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Understand the historical context of the time when the art was produced. Find out the genre of the painting. Learn about the art movements or schools that influenced the piece. Read up on the life and perspective of the artist.

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Artists often create works to comment on major historical events, and this can give you a window into their unique perspective. In contrast, powerful institutions and people throughout history often commissioned artists to create pieces that endorsed their agendas. This affects the intended audience of the art piece — who was meant to see the art.  For example, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) was created in response to the bombings during the Spanish Civil War. It’s filled with anti-war symbolism. Picasso said of the artwork: “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.”  During the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church relied a lot on commissioned art as a means of promoting their cause and asserting their power. If you’re looking at a painting, knowing what genre it belongs to can be helpful. Genres are essentially categories that are used to classify art. In painting, the established and well-known genres are landscape, portraiture, genre paintings (which are paintings of scenes from ordinary life), history, and still life.  John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821) is a famous Landscape painting that led to the resurgence of landscape painting in the 19th century.   Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) by Johannes Vermeer is considered to be a masterpiece of portraiture.  Judith Leyster’s Carousing Couple (1630) is a great example of a genre painting.  History paintings depict a moment in a specific historical narrative. Vasily Surikov’s The Morning of the Streltsy Execution (1881) is a very intricate history painting example.  Lastly, still life paintings are of inanimate, commonplace objects. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1889) is a bright and sunny still life example. Art movements were surges in popularity of certain ways of creating art. An art “school” is basically just a group of artists, sometimes all in the same region, who all have a similar style or subject matter. Knowing a little bit about these can help you understand why an artist might have made certain choices.  For example, painters in the Egyptian school of art had certain rules that they had to follow — like the size of any figure they drew was supposed to vary based on the social status of the person they were painting. They also couldn’t use more than six colors, and each color symbolized a different aspect of life or death. Impressionism, one of the largest 19th-century art movements, is defined by short, loose brushstrokes that are intended to capture the quality of light. Learning a bit about the artist who created a piece can help shed light on it in a variety of ways. It can help you understand why they made certain artistic decisions, or chose to make the work at all in the first place. For example, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo had limited mobility after fighting off polio and enduring a bus accident in her early life. Her pain and struggle manifests in several of her pieces.