How to Look at and Understand Great Art

Examining the contexts and environments where art is encountered.

Exploring how point of view works in painting and sculpture.

Uncovering core principles of color in painting.

Discovering properties of line in describing reality or conveying feeling.

Examining geometric and organic shapes, as well as the illusionistic use of shading and shadows.

Studying scale and proportion, and distinguishing between open and closed composition.

Grasping the principles of linear perspective, foreshortening and atmospheric perspective.

Exploring artists' techniques that evoke motion and the passage of time.

Considering the painter's use of paint to capture texture and light on canvas.

Defining various drawing purposes.

Studying contrasting techniques of relief printmaking and intaglio printmaking.

Exploring artists draw and paint directly on the printing surface.

Investigating the viewing contexts of relief and in-the-round sculptures.

Tracing the development of painting, including types of oil paint and brushwork techniques.

Tracking 20th-century nontraditional materials and application methods.

Studying the academic codifying and ranking of subjects in art.

Observing changes in symbolic associations over different historical eras.

Studying a subject's position and gaze with relation to the pictorial space.

Revealing the changing role of the artist.

Observing landscape's expression of drama, infinite space and the sublime.

Examining four diverse masterpieces with developed tools.

Contemplating renaissance classicism and humanism phenomena.

Defining the stylistics of northern renaissance oil art.

Exploring masterpieces by three of history's great geniuses.

Exploring the hallmarks of Mannerism and the essence of Baroque art.

Baroque style flourishes in key regional variations.

Exploring the evocation of hedonism in Watteau, Fragonard and other Rococo masters.

Exploring ordered neoclassical compositions and romanticism's dramatic proportions.

Studying examples of realism and impressionism in works by Courbet, Degas and others.

Discovering Post-Impressionists driven by their perception of a loss of form in Impressionism.

Studying expressionism's use of violent colors and sculptural paint application.

Investigating the visual elements and phases of this hugely influential movement.

Examining the philosophical underpinnings of abstraction and nonrepresentational art.

Contemplating the anti-art spirit of Dadaism and Surrealism's focus on the subconscious.

Recognizing pop art, op art and minimalism.

Maximizing museum visits for better experiences.