Visit to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

As part of our summer seminar, we like to take advantage of the wonderful art collections on campus at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA). BCMA Codirector Frank Goodyear was kind enough to make available a seminar room and to ask his staff to pull specific works of art from storage for us. As a teacher, you can do the same at your local museum or galleries.

We requested to view objects that intersected with our topic. Since the museum did not have objects that exactly aligned (i.e., works made by Holocaust victims or survivors or works made in reaction to the Holocaust), before our museum we first discussed  in the classroom works of art that are related to our topic by artists whom we know are in the BCMA collections (we checked the museum’s online catalogue, first!). Then, we chose works of art by those artists in the collection that would align with the ideas we discussed in class. Would we have loved to look at original works of art by Heartfield, Solomon, and Nussbaum? Yes! Does our museum have them? No. But there are still reasons to look at works art that align with the goals of our seminar – and we hope that this is an approach that you can take with your local art resources, as well.

We begin visual analysis in front of original works of art by asking participants questions such as “what do you see?” “What stands out?” “What is in the foreground, middleground, and background?” “What effect do the colors have on each other? On the viewer?” And finally, “what meaning can you glean from these observations?” Oftentimes, even people who don’t have a lot of experience analyzing works of art come up with amazing observations that lead us directly to the “heart” of the ideas that we are trying to address. In this case, we examined prewar works of art that set up the social context for the rise of Nazism.

During our regular class time, we looked at Otto Dix’s Match Vendor (Streichholzhaendler), 1920, to discuss New Objectivity, the Weimar era, and the artist’s participation in the Reich Chamber of Arts in 1934. The work depicts a crippled veteran from WWI who is so poor that he must sell matchsticks on the street; the work thereby historically “sets up” the precarious situation of Weimar Germany. Since the museum did not have that specific work of art, we nonetheless looked at another Dix that conveyed his style and approach to subject matter: Amerikanischer Reiterakt (American Riding Act), 1922, drypoint on paper.

We examined Käthe Kollwitz’s , Memorial to Karl Liebknecht, 1919-1920. woodcut on paper, for the ways in which it captures the spirit of the socialist worker, soon to be completely disenfranchised by Nazism.

George Grosz’s Half a Century of Social Democracy (ca. 1923, lithograph on paper), served to highlight aspects of prewar Germany that Grosz satirizes, such as greedy, grotesque capitalist factory owners, the working poor, and crippled veterans from World War I.

Lyonel Feininger’s Cathedral (1919, woodcut on Japanese cream paper), exemplifies the ideals of the Bauhaus, the art school that was active during the Weimar Republic that extolled architecture and all types of crafts as fine art – and was considered “degenenerate” by the Nazis.

Many of the teachers, especially those who live in rural areas, do not often get to visit museums – and had never looked at works of art up close, in an intimate setting, and with a museum director in the room.

Practical tips when visiting museums to view works of art: 

1. You can usually view a museum’s collections on their website by searching their online database. Failing that, you can contact staff members to help you.
2. When making requests to view specific objects in a museum, remember that the galleries have been scheduled with specific exhibitions and seminar rooms often are scheduled early in the year – so it’s important to plan ahead of time).
3. Always have your participants check their bags in storage and only bring a pencil and paper into the galleries/study room – never a pen! When we speak in front of a work of art, we often feel the urge to gesture and point, which can be fatal for a work of art, especially if we are holding a pen!

In July 2022, I had the opportunity to engage in the NEH Seminar, Teaching The Holocaust Through Visual Culture. As a result of this seminar, I have been able to incorporate much more visual culture into my teaching of the Holocaust and I have been able to engage students in critical thinking and visual analysis strategies related to images and other elements of visual culture across our study of history. Students have been particularly drawn to the use of visuals in our study of the Holocaust and other genocides. I have found that pairing images, especially primary source images, with text-based sources has enhanced engagement and understanding as it provides multiple access points for students to learn historical content. In addition, students have appreciated opportunities to take time to deeply study images and to consider the role of image in the ways we understand history. They have gravitated to the idea that different images can tell different stories and they have deepened their understanding of the fact that an image, just like a text or speech, can be used to communicate a specific point of view or agenda.

Through my work in the seminar, I was able to create multiple assessments that students completed this year. The first was an analysis of Nazi propaganda (a student example is pictured on the right). This assignment, based on a collection of examples of propaganda compiled during the seminar, asked students to select an example of Nazi propaganda and analyze its messages, its purposes, and its role in the rise of fascism and its contributions to genocide. Students also had the opportunity to compare their chosen piece to other examples of Nazi propaganda to identify common themes and also varying strategies the Nazis used. A second project, also developed in the seminar, asked students to analyze different pieces of visual culture from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Students contrasted artistic representations of the event, many of which were created by Jewish artists, with photos taken by Nazis for the Stroop Report. Students were interested in considering the ways that images tell stories and were intrigued by the concept of photographs being used to depict certain perspectives. For both assignments, students appreciated the chance to unpack images, many of them primary sources, and come to historical conclusions based on their analysis.

Finally, my seminar learning about Holocaust memorials inspired the final project for our Genocide Studies unit. In this final project, students were asked to select a genocide other than the Holocaust and propose a memorial for that genocide. To prepare for this project, we looked at existing Holocaust memorials and studied the various ways people have memorialized genocide over time. This crucial background information came directly from my learning in the seminar. Overall, my experience in this seminar has expanded my teaching of the Holocaust and of history in general. I feel more prepared to bring visual culture into my classroom and better equipped to support students in visual analysis. Thanks to this seminar, I have made curricular and pedagogical shifts that students have appreciated and that I believe deepen the engagement, rigor, and complexity of student learning in my class. I am grateful for my learning through this seminar, which has directly impacted and improved my teaching practice.

 by seminar co-director Natasha Goldman

Introduction to the Blog: This blog is written for an audience of teachers who teach the Holocaust in grades 8-12. It is meant both to describe the experiences of the directors, guests, and participants of/in the 2022 NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers, “Teaching the Holocaust through Visual Culture” and to provide tips for our readers on how to integrate similar experiences and assignments into their own classes. We hope you find it helpful! (Please note that wherever possible we provide links to original works of art; due to copyright restrictions we cannot post images of original works of art on our website).