the school website

Check out the Greensburg Salem School District Website! We made the front page!
http://greensburg.pa.schoolwebpages.com

Visit to Bergisch Gladbach

The LVR-Industriemuseum consists of 6 venues. One of them is an old paper mill. In March our colleagues from this venue (located in Bergisch Gladbach) invited our American guests to visit them. Katie, Anita, Nina and me got a great guided tour through the museum.

Katie and Anita produced their own paper! At lunch time we ate a typical meal at the museum cafe: potatoes and fried eggs. After that our American guests spent a lot of time at the museum shop.

My colleague Beatrix currently tries to prepare a lecture for a big conference for education curators in October. If that works, we’ll have the chance to present our Transatlantic Bridge to a wide audience of professionals.

Transatlantic Bridge on web site of school ministry

Click here to read more

As time goes by...Modern times in teeming II

Lieber Thomas Schleper,

"This day and time we´re living in

gives cause of apprehension

with speed and new invention

and things like fourth dimension...*

Not the fourth dimension is evoked in your article, but "teeming as a gate to modernity" You are reporting of Bonhommés picture "Teeming" from 1865, which shows the "soldiers of work" out of the perspective of the owner -- showing the factory interior view - who tries "to get a quick overall view of his capital investment and its useful exploitation".

Out of the perspective of a student of the art class 12 of our school -- whose drawings were made during a visit in the R.I.M --the structural change in industry has also changed the view on "teeming" . His collage - a new combination of two objects out of the R.I.M. exibition -- wants to show this fact symbolically.

Bonhomme´s "soldier of work" has become a stripped marionette, his body a fossil dinosaur and the teeming laddle a so-called "Auslaufmodell" (phased-out model?), his head illustrating the idiom "There´s no use crying over spilled milk". or " ... the simple facts of life are such, they cannot be removed..." furthermore as it sounds in the song from "Casablanca".
The song also is telling that only "on love you can rely".

However we can rely on both, the Industrial Museum in Oberhausen (R.I.M) and the Westmorelandmuseum of American Art in Pittsburgh - whose collection of industrial machines and paintings enable the students of our schools to have a look at a teeming laddle in original or the watercolour paintings "Teeming" out of "The Valley of Work" Collection.

These "everlasting" cultural goods - conserved at the museum - offer the possibility for the students to deal with the subject of the industrial past and to interpret in a creative "modern "

way from their individual perspective to past times.

Mining Dump Heaps

School at museum

all videos are made by U. Bugdoll and students, HBG, 2010

Modern Times in "Teeming"

Francois Bonhommé, Coulée de fonte, 1865,

Écomusée Creusot-Montceau, Collection: Académie Bourdon, photographer: T. Schleper

World Trade 1867, Paris
L'Illustration, Nr. 1272, 13.7.1867, S. 21f

The Frenchman Françoise Bonhommé is regarded as the first European painter who tried to depict both the new dimensions of iron works and the collective of the new working class in order to grasp the modern reality of industrial production in iron works. The monumental painting "Teeming", has been one of the attractions of the World Trade 1867 in Paris and Adolf Menzel, the famous German painter of the later "Eisenwalzwerk", took the opportunity to see that work of art. No surprise, the team of the museum counts itself lucky as - after repeated attempts - the Academy Bourdon just has accepted the loan to the exhibition "Feuerländer" in Oberhausen.

Bonhommé called the workmen "soldiers of industry" and wanted to grant to them a special dignity - in spite of the hierarchy within the production process. Therefore, this work is painted as a tribute to the new labour class. On the other hand, however, the painter applies a wide-angle perspective to the scene. It’s the perspective of the owner, who likes to get a quick overall view of his capital investment and its useful exploitation. The modern argument between labour and capital is present at this painting. Because of it, Bonhommés "Teeming" became a key work in the history of industrial painting: for the following artists and their interpreters as well.

The museum wasn’t able to do without Bonhommé and now it needs not renounce his work of art. "Teeming" represents a crucial point of the "Feuerländer" as a gate to modernity.