ARTS FOR AMATEURS : Children Learn 600 Years of Art at Pace of a Year a Minute

It’s always a question when you’re teaching art to young elementary schoolchildren: How much detail can they absorb about the classics, and how fast?

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, they’re trying to teach the basics of classical art history as well as discussing the influence of Western European art on 20th-Century American art. And they’re doing it at the pace of a year a minute.

Lena Rivkin, in her course “600 Years of Art,” attempts to give 6- to 8-year-olds a broad exposure to art from the Renaissance to the 20th Century in five two-hour sessions.

If it sounds like too much too fast, Rivkin says, it would be overwhelming for adults but not for children. “The children experience the moment. They just take in what I show them,” she says, adding that adults would try too hard to connect each period to the one that follows. Although she tries to tie each week to the previous lesson, she says her real focus is to allow the children to absorb what they can about each period.

So she covers about a century a week. The class starts with a look at the 15th and 16th centuries, studying terra-cotta sculptures and other significant works. Rivkin shows the children “Nativity” and “Angel,” and helps them understand why these were important subjects in the Renaissance.

Each week, the children do some pencil sketching in the galleries, an experience that many adult museum-goers probably have never had. And they spend the last hour or so of the session making something related to the period that they have studied. The first day, they’ll make a “fabulous beast”--an imaginary animal--out of clay, the closest thing to terra cotta around.

By the following week, it’s the Baroque period, and the children study Gerard Ter Borch’s “The Card Players” and Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus.” Rivkin emphasizes the theatrical, dramatic gestures seen in these works and the high contrast between light and dark. So the children become more sensitive to contrast, Rivkin has them trace shadows outside, an exercise she says they really enjoy.

In the remaining weeks, the children study the costumes and design of the neoclassic era and learn something about lithography. Rivkin says she tries to have the children develop an ability to relate the art to their own lives and to figure things out about a painting without relying on a label or guidebook. In the galleries, she asks them such questions as, “What time of year is it? How did the artist create that feeling? What colors did he use?” In the second part of the session, she asks the students, while still in the galleries, to paint their own landscape, using tempera.

The last two hours of the course--the last day--cover 20th-Century American art, including Sam Francis, Frank Stella, Elsworth Kelly, David Smith and Stewart Davis. The children design their own wood sculptures, working in the gallery next to a David Smith stainless steel piece for inspiration.

Rivkin says she knows the class is successful when she sees the children take their parents back through the galleries afterward, relaying various bits of new-found information.

Not only are the children exposed to 600 years of art, they also quite literally cover a lot of ground. The students walk through most of the corridors and galleries of the museum and begin to see how art is separated into distinct collections. If nothing else, says Rivkin, the children learn their way around and, it is hoped, begin to see the museum as a friendly place.

“600 Years of Art” is offered Saturdays through March 23 from 10 a.m. to noon. The cost is $50 members, $59 non-members. To register, call (213) 857-6139.