Welcome

Welcome to the Springfield Township High School Art Blog. The purpose of this forum is to inspire discourse surrounding your artistic experiences while building writing skills, exercising your art vocabulary, and refining descriptive language relating to art. In your writing, you may choose to discuss museum and gallery exhibitions, publications, articles, professional works, student works, or responses to each other’s ideas and investigations. Additionally, participants may want to pose questions or react to artistic predicaments, sharing the trials, frustrations, solutions, or the general excitement we feel when we make or look at art.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Remembering the Future

Some 25-plus years ago, Frau Hoess (former German language teacher) and I took students on a field trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  We saw a show featuring Anselm Kiefer's work.  Kiefer was then 43, a young budding artist (by standards of landing a major museum show), but his moving post-WW II Germany and holocaust inspired images warranted such promotion.  His multi-media works including paintings and sculptures with ashes, broken glass, straw, and plant material were the beginning of a lifetime of experimental  development.  By my own standards, his work places him among the best artists, exceeding all bestness, where artistic bigness and bestness live ... right up there with Sigmar Polke, Jasper Johns, and Gerhard Richter.  Although he is not as ground breaking an artist as Cezanne, Picasso, or Warhol during their generation , Kiefer will be one of the artists who mark a generation.  How fortunate we were to see that show early in Kiefer's career.  For more on Kiefer see the 5 part youtube series entitled: Remembering the Future, online.  (click me. I'm the link)