Sara E. Thomas
Students will look through examples of futurism by a variety of different artists such as: Balla, Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Servini, Duchamp, Leger, Malevich and Stella. Students will work in small groups to create a powerpoint presentation about one of the above artists. In their small group students will need to look up a variety of different images by the artist. If time allows I would like to take them on a field trip to the Yale Art & Architecture museum so that they can look at entire books of work by each artist. I think that this is important because looking up images on the computer is not sufficient, plus it is easy to mistake and artwork inspired by an artist for an artwork by an artist they way images are catalogued by search engines. To avoid this confusion, students must include at least six different futurist paintings in their presentation and must include the name of each painting and the year it was painted, to show the artist's progression.
Other slides will focus on: how specifically the artist captures motion -- this will change for each artist, how the artist breaks the subject down into shapes, what shapes the artist repeats and what technology was the artist thinking about. Students will answer these questions as a group, each one being a slide in their slide show.
Individually, each group member will choose one of the pieces in their slide show to describe and analyze. They will each present their analysis as a part of their presentation about their artist. In their analysis students will need to explain how the futurist painting gives them different information than a single snapshot of that subject would. They will have to cite the artwork for support.
