Beyond Lucian Freud: Exploring body representations in children's culture

In this article we show how theory of Visual Culture Studies can be put into practice in schools. We report on a collaboration between the Department of Art Education in the Fine Art Faculty of the University of Barcelona and an urban primary school. It took the form of Inquiry-based Project Work focussing on alternative ways of understanding and implementing Visual Art Education. Specifically, we investigated a traditional Art History topic (the life and work of the artist Lucian Freud) and explored this from the perspective of Visual Culture Studies. Three aspects of this work are presented and discussed: (a) how art historical representations fix discourse about the body in everyday situations; (b) how Lucian Freud represents people's experience of their bodies and how this affects them; and (c) how pupils experience their bodies given the way the body is represented in media culture and everyday life.