Okay. Why am I so driven to teach, especially art history? It all goes back to my family moving to Mt. Lebanon, which was a golden ghetto both monetarily and educationally. We moved from a nice middle-class community and school system in Pennsauken, NJ, just before junior high school. The next half a dozen years at Mt. Lebanon taught me two things: I was dumb and poor.

After high school, I went to Muskingum College in the early 60s. Muskingum required students to take a ten-hour class called The Arts. You could take it in your junior or senior year. Professor Louie Palmer taught the class.

Fortunately, I took it in my junior year, and it opened my mind to all the various art forms. More importantly, I realized that I wasn’t dumb. At the end of my junior year, Louie asked me to be his teaching assistant the following year. I taught several weekly subsections using slides containing famous paintings and sculptures. We also listened to musical compositions. Additionally, I wrote and graded the midterms and finals for both semesters. Talk about a golden opportunity.

A lifetime later, I taught art history classes at the college level for the last quarter of a century. Gone are the slides, which have been replaced with PowerPoint Presentations. Click on Art History, and you will see a PPP that I created years ago.

Art history is human history seen in the various art forms. Teaching art history is merely history, as seen through the eyes of various artists. For example, Pablo Picasso created 150,000 pieces of art: 14,000 paintings, 100,000 prints/engravings, 300 sculptures, and 34,000 illustrations. One of his most famous paintings was Guernica, probably the largest of his paintings, measuring approximately 11ft tall and 25ft wide.

Guernica

Guernica is a small town in northern Spain that the Nazi Condor Legion bombed in the spring of 1937. At the time, it was considered a barbaric bombing of a small Basque village. Nevertheless, it was a harbinger of things to come during WWII.

Equally interesting is that art history has also changed over time. For example, paintings have moved from pictures on a museum wall to art in motion.

Art in Motion

Here is another new art form.

This is still another.

I’d jump at an opportunity to teach art history online at Gusto University. Ti Ti is now a student at Gusto. Ti Ti’s section on my website is College Days. My last online class before I retired was Ti Ti’s first college class.