Aesthetic Realism; or, Why I Love Teaching Art

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Donita Ellison - Art Educator, Aesthetic Realism Associate

Collage and You!

Collage is a technique I have loved doing myself and with the high school students I taught at La Guardia High School using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. From one point of view it is so simple—all that is needed is paper and glue—yet the artist Robert Motherwell described collage as “the twentieth century’s greatest creative innovation.”

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque explored the possibilities of this folk craft once used mainly for scrapbooks, and brought it into the realm of high art. Matisse is among the artists who have shown that collage is more than just gluing paper. He said that each piece of paper had to be “augmented,” “given life,” and just last year people waited in long lines at the Museum of Modern Art to see how Matisse gave life to paper in his beautiful and dynamic cut-outs.

Why have people, including students in art classrooms at all levels, loved doing collage? All art, I learned, has an important message for the life of every person. That message is in this principle, stated by the 20^th century educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel:

“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Opposites at the heart of collage are manyness and oneness, separation and junction. Many disparate, individual pieces of paper—diverse shapes, colors, images, textures—are arranged and fixed with glue into a single composition. To introduce collage to my students I showed them several individual pieces of paper—white, brown, blue, a newspaper clipping, and a sample of wallpaper—and asked: Would a composition created by gluing just one of these pieces of paper onto a background, be interesting? As a means of exploring this question, we looked at Picasso’s Guitar of 1913.

Created from pieces of paper similar to the ones I had shown, this work is described in Collage, Personalities, Concepts, Techniques, by authors Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, as a “virtuoso demonstration of the...possibilities of collage.” My students and I studied the way Picasso cut, organized and combined different pieces of paper to indicate, for example, the shape of a guitar, and how he used light and dark paper as light and shadow. I asked the class: Does the newspaper clipping add something to the shape of the guitar? Does the blue background add something to the wallpaper pattern? We saw that these single pieces of paper did add something to each other. I am fortunate to be able to tell the young people I teach that the beauty of a collage depends on its composition—how its many parts, with all their drama of likeness and contrast, work well together.

In his great 1949 lecture titled Poetry and Unity, Eli Siegel explained: “The purpose of composition is to show that through bringing something together with other things, it will have something which it would not have had alone.” As we studied Picasso’s collage, my students were excited to see how each piece he added to the composition, had something it didn’t have alone. For example, the blue background brought serenity to the wallpaper and the wallpaper pattern added a rich liveliness to the blue background.

A mistake that I have made, as many students have, is feeling that our relation to other people and things makes us less, not more. This is an aspect of contempt, which Aesthetic Realism describes as the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” All art, I have learned, opposes contempt. This is definitely true of collage.

As my students worked on collage compositions they were excited and thoughtful as they considered how individual shapes and colors of paper added to each other. They liked learning that collage comes from the French word, coller, meaning to glue; and that pieces of paper could be cut, papier collé, or torn, déchiré. As one cuts and pastes, separates and joins, collage answers yes to these questions that are central to life: How can all the many parts and aspects of our lives work together? Are we more ourselves through seeing our relation to the world, including people, in all their manyness and diversity? The technique of collage is loved because it represents a large hope in the life of every student and teacher.

*Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) Guitar. Céret, March 31, 1913, or later Cut-and-pasted newspaper, wallpaper, paper, ink, chalk, charcoal, and pencil on colored paper 26 1/8 x 19 1/2" (66.4 x 49.6 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Does the Keystone Arch Meet a Hope of Ours?--or, Strength and Grace Can Be One!

I taught Art History at LaGuardia High School in Manhattan for many years, using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. It is based on the education founded by Eli Siegel, the 20th century poet, and critic. I’ve seen this method work in my classroom with thousands of students. For a teacher to know what I’m fortunate to have learned—that the purpose of education and life itself is to like the world on an honest basis—is an absolute necessity! Aesthetic Realism also explains the biggest interference with learning: the desire in a person to have contempt, to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else."

Pont-du-Gard, France

In teaching the unit on the art of ancient Rome, my class studied how the keystone arch was central to its great architectural structures. There is the Pont du Gard, a powerfully-built aqueduct consisting of a series of graceful keystone arches, built in the 1st century BC in Nimes, France. What makes this structure beautiful—and also made my students change, and want to learn—is in this principle stated by Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

This aqueduct with its repeating curves and strong vertical supports, carried 100 gallons of water per day over a distance of 30 miles for each city resident, making possible the fountains and public water works. "Clearly this is powerful, but does it have something else?" I asked. “Is it also ever so graceful, with those curves?” I’ve seen that students—including the toughest young men—long to be both strong and graceful, or gentle, and suffer because they feel they can’t be both. They think if they have gentleness they'll be weak and people will take advantage of them. My class began to see that this aqueduct does something they were hoping to do: it puts opposites together.

One student, David, wanted to know how the aqueduct worked, and we learned that the power of gravity is what made the water flow. Built on an exquisitely calculated decline, from the water's source high in the mountains, the water flowed downward to the city fountains. Rafael was amazed to learn that this aqueduct was designed to withstand the strength of flooding river currents and has remained standing for 2000 years even as more modern bridges in the area have washed out in heavy flooding! "Wow, that's strong!" he said. “What did this strength come from?” I asked. The strength actually depends on that curved, graceful thing—the arch. As we read from our textbook, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, this description of the Pont Du Gard, there was a sense of awe:

"Each large arch spans some 82 feet and is constructed of uncemented blocks weighing up to two tons each."

The class saw the amazing relation of solidity and lightness in this structure. Vocabulary words for the lesson were keystone and voussoir. The voussoirs, I explained, are the wedge-shaped stones fitted around the sides of the arch, and the keystone is the topmost voussoir. The keystone, the last stone placed at the highest point in the arch, locks all the other stones or voussoirs into place. The downward pressure it exerts gives the arch its strength. The other voussoirs, in turn, send a counter pressure upwards on both sides, holding the keystone in place. The strength of an arch, we learned, depends on something that has amazing delicacy—the precision with which the voussoirs are fitted together—and all done without any cement!

The class was thrilled to see that the keystone which is at the center—the thing upon which all that power depends—seems to be the lightest, even the most vulnerable thing, with nothing but space underneath it! George, who rarely showed any emotion, was excited, "That's really cool," he said.

I read sentences from a historic class titled "Architecture Is Ourselves," taught by Ellen Reiss, the Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education, in which she explained that the arch is a very elemental thing, and one of the big achievements of the human mind:

"The crown of the arch seems unsupported from below: matter is making for this tremendous lightness. The grand moment in arch construction is when the keystone … is inserted: it seems it would fall, but it's the thing that holds the two sides together."

In this arch massiveness is the same as lightness—strength is the same as delicacy or grace. Seeing these opposites as one in a structure that has joined earth, sky, and water for thousands of years, my students had more hope for themselves.

What Art Can Show Us About Our Lives?

The links below richly illustrate how the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism founded by Eli Siegel, American poet, educator and critic, show that art has the answers to some of the biggest matters in our lives. As you will see, the great art of the world can teach us about our very selves!

John Singer Sargent
Sargent's "Madame X"; Or, Assertion and Retreat in Women by Lynette Abel

Jan Vermeer
Vermeer's "Young Woman With a Water Jug"--and What Men and Women Are Hoping For in Marriage by Julie and Robert Jensen

Diego Velazquez
What Will Make Us Truly Proud of Ourselves? A Study in the Art of Diego Velazquez by Dorothy Koppelman

Pablo Picasso
Picasso's Dora Maar Seated--or, Full Face and Profile: How Do They Show the Self? by Meryl Simon

Vincent Van Gogh

Can We Be Expansive and Contained Like Van Gogh's Starry Night? by Miriam Mondlin

Robert Indiana
What Are You Looking For In Love, Robert Indiana's "Love" by Ken Kimmelman

Jackson Pollock
Beauty--and Jackson Pollock, Too by Eli Siegel

Claude Monet
Claude Monet—Does Art Answer the Questions of Our Lives? by Marcia Rackow

Dorothea Lange
What Does a Person Deserve? The Answer Found in a Great Photograph of Dorothe Lange by David Bernstein

Paul Cezanne
Wonder & the Everyday; or, Cézanne’s Still Life with Onions by Nancy Huntting

Pieter Bruegal
How Can We Be Composed?: Bruegel's Hunters In The Snow by Nancy Huntting

Art and Love

As I have said in other places on this blog, Aesthetic Realism shows that art has the answers to questions every person has in life, including about love! Here is an example that I invite you to read.

"What Are You Looking For In Love? Robert Indiana's "Love" by Ken Kimmelman, Emmy award winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism Consultant.