Tips on Becoming a Successful Student

Writing a Museum Paper

Slides and reproductions in books or on the web can serve as introductions to art, but they cannot substitute for encounters with the works of art themselves. You instructor may require that you visit a museum or gallery and write about what you see. Since many beginning students are uncertain about what to write about a work of art, I have included a brief outline of some points you may wish to consider. Works of art have been analyzed according to many different schemes. The following presents one such scheme and it is not intended to be followed literally, but merely to help you make a systematic analysis of the work of art you choose. Many of the categories will overlap, and some are obviously more important for certain works than for others. Each work of art is a unique experience, and must be treated as such, but I hope the following outline will help you experience more deeply the art work you have selected.

Introduction:
Give the title of the work, the name of the artist who created it, if known, the country and time period when it was created, and the museum where it now exists. Give the date of your visit to the museum.

Is the work a painting, a graphic, a sculpture or a piece of architecture? What materials were used: tempera, acrylic, oil, stone, wood, metal, ceramic, etc.? What technique was used: engraving, lithography, etching, low or bas relief, high relief, casting, carving, etc.?

Why did you select a given work or works? What interested you?

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Context and Subject Matter:
What was the cultural context of the work? What meaning did it have for the people that created it?

What is represented? Is it a portrait, a genre scene, a mythological or biblical scene? Are there symbols in the work? What does it mean? If you know the source of the story, for example the illustration of an ancient myth or a biblical story, give the appropriate citation. How is the subject portrayed? What is its emotional context?

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Formal Elements:
Artists use the formal elements of line, color, value, texture, shape, and rhythm to describe form, space, plane, and mass. Space can be three dimensional, as in sculpture or architecture, or two dimensional as in a painting. Artists may use devices like linear perspective to give the illusion of three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface, or they may use the properties of color and line to create spatial movement on the surface plane. Plane refers to flat two-dimensional space and generally refers to the surface of a painting or graphic. Mass, which is also known as "volume" refers to three dimensional space.

Answering the questions will help you to analyze how the artist used the formal elements of art to create the work of art you are considering. If you are writing about a piece of sculpture, just use the questions that apply. Try to use as many as you can.

Do the lines go primarily in horizontal and vertical directions, echoing the frame of the work, or are they primarily diagonal? ? Are the lines flowing or jagged? Can you follow the edges of the forms? Are the edges of the forms sharply delineated or are the brush strokes obvious, tending to obscure sharp edges and lines?

Are the forms arranged in orderly patterns or do they seem chaotic? Do they seem to be static, or do they create a sense of movement? Do the forms create an illusion of three dimensional space or do they seem to lie flat on the surface? Is there a strong sense of three dimensional mass or is the emphasis on surface texture? Is the texture smooth or rough?

How does the artist use light? Does the light come from a consistent source? Does it seem to mold objects into three dimensions or does it flatten them? Are there strong contrasts of light and dark or only subtle modulations? What sort of emotional effect is produced by the light and dark?

What colors does the artist use? To what degree are the colors saturated (intense hues) or grayed? Are the colors complementary or analogous? Is the color used realistically, symbolically or expressively?

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Conclusion:
Use the conclusion to sum up your reaction to the work. Here are some questions you may wish to answer. In what way do the formal elements support or contradict the ideas implicit in the subject matter? How was the work displayed and what effect did that have on your appreciation of it?

Final:
The title page should contain your name, the title of your essay, the class for which you are writing the paper, and the date. You may wish to prepare a cover sheet with an image of the work that you are discussing, perhaps from a post card you purchased at the museum or from an image you downloaded from the web. If you use footnotes, be sure an find out what format your teacher prefers.

Tips:
Don’t wait until a few days before the paper is due to write it. Start your writing early and let your draft sit for a few days before doing the final editing. Read for logical structure, make sure that your paragraphs each develop a single idea. Above all, be sure that you have checked your spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Word processing has made these tasks much easier, but there are still errors that computers cannot catch. Be sure that you have numbered the pages and that your paper is neat and clean. You might ask a friend to check your paper for errors before you turn it in. Above all, do not turn in the first draft! (You will find that learning to write and rewrite in order to create clear and logical papers is one of the most important things you can learn in college, no matter what you do after you graduate.)

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Research Papers:
While the museum paper is based upon your direct relation to a work of art, a research paper involves looking up information about a work of art or a series of works. The process involved in writing a research paper is intended to introduce you to the various tools and sources that you will need to be able to find information to develop ideas of your own while at the same time giving credit to the sources of your information. In this preface I cannot tell you how to write a research paper, but I can point you to some sources that can give you good information. You will find the following to be very helpful for approaches to writing about art history:

Henry Sayre, Writing About Art, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 1999.

Donna K. Reid, Thinking and Writing About Art History, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall , 2nd edition, 2000.

A major task will be locating appropriate source material. Books, articles, and web sources can all be consulted. You will be able to find a good number of books cited in the bibliographic section of Gardner's Art through the Ages, Harcourt Brace, 11th edition, 2000. These have been reviewed for their scholarship and so can be important in getting you started. You will find that both the bibliographies of these books as well as their footnotes will lead you to other sources. Be sure to check the books and periodicals in your library, and don’t be afraid to consult a reference librarian if you have a difficult topic. Reference librarians enjoy helping students locate materials. You will probably find that your library does not have all the books you want, but many libraries have interlibrary loan programs which can be extremely helpful.

The tools have expanded incredibly in recent years as the World Wide Web has provided us with access to libraries and texts from throughout the world. Although some full text sources exist on the web, a thorough search, however, teaches us that most of what we need is still in books. However, searching libraries over the web can let us know about the existence of many relevant books or articles that we would never have found in our local library. The best guide is:

Lois Swan Jones, Art Information and the Internet. Oryx Press, 1998.

The Getty Information service sponsors a number of important art historical research projects and has created a site with links to many types of on line resources:

Research Tools

An excellent source for art historical information is the multi-volume Grove Dictionary of Art. You should ask your reference librarian if your school either has a copy in paper form or has a subscription to the on-line version.

There are endless web sites that deal with art historical imagery which can provide source material for your papers. I will give you two that should give you a good start, Art History Resources on the Web, a site organized by Christopher Witcombe:

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html

and the WorldArt Gallery at

http://gallery.sjsu.edu

that has a very large collection of art historical images that you can search using a variety of criteria.

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Using and Citing Sources:
Be sure to keep careful references to the works that you consult and give appropriate recognition to them in your own writing. While academic research is an ongoing process in which scholars build upon what went before, quoting material without giving credit to the original author is known as plagiarism, and it is one of the greatest academic "no-no's". It is a problem for many students who are unsure about just what they should quote and what they should not. The internet with its plethora of information has exacerbated the problem, for some students now think that cutting and pasting can create a research paper. Do not just string together a series of quotations, but rather use material from many sources to develop your own ideas, and use your own words. One way to take notes is to read something, then close the book or look away from the computer screen and write down the pertinent ideas or facts in your own words.

You don’t need to footnote commonly known ideas, but when you are just beginning, you don’t necessary know what is commonly known and what isn’t. Sometimes an author will cite another author as the source of a quotation. You can deal with this by giving the original citation and adding "as cited by so-and-so." Sometimes an author will use a particularly apt descriptive word. In that case you might put just that word in quotation marks with a reference to the author in your text. These things can be confusing, but as you read, watch how other writers handle them, and you will gradually become comfortable. Remember that quotations should always be footnoted, that people should be given credit for their ideas or images, and that you should include the works that you consulted in our bibliography.

Research papers utilize a number of different formats to cite their sources. References are called "footnotes" when placed at the bottom of the page and "endnotes" when they appear at the end of the book or chapter. Sometimes references that contain an abbreviation for the source are included in parentheses in the text itself. You should find out what format your instructor wants you to use, but whichever one you use, be consistent. The form most commonly used for writing art historical articles is available on the College Art Association website at:

http://www.collegeart.org/caa/publications/AB/ABStyleguide.html

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