurchanova Independent Art Historian

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Guest Essay

Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.

An illustration of a woman holding a baby as a large thorny vine encircles and threatens to overwhelm them.

By Vivek H. Murthy

Dr. Murthy is the surgeon general.

One day when my daughter was a year old, she stopped moving her right leg. Tests found that she had a deep infection in her thigh that was dangerously close to her bone. She was rushed off to surgery. Thankfully, she’s now a healthy, spirited young girl, but the excruciating days we spent in the hospital were some of the hardest of my life. My wife, Alice, and I felt helpless and heartbroken. We got through it because of excellent medical care, understanding workplaces and loved ones who showed up and reminded us that we were not alone.

When I became a parent, a friend told me I was signing up for a lifetime of joy and worry. The joys are indeed abundant, but as fulfilling as parenting has been, the truth is it has also been more stressful than any job I’ve had. I’ve had many moments of feeling lost and exhausted. So many parents I encounter as I travel across America tell me they have the same experience: They feel lucky to be raising kids, but they are struggling, often in silence and alone.

The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness , workplace well-being and the impact of social media on youth mental health — aren’t always visible, but they can take a steep toll. It’s time to recognize they constitute a serious public health concern for our country. Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support. That’s why I am issuing a surgeon general’s advisory to call attention to the stress and mental health concerns facing parents and caregivers and to lay out what we can do to address them.

A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults who reported the same. They are navigating traditional hardships of parenting — worrying about money and safety, struggling to get enough sleep — as well as new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future.

Stress is tougher to manage when you feel you’re on your own, which is why it’s particularly concerning that so many parents, single parents most of all, report feeling lonelier than other adults . Additionally, parents are stretched for time. Compared with just a few decades ago, mothers and fathers spend more time working and more time caring for their children , leaving them less time for rest, leisure and relationships. Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being. And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.

All of this is compounded by an intensifying culture of comparison, often amplified online, that promotes unrealistic expectations of what parents must do. Chasing these expectations while trying to wade through an endless stream of parenting advice has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind.

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Women Who Shaped History

A Smithsonian magazine special report

History | July 9, 2024

Meet Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century

The self-taught artist is getting her first museum exhibition in New York City, where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography

A self-portrait taken in New York by Vivian Maier in 1954

Ellen Wexler

Assistant Editor, Humanities

Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.

Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof , who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives. A quick Google search revealed that Maier had died just a few days earlier. Uncertain of how to proceed, Maloof started posting her images online.

“I guess my question is, what do I do with this stuff?” he wrote in a Flickr post . “Is this type of work worthy of exhibitions, a book? Or do bodies of work like this come up often? Any direction would be great.”

Central Park, New York, NY, September 26, 1959

Maier quickly became a sensation. Everyone wanted to know about the recluse who had so adeptly captured 20th-century America. Her life and work have since been the subject of a best-selling book , a documentary and exhibitions around the world .

Now, the self-taught photographer is headlining her first major American retrospective. “ Vivian Maier: Unseen Work ,” which is currently on view at Fotografiska New York, features some 230 pieces from the 1950s through the 1990s, including black-and-white and color photos, vintage and modern prints, films, and sound recordings. The show is also billed as the first museum exhibition in Maier’s hometown, the city where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography.

Born in New York City in 1926, Maier grew up mostly in France, where she began experimenting with a Kodak Brownie , an affordable early camera designed for amateurs. After returning to New York in 1951, she purchased a Rolleiflex , a high-end camera held at the waist, and began developing her signature style: images of everyday life framed with a stark humor and intuitive understanding of human emotion. She started working as a governess, a role that allowed her to spend hours wandering the city, children in tow, as she snapped away.

She left New York about five years later, when she secured a job as a nanny for three boys—John, Lane and Matthew Gensburg—in the Chicago suburbs. The family was devoted to Maier, though they knew very little about her. The boys remember attending art films and picking wild strawberries as her charges, but they don’t recall her ever mentioning any family or friends. Their parents knew that Maier traveled—they would hire a replacement nanny in her absence—but they didn’t know where she went.

“You really wouldn’t ask her about it at all,” Nancy Gensburg, the boys’ mother, told Chicago magazine in 2010. “I mean, you could, but she was private. Period.”

Despite Maier’s reclusive tendencies, the Gensburgs knew about her photography. It would have been difficult to hide. After all, she lived with the family and had a private bathroom, which she used as a darkroom to develop black-and-white photos herself. The Gensburgs frequently witnessed her taking photos; on rare occasions, she even showed them her prints.

Maier stayed with the Gensburgs until the early 1970s, when the boys were too old for a nanny. She spent the next few decades working in other caretaking roles, though she doesn’t appear to have developed a similar relationship with these families, who viewed her as a competent caregiver with an eccentric personality. Most never saw her prints, though they do remember her moving into their homes with hundreds of boxes of photos in tow.

“I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can,” talk show host Phil Donahue, who employed Maier as a nanny for less than a year, told Chicago magazine. “I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”

Meanwhile, the Gensburgs kept in touch. As Maier grew older, they took care of her, eventually moving her to a nursing home. They never knew about the storage lockers. When she died at age 83, a short obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune , describing her as a “second mother” to the three boys, a “free and kindred spirit,” and a “movie critic and photographer extraordinaire.”

Maier’s mysterious backstory is a large part of her present-day appeal. Fans are captivated by the photos, but they’re also intrigued by the reclusive nanny who developed her talents in secret. “Vivian Maier the mystery, the discovery and the work—those three parts together are difficult to separate,” Anne Morin, curator of the new exhibition, tells CNN .

The show is meant to focus on the work rather than the mystery. As Morin says to the Art Newspaper , she hopes to avoid “imposing an overexposed interpretation of her character.” Instead, the exhibition aims to elevate Maier’s name to the level of other famous street photographers—such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus —and take on the daunting task of examining her large oeuvre.

“In ten years, we could do another completely different show,” Morin tells CNN. “She has more than enough material to bring to the table.”

The subjects of Maier’s street photos ran the gamut, but she often turned her lens toward “people on the margins of society who weren’t usually photographed and of whom images were rarely published,” per a statement from Fotografiska New York. The Gensburg boys recall her taking them all over the city, adamant that they witness what life was like beyond the confines of their affluent suburb.

The exhibition is organized thematically, with sections devoted to Maier’s famous street photos, her experimental abstract compositions and her stylized self-portraits. The self-portraits, which frequently incorporate mirrors and reflections, amplify her enigmatic qualities, usually showing her with a deadpan, focused expression. Her voice can be heard in numerous audio recordings, which play throughout the exhibition. As such, even as the show focuses on the work, Maier the person is still a frequent presence in it.

“The paradox of Vivian Maier is that the lifetime of anonymity that has captured the public imagination persists in the work,” writes art critic Arthur Lubow for the New York Times , adding, “An artist uses a camera as a tool of self-expression. Maier was a supremely gifted chameleon. After immersing myself in her work, other than detecting a certain wryness, I could not get much sense of her sensibility.”

The artist undoubtedly possessed a curiosity about her immediate surroundings, which she photographed with a “lack of self-consciousness,” Sophie Wright, the New York museum’s director, tells CNN. “There’s no audience in mind.” There is no evidence that Maier wondered about her viewers—or that she ever imagined having viewers in the first place. They, however, will never stop wondering about her.

“ Vivian Maier: Unseen Work ” is on view at Fotografiska New York through September 29.

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Ellen Wexler | | READ MORE

Ellen Wexler is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities.

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Art As Activism: Three Visionaries Preserving Legacy Through Storytelling, Movement, And Visual Art

Art, by its very nature, is reciprocal. It’s an energetic conversation between the artist, the viewer, and the presenter—each contributing to its impact.

Art is universal. And, in many respects, multilingual— a higher form of communication that cuts directly to the soul . It’s why you can stand before a 500-year-old painting or hear a musical arrangement composed by an artist from a completely different environment and era and still feel profoundly connected. Art is transcendent. Its marvel lies not in a singular perspective but in its ability to be perceived through the lens of personal experience. The beauty is in its myriad interpretations. That we can experience art in our own language, regardless of origin, period, or the creator’s context, is nothing short of miraculous—a miracle at Pentecost, if you will.

The power of art finds resonance in the hands of those who wield it as a tool for activism. Artists like James Baldwin, who powerfully articulated the complexities of his time and expressed the collective rage and optimism of a people, have shaped our understanding of historical moments. Nina Simone’s freedom songs conveyed the profound hope and oppression of the Black American experience, while Gordon Parks captured those realities with striking clarity through his photography.

Whether it’s the duty of Black artists to lend voice to the struggle is often debated, but modern storytellers like writer, performer, and award-winning poet Darius Simpson embrace this accountability. “I would envy me if I wasn’t Black,” he told ESSENCE. “What a terribly uneventful and bland experience it must be to not feel responsible to a people with such a rich history of struggle—not just suffering, but struggle in the political sense. I’m honored to take on that responsibility and that mantle. Simpson stands in brilliant company across history and artistic mediums.

Continuing in that tradition, today’s visual artists, performers, and poets embrace their roles as keepers of history, viewing art as a powerful form of activism.

Art As Movement

Nicole Clarke-Springer is a master of movement with a natural talent for dance. Despite her gift, it wasn’t immediately apparent or easy to see herself in that role. “The craft that chose me was not created in my image, and I struggled and fought for many years to find appreciation and value within this system,” she told ESSENCE.

As a young African-American ballerina , she faced challenges. “It was not very often that I was able to ‘see myself’ within the landscape of the dance community that I was placed in,” Clarke-Springer recalled. “There were no company members or mentors of color to guide me through the journey in which I would embark upon.”

Her formal ballet training began under the guidance of Claudette Soltis and later at the Indianapolis Ballet Theatre . But it was in Chicago that she truly connected with her tribe. “I found my voice within the roots of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater (DRDT),” she said. “My identity and how I viewed myself holistically inside of my art finally had value.”

It was there, where modern, classical, American, and African American traditions in dance and storytelling converged , that Clarke-Springer truly thrived. “I was granted permission to celebrate my blackness in my artistry and recognize that my body was not an apology within this artform,” she explained.

With a B.S. in Arts Administration-Dance from Butler University in Indianapolis, Clarke-Springer set out to make that experience a reality for others. Today, as the Artistic Director of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater , she oversees a diverse range of programming, including performances, repertory workshops, and outreach to over 4,500 community members annually.

“There is a need in Chicago for a Black creative hub filled with beautiful, state-of-the-art rehearsal and performance spaces that support not only the technical skills of our professional dancers but the creation of emerging, established, and future legendary choreographers to come,” she said.

By seeing a need and filling it, Clarke-Springer upholds a long-standing tradition of Black artists using their craft as a tool for change and community upliftment.

The Contemporary Visual Narrative

Sam Gilliam was a pioneering American abstractionist whose colorful, multi-textural, and innovative Drape paintings merged elements of painting and sculpture. As a Black visual artist, his technique broke boundaries and redefined contemporary norms.This legacy of innovation finds a contemporary echo in modern artists like Saloan Dunlap .

Known as Queen Loany, Dunlap pushes the envelope of visual storytelling through her incorporation of digital art and collage. Her innovative approach and thematic focus explore both personal and social themes.

A self-taught photographer, Dunlap transitioned to digital collage during the pandemic as a creative outlet due to the lockdown restrictions. “COVID-19 played a major role in me sticking with collage because we couldn’t leave our homes,” Dunlap recalled. Her early pieces reflected the social impact of COVID-19 and police shootings in her community. These days, she has successfully merged art and commerce. With nearly 20K Instagram followers, her exceptional works are well-known, and prints are available for purchase .

On her purpose, Dunlap is crystal clear: ‘My inspiration is the beauty in blackness and the Black American experience. Nina Simone said that as artists, we have the responsibility to reflect the times . While I do use my artistic voice to address some of our trauma, I feel it is more my responsibility to uplift and encourage my community despite the negative imagery often portrayed by the media about the Black experience.'”

Art as Poetry

Art, particularly in its written and lyrical forms, is a vessel for cultural preservation through personal storytelling.

Maya Angelou , among her many facets of artistry—poetry, stage performance, film, and dance—stands out as an oracle and master of reinvention. Her timeless proverbs—” When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time “— have left an indelible mark on the cultural zeitgeist.

In an era where book bans and the erasure of historical truths threaten to silence vital narratives, artists play a crucial role in cultural preservation. Writer, poet, and spoken word performer Darius Simpson embodies that role, navigating a landscape that often selectively presents historical truths.

“We’re taught about the civil rights movement in school, but less about The Black Power Movement . We hear about the SCLC , but not so much about SNCC or the Panthers ,” he noted. Simpson’s work exemplifies the artist’s responsibility to confront and preserve.

As someone who is “committed to transforming the world in a positive way,” his latest book, Never Catch Me , exemplifies his dedication. “The book explores what it meant for me being a Black boy coming up in the Midwest; Ohio specifically,” he shared. Black boyhood is a recurring theme in his work. By weaving personal narrative with broader cultural commentary, Simpson continues a vital tradition of using art to amplify voices and stories that demand to be heard.

Through their work, Simpson, Clarke-Springer, and Dunlap continue a rich legacy of artists, ensuring our stories are preserved and thrive in the collective consciousness.

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Visual Arts - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas. Visual arts is a form of creative expression that includes a wide range of mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, and printmaking. These forms of art often require a high level of skill and creativity to create a visually stunning and thought-provoking piece.
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.
How to Write a Visual Arts Essay explained.
Visual Arts Essay: How to Reveal the Topic Correctly. Visual art essays is a creative way of representing art in a word form. It is a way of explaining what is really in the art. It talks about art in painting, sculpture, drawings, and portraits. The main aim is to make people understand the art better by painting a visual image in words.
Essay On Art in English for Students
Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers. Share with friends. Previous.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
Visual Arts Essay
This essay aims to explore the connections of arts education, history of arts education and visual culture education through a theoretical investigation of literature by theorist Addison and Burgess 2015, Efland 1990, Eisenhauer 2006, Macdonald 2004, McFee 1960, Jetton and Shanahan 2012. For the context of this study art/design education will ...
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.
Writing About Art
How to Write Art History by Anne d'Alleva The book introduces two basic art historical methods - formal analysis and contextual analysis - revealing how to use these methods in writing papers and in class discussion. The common strengths and weaknesses of an art history essay are highlighted by using real examples of written work, and at each stage of the writing process DAlleva offers ...
Stop seeing and learn to look: Discover the importance of visual
Visual literacy describes the ability to encounter, seek, interpret, use, and create visual content. ... to start. In "Learning to Look", Virginia Seymour, Head Librarian of Research and Instruction at Savannah College of Art and Design, takes us progressively deeper into lessons that help us stop and consider how the objects, images, and ...
When Art Talks Back: Jonathan Lethem on Graffiti As Visual and Written
When Art Talks Back: Jonathan Lethem on Graffiti As Visual and Written Expression Exploring Artistic Scribbling in a Rapidly Gentrifying New York City ... was a language act. Writing graffiti was an action not only in visual space but a verbal blurt, a gesture aloud. The flamboyance of the major panel work was grounded in the baseline activity ...
PDF AP Art History
AP Art History - Student Samples from the 2023 Exam Administration - Free-Response Question 6. AP® Art History 2023 Scoring Guidelines. Question 6: Continuity and Change. 5 points. Describe ONE visual and/or contextual element of the work shown. Examples of acceptable responses include the following: Visual.
The story of art in the Russian Revolution
In the visual arts, Malevich and his followers took painting to new regions in search of abstract geometric purity. The principles of Dynamic Suprematism, proclaimed in his 1926 manifesto The Non-Objective World, ring with the provocative self-confidence of culture in those years. "By Suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in art...
Greek Parthenon and Bolshoi Theater in Moscow Essay
This essay talks that Parthenon and Bolshoi Theater are the most attractive buildings in Moscow and reveals an art, one of the most economic and cultural practices in the United States of America. The two buildings have almost similar construction and aims to perform in the culture of Moscow. …
National Portrait Gallery Announces Winner of the 2024 Director's Essay
Founded in 2019, the Director's Essay Prize fosters leading research in the field of visual biography and American portraiture. The 2024 prize was juried by PORTAL, the Portrait Gallery's ...
Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992
It is difficult to assess Margarita Tupitsyn's new book, Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922-1992, because of its strong spirit of partisanship. It covers wide historical ground and brings in a lot of new material gathered from primary sources, but it is also unabashedly selective, its choices circumscribed by the author's personal history. A well-known art historian and curator of Russian and ...
Opinion
Dr. Murthy is the surgeon general. One day when my daughter was a year old, she stopped moving her right leg. Tests found that she had a deep infection in her thigh that was dangerously close to ...
Meet Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the
The self-taught artist is getting her first museum exhibition in New York City, where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography
Art As Activism: Three Visionaries Preserving Legacy Through ...
The Contemporary Visual Narrative Sam Gilliam was a pioneering American abstractionist whose colorful, multi-textural, and innovative Drape paintings merged elements of painting and sculpture.

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

What Is Visual Analysis?

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How to Write a Visual Analysis Step-by-Step

Step 1: Identify, Describe, and Analyze the Visual Material

Step 2: Situate the Visual Material in its Context

Step 3: Interpret and Respond to the Content of the Visual Material

Who Does Formal Analysis of Art

6 Questions to Answer Before Analyzing a Piece of Art

Elements of the Visual Analysis

Principles of the Visual Analysis

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Step 2: Painting Description

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