The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship (1988) 7,57-61

The Art Museum as a Teaching Resource A Survey of French History for Students of French at the Elementary and Intermediate Levels, taught at the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, USA

DIANA C. J. MATTHIAS

Perhaps it will be useful to preface this account by a few words about education in a museum. Obviously the type of instruction and learning done in a museum will be different in kind to that which occurs in a classroom. Some teachers may fear that they will lose control over their students who may wander away and not listen to the presentation in a museum, but this can be avoided by inviting the students to sit down in front of each group of objects to be discussed. There are many advantages to teaching the humanities in a museum, and perhaps the most important is that the students confront a real object made by the people being studied, rather than a reproduction in a book. American students tend to have difficulty in understanding history and developing a sense of chronology, probably because there is so little history in their own environments. And although European children grow up with the evidence of history all around them, they often have little sense of chronology because of the specialization in particular periods required for passing their examinations. It is this sense of chronology-the way in which the present is built upon the past continuously throughout history-which this survey aims to teach, and the lecture-tour described below is structured around the French collection at the Snite Museum of Art. This is a small museum and therefore the survey is obviously limited, whilst 16th century French history must be omitted because we have so few objects from this period. In spite of these gaps, the teachers of French who bring their classes to the Snite Museum for these lecture-tours do feel that the practice of discussing a few objects dating from the Roman period to the 20th century, in a class time of one-and-a-half hours, does give the students a useful introduction to French history and civilization, and one which cannot be accomplished as effectively in the classroom with books or slides. An understanding of the lives and ideas of the French really does begin to develop, and is remembered because it is tied to the objects seen in the museum.

The lecture-tour given to students of French is one of the lecture-tours given at the Snite Museum in the programme of Curriculum Structured Tours which is most often requested. Th’ is programme was created in 1982 specifically for the Notre Dame community, and I believe it to be unique. The aim of the programme is to use the university museum as an academic resource for teaching students from many different disciplines, and during the 198647 academic year over 3 100 students visited the museum on individually arranged lecture-tours. When a teacher wishes to arrange a lecture-tour for his or her class, he or she contacts the museum educator and comes to the museum for a walk-through well before the class visit. It is this preparatory meeting between the teacher and the museum educator which ensures that the lecture-tour will be relevant to

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58 The Art Museum as a Teaching Resource

Teaching of Young Persons, by Barbara Bartosik, assistant to Diana Matthias, being undertaken in the display galleries of the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana. (Photo: Steve Moriarty)

the studies of each particular class. During the walk-through the museum educator and the teacher discuss the class and the syllabus, and decide which ideas to use in the museum visit. They also choose together which paintings and sculptures to use for the class visit. The teachers of French often request that a particular vocabulary list be used, or that a particular historic period be stressed. The museum educator may therefore have to read several of the books on the syllabus, so that she can quote from those texts, and make the connections between them and the visual objects in the museum. So the aim of the entire programme of Curriculum Structured Tours is to teach the humanities in a museum by making the connections between the objects seen and the studies of each particular group.

The French history survey usually lasts approximately one-and-a-half hours. It is given in either French, or English, or a mixture of both languages, depending on the level of the class concerned. Even when the means of communication is English, the intention is still to learn about French history and civilization, so key words are stressed in each section, and the students are encouraged to write them down. This is how we teach a vocabulary list which has been requested or words which we have chosen ourselves as important. A few such words might be: chapiteau, cloitre, pderinage, coquille St. Jacques, bow-don, cloisonne’. We begin the French history survey with the Roman period. The students are invited to sit down so that they are surrounded by French objects, and also because it is easier for them to write when they are seated. We introduce a discussion of the Romans in France by showing the students photographs of such familiar landmarks as the Pont du Gard and the theatre at Orange, which some of them may have already seen. Next we talk about domestic architecture, in particular the mosaic floor recently found in a villa outside Toulouse. The aim of what I will now describe is to try to make, by allowing them to touch some real Roman objects, what was a personal experience for me, a personal experience for the students. One of the most frustrating experiences in museums is, unavoidably, the prohibition of touching.

When I was in Toulouse two years ago I visited the workshop in which damaged works of art from the surrounding area are restored. The biggest job at that particular moment was the restoration of a Roman mosaic. One of the restorers was so interested in my work at the Snite Museum, that he gave me some very useful objects to use in the museum with the students. Among these was a piece of the jute sacking which is used as a base for holding together the tessarae of the mosaic while it is lifted from its original site,

DIANA C. J. MATTHIAS 59

eventually to be reset in a type of concrete for permanent display. When the jute is removed from the tessarae they leave their design, shape and colour printed on it. I was given such a piece of jute, and so, as the students pass it around among themselves, I explain the process of removing the mosaic from its original site, resetting and displaying it. I was also given a few of the actual tessarae from this mosaic, and I pass these around as well so that the students can touch some objects made by the Romans in Gaul. I find that this hands-on experience at the beginning of the museum visit usually catches the interest of the students. Most European students would probably be thoroughly bored by what I have just described, as they have access to many Roman objects, and Roman mosaics are particularly well displayed in such museums as the British Museum, but it is a novel experience for most young Americans to touch Roman objects.

We continue our discussion of the Romans by pointing out the objects in the permanent collection of the Snite Museum-the head of a young boy and a stone mask-and we mention how they probably would have been used. For the next period, the Middle Ages, the students remain seated and we look first at a reliquary chasse made of gilded copper and decorated in champlewt with coloured enamels, which was made in Limoges in the 12th century. We encourage the students to look carefully at all the objects by asking them questions about what they see, and by linking the questions and answers to their classroom studies which we have discussed in advance with the teacher. Many of the university and high school students who live and study in this area are Catholics, but most of them do not realize how important relics were to the church in the Middle Ages: no altar could be consecrated without relics. A useful section on vocabulary can be included at this point by discussing what relics members of the group have seen, touched or heard about. When we discuss the shape and decoration of the reliquary chasse in the Snite Museum we are examining an object which was venerated for what it contained and whose contents pilgrims would have travelled thousands of miles to see.

Next we show the students a map of Europe in order to point out the three most popular pilgrimage routes: to Jerusalem, to Rome and to Santiago de Compostela. In this way the students can see why it was that some of these pilgrimages took years to complete, for many people travelled great distances on foot. We mention the name of Aymery Picaud, the French monk who may have written Le Guide du PPlerin, the 12th century guidebook for pilgrims on the route to Santiago de Compostela. Often we read one or two of the amusing remarks which constitute his advice to the faithful. Then we move on to a discussion of architectural elements when we look at two pairs of columns which are covered with carvings of birds and animals. Much useful vocabulary can be learnt and written down as the students describe the decorative elements and identify the fauna. We then show the group a photograph of a cloister such as The Cloisters in New York City (they came originally from Prades in Roussillon), so that the students can see how the columns in the Snite Museum were probably originally used. We discuss monasteries and abbeys where cloisters were built, as well as the medicinal herbs which the monks would have grown in the garden inside the cloister. This subject would lead into mentioning the monks’ role as the doctors and nurses of the Middle Ages.

There are other objects in the medieval collection which we discuss but which I have no space here to describe. For our next historic period we are forced to move on to the 17th century because we have very few objects from the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 17th-century section we look at Baroque paintings and talk about the role of Louis XIV, as this is a period taught in many high school and university classes. We show the students reproductions of paintings of some of the key figures whose names will be

60 The Art Museum as a Teaching Resource

familiar to them, such as the King himself, Mazarin, Colbert, Racine, Corneille, Moliere and Descartes. We make sure that the students understand how important royal and ministerial patronage was for the development of French art at this time, and we look at the paintings by Coypel, Allegrain, and Claude GellCe in the Snite Museum as typical examples of the kind of art collected by the King and his ministers.

Now we look at the reaction to the grandeur of Louis XIV which developed in France under Louis XV, as seen in the luxury and frivolity of the Rococo court style captured in Boucher’s The Offering of u Rose (1765, Snite Museum of Art). This painting is full of domestic details which are excellent for learning useful vocabulary such as: pannier, brouette, boutons, canne, chapeau en paille, pieds nus. The French Revolution seems to interest many students, and we can discuss it in some detail by looking first at a painting in the Neoclassical style, painted in 1796 by FranGois-Xavier Fabre, depicting a scene from Roman history which was dramatized by Charles-Louis Muller, and performed in Paris in 1791, the lead being played by the actor Talma. Secondly we can look at a large canvas painted in 1850 of revolutionaries and prisoners in a Paris prison during the Reign of Terror 1793-94. In this painting, The Last Rollcall of the Condemned (1850, Snite Museum of Art) we point out the uniform of the revolutionaries and explain such expressions as sans culottes and bonnets rouges, both of which articles of clothing can be clearly identified. We name some of the different prisons used in Paris during the Revolution, and make sure that the students understand why the Bastille could not be the prison in our painting. We point out here the painter’s interest in showing the horror and fear of the victims, and how this interest in extreme emotions is in fact an ingredient of Romanticism, the next style of art at which we look.

We discuss French colonialism in North Africa when looking at the painting of a woman depicted as an odalisque in the Orientalist style, made famous by such painters as Ingres, and we show a reproduction of one of his painted odalisques at this point. Next we discuss a sculpture which was made to glorify the French who fell in the France-Prussion war (1870-71). Th e subject of this sculpture is in fact Joan of Arc, so we retell her rather complicated story, and show the students how she is being used as a national emblem for the French in the 19th century. The students are encouraged to go to see the full-size version of our sculpture of Joan of Arc in the center of the Place des Pyramides, when they visit Paris. However, we continue our journey through the 19th century, looking at paintings in the Realist style and mentioning the writings of Flaubert with which some of the students are familiar. We complete the 19th century with an Impressionist painting by Boudin, Monet’s teacher, where we discuss the breakdown of form, the rise of interest in scientific laws caused by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Chevreul’s theories of colour, the development of photography, and the wish to depict one single moment of time in paint.

To finish this lecture-tour we look at works from the 20th century. Cubism is discussed with reference to a painting by Metzinger, and we discuss the Surrealist movement with particular reference to two paintings by Masson in the Snite Museum. The first one shows his interest in portraying a dream world completely taken over by insects. After looking at this painting by Masson we compare his vision with that of Salvador Dali, by showing the students a reproduction of a work by Dali such as The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Students often seem to be familiar with the work of Salvador Dali, and they enjoy learning about other artists in the Surrealist movement. The second painting by Masson shows his interest in tapping the subconscious, and trying in art to make images and designs which are not censored by the conscious mind. Here it is important to mention the influence of Freud and the

DIANA C. J. MATTHIAS 61

enormous impact his ideas and writings have had on many artists of the 20th century. Picasso’s Le Miroir (1932, Snite Museum of Art) is a portrait of Marie-The&se Walter,

whom Picasso painted repeatedly throughout the 1930s. He probably used her face for the profile of the figure who carries the lamp of hope in his Guernica (1937, Prado, Madrid). This face can therefore provide the way into a discussion of Guernica, one of the most important visual icons of the 20th century. We finish this lecture-tour by looking at Chagall’s Le Grand Cirque (1956, Snite Museum of Art) and mention that France, like the United States, became a haven for many political refugees and artists in the 20th century. We name some of the creatures and birds depicted in this wonderful painting, in which a great affirmation of animal and human life is expressed in movement and colour. In our concluding remarks we reiterate the historic periods which we have covered, and encourage the students to return to the museum outside school hours.

Naturally in this article I have had to cut short sections which we discuss at greater length in a lecture-tour usually lasting one-and-a-half hours. I hope, however, that readers will be able to see how the discipline of history can be tied to the objects made by French artists. People today are very visually oriented, and I find that when they return to the Snite Museum for another lecture-tour, the students often remember points made several years before in a previous museum visit. The students’ obvious ability to remember what they have learnt in the museum encourages me to believe that the teaching of history with objects can be a useful addition to the regular classroom experience of most teachers and students.