It’s Art--but Is It History? : Museum Appreciation Class Helps Viewers See Works in a Context

When Susan Schopp first visited the Louvre in Paris and saw the “Mona Lisa,” she told her museum appreciation class, she was amazed by how small the famous painting is.

“Oh, I was too,” agreed several students in the two-day course Schopp is teaching through Orange Coast College’s Community Service Program. (The second session will meet Friday in the school’s Fine Arts Building.)

After the first class last Friday, Schopp confided to a visitor that she hadn’t expected such a well-traveled group.

Nevertheless, her audience seemed eager to learn about the “hidden” content of several Old Master paintings and to get some pointers about how to make the most of a visit to an art museum.

Schopp, who has a BA in art history from Smith College and advanced degrees in other subjects, showed slides and discussed several famous paintings. She pointed out, for example, that Flemish artist Jan van Eyck’s painting of a sad-looking 15th-Century couple holding hands is actually a marriage document.

Tiny images of the two witnesses to the ceremony (one of them the painter himself) are reflected in a mirror. Scattered throughout the scene, she explained, are symbolic details referring to the sacrament of marriage: a dog (fidelity), a lit candle (the all-seeing Eye of God) and a bedpost carving (of St. Margaret, patron of childbirth).

An airy bedroom scene of a man catching a nude couple in a compromising position, Schopp described as 18th-Century French painter Francois Boucher’s playful, escapist version of a mythological love triangle involving Vulcan, god of fire, his wife, Venus and her lover, Mars, god of war.

Theodore Gericault’s “The Raft of the ‘Medusa’ “--a scene of desperate, dying and dead men on a raft at sea at the moment a rescue ship appears on the horizon--was based on the 19th-Century “French government’s Watergate,” Schopp said. The scandal erupted when an overloaded and unseaworthy French ship sank off the coast of West Africa, leaving only a few survivors, who clung to a raft for days until they were saved.

Moving abruptly into the mid 20th Century, Schopp flashed a slide of Andy Warhol’s lithograph of 25 nearly identical images of Marilyn Monroe. “Tell me about plastic forks and paper plates,” she demanded, alluding to aspects of the “disposable” culture that inspired Warhol’s multiple images of the same familiar face.

The puzzled class was silent.

“Should we call this art ?” Schopp asked. “Why not? Because it pokes fun? Because it isn’t painted in oil? Do we have the right to say this is more or less worthy?”

Schopp’s advice to museum-goers is mostly a matter of common sense.

Should you visit a museum with friends? It depends, Schopp said, on whether you are more interested in communing with the art or communing with other people.

If you want company, make sure you choose someone with a similar energy level, attention span and scope of interest. If you are someone who “looks at every brush stroke and reads every label, go on your own,” she advised.

But don’t feel obliged to pore over the labels or to look at every work of art in every gallery, Schopp told the class. Content, composition (“how the different objects . . . are arranged in relation to each other”) and the range of colors used all are worth noting, but the amount of time spent in front of each work is an individual matter.

And so is taste. Schopp urged her students not to be intimidated by the fame of a particular work of art. “Just because the experts like a particular painting, you don’t have to.”

The second and final session of “Rooms With a View” meets on Friday from 7 to 10 p.m. in Room 116 of the Orange Coast College Fine Arts Building. Admission is $9. On Saturday, Schopp will escort the class on an optional field trip to the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. Call the Orange Coast College Community Services Program for more information on the class and tour: (714) 432-5880.