An Art Project in the Essen Folkwang Museum

Ein Kunstprojekt mit deutschen und französischen Schülerinnen und Schülern im Differenzierungskurs Englisch

Every year Goetheschule Essen offers an optional course for students in Year 8 and 9, who wish to study Geography, History and Politics in English. In 2017 the students in Ms Heup’s course chose “Art History” as a topic for the last half of the summer term and invited a group from Collège Louis Pergaud in Dozulé (France) to work with them at the Folkwang Museum. The groups had got to know each other through a European eTwinning project and very much looked forward to an English-French-German day on April 27th 2017 in Essen.

Imitieren, ergänzen, interpretieren: Kunst neu denken

After an introductory session at school, 21 German and 25 French students arrived at the museum at eleven in the morning. They split into small mixed groups and soon had their mobiles ready to start their project. The task was to create photos which imitate, complement or reinterpret paintings in the permanent exhibition. Here is a small selection of the creative work, which the students shared after lunch:

Die Dauerausstellung im Folkwang-Museum

Imitation

Faithful imitation requires to watch out carefully for what might otherwise easily escape one’s notice. A good example is the photo the students took in front of Wilhelm Tübner’s Portrait of a Lady. Attention has not only been paid to posture, gesture and facial expression, but also to a tiny little detail. Art teacher Dagmar Bieniek spotted it right away. Have you seen it as well? Look at the lady’s white collar. Have you realized that the student’s white ribbon underlines the resemblance?

One group was down on their knees in order to turn George Minne’s Fountain with Kneeling Boys into a marble fountain with both boys and girls; others decided to rearrange the seating order in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Coffee Table.

An object that inspired different groups of students is Constantin Meunier’s Load Carrier. Which of the three versions below do you think is closest to the original? Our art teacher preferred the first, because the perspective is unusual and impressive.

Talking of perspective…, here is another favourite of Mrs Bieniek. The window frame in the background seems to create a link between Rodin’s headless statue and the statue-like student whose head is but a black shadow, doesn’t it?

Ergänzen

At times, you may of course feel that something needs to be added to complement a picture. In the case of Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Faure as Hamlet the students decided to introduce another character and thereby turn the tragedy into a cloak-and-sword play.

Similarly, Renoir’s Lise with a Parasol suddenly found herself at the side of a most fervent admirer. (Now there is definitely romance in the air!)

Last but not least, the abstract quality of Donald Judd’s three-dimensional aluminium object was emphasized with the help of a simple scarf on the floor, which served as a corresponding black-and-white element.

Interpretieren

Interpreting art is not necessarily an analytical process. Sometimes you just need imagination and intuition. Look for example how the students visualised the dynamics in Frank Stella’s Basra Gate III. Or how they started to develop the idea of reflection with the help of Adolf Luther’s Concave Mirror.

Die Fotoausstellung von Folkwang-Studierenden

They also found inspiration in the current Photography Exhibition by Folkwang Students. In Amy-Jade Chapman’s collection Teenager and Sophia Maria Lanzinger’s Humangeographie, they played with perspective…,