Great artists, architects and designers
Art & Design · Key Stage 2 · The School
A rough map
Renaissance (1400s–1500s): perspective and anatomy. Impressionism (1870s): painting light and outdoors, fast. Cubism (1900s): showing several viewpoints at once. Bauhaus (1920s): design where form follows function. Each was in part a REACTION to what came before, which is why knowing the order matters.
Beyond Europe
Chinese ink painting valued the trained gesture over the copied appearance, and was doing so a thousand years before Europe argued about it. Japanese woodblock prints reshaped European art when they arrived in the 1800s. West African sculpture had its own long traditions of abstraction. Benin's bronzes were being cast with a technical mastery that astonished Europeans who assumed otherwise.
Studying without copying
A copy teaches your hand a little. A STUDY teaches your judgement: take the artist's palette but your own subject, or their mark-making but your own composition. Then annotate what changed in your work as a result. That is what examiners mean by 'influence' — and it is the difference between a top and a middle grade.
COPYING: reproduce Van Gogh's Sunflowers as closely as you can. It proves you can copy. IN THE MANNER OF: take his METHOD — thick directional brushstrokes that follow the form, a limited palette of yellows and blues, everything outlined — and apply it to something of your own, say the view from your window. The second one is what a GCSE portfolio asks for, and it teaches far more.