Arts · Full roadmap · ~95 min read · 26 steps
🖼️Art History (Aotearoa NZ)
Read a Western painting, a wharenui, and a McCahon with confidence
Activities in this path
Skill tree
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Unit 1
Start here
Course overview
How to look at a painting
Looking is a skill, not a reaction
Composition, light, colour, line
Four dials that set the whole picture
Ancient to medieval, fast
From cave walls to gold backgrounds
The Renaissance opens the window
Perspective, anatomy, and three giants
Unit 2
Baroque to Romanticism
Drama, then frills, then awe
Realism and Impressionism
Ordinary life, then fleeting light
Post-Impressionism to modern art
Breaking the rules of space and colour
Now turn south
Art was already here
Whakairo, the carving
Wood that holds an ancestor
Unit 3
The wharenui as one artwork
A building you read like a body
Tukutuku, kōwhaiwhai, and raranga
Pattern that carries meaning
Lindauer and Goldie paint Māori
Two settlers, two very different deals
Frances Hodgkins leaves, and modernism arrives
A New Zealander goes modern, abroad
Colin McCahon, the landscapes
New Zealand's most important painter
Unit 4
McCahon, the word paintings
When the words become the picture
Gordon Walters and the koru debate
Borrowing a motif, and who it belongs to
Hotere and Binney
Black protest, and birds in the sky
Contemporary Māori and Pasifika art
The conversation now
Where to see it
The real works are close
Unit 5
Reading a Western painting
Run the method on a European work
Reading a wharenui
Read the house like a body, not a frame
Spot the New Zealand movements
Telltale signs, all in one place
Common mistakes
What trips up beginners here
A practice routine
Ten minutes a day, and the eye sharpens
Unit 6
Where to go next
Where to go next