Teaching Pages

Paul Shambroom’s panoramic photograph has the appearance of a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of civic leaders. It is large, thirty-three inches high and sixty-six inches wide. Flags and maps suggest that the photograph was taken in a government meeting.

Philip Hanson’s Mezzanine beckons us into a richly colored architectural space while simultaneously preventing us from knowing where the space leads or what lies at the end of its passageways.

José Clemente Orozco created La retaguardia, or The Rear Guard, in 1929. Though Orozco painted many murals, he was also a renowned printmaker. The Rear Guard is a black-and-white print created using lithography, a printmaking method that uses limestone blocks or aluminum plates to transfer ink drawings to a sheet of paper.

With their electrifying greens, yellows, reds, and blues, La Chanteuse and Prothesian have the glow of a TV screen in a darkened room. Strong horizontal lines radiate color and create an effect of electronic interference.

A heavy rainstorm is swooping through a colorful intersection of stores and apartments, streets and sidewalks. Like a typical big city corner, this one is jam-packed with shoppers, workers, and vehicles.

Unraveling Robert Barnes’ paintings, such as Ragno’s Place, is an exercise in sorting out how we arrive at “reality.” Even though his paintings are usually figurative and seem to tell a story, their stories are enigmatic and often steeped in obscure references to literature, poetry, or other artists’ works.

The “pond tokens” in this lithograph are treasures the artist has discerned from close looking at a watery scene. John Colt was not interested in exploring large vistas; rather, he said he liked the “little areas—little realms of experience, nature close up,” and his title for this work demonstrates that he liked to look at what most represented, or was a token, of one of these sites.

Trader of Green is an unusual portrait. Even though its format is a traditional close-up view of a figure shown from the front and with his head turned to the side, there are surprises.

There’s a pun in the title The Future: On the Line. Assembly line workers are building vehicles of the future, but their appearance, their functions, and their environment suggest that work life is “on the line” or on the brink of worrisome change, where humans are subservient to robots who supplant them in performing industrial tasks.

Changing daylight illuminates a vibrant scene of lake and forest in the American North. Spindly pine trees and moss-covered boulders fill a narrow strip of land between a watery shoreline in front and a lake behind.