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Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World, 246
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, EUS, Medieval Studies, MES
This course explores connections around and across the Mediterranean from the 4th through the 13th century, and considers art and architecture within dynamic contexts of cultural conflict and exchange. It introduces art traditionally categorized as Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, and Islamic, but also encourages students to question critically these designations. Looking at art created by Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and "pagan" communities, the class examines the role of the Mediterranean Sea as a boundary and a crossroad in the development of urban centers around its periphrey. AHVC distribution: ancient/medieval, Africa/Asia/Middle East
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Art and Nation Building, Art History 209
Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights Between 1650 and 1876, a new nation came to dominate the world scene. This course explores the contribution of the visual arts to the conceptualization of an American national identity, from the founding of the colonies through the Federal and Antebellum periods to the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will look at a range of visual and textual materials to examine the development of American culture and the efforts to portray the political experiment of democracy. Topics range from depictions of authority and difference, to the importance ofportraiture and landscape painting to national culture and politics, to the emergence of American art institutions, to issues of aesthetics, to transatlantic connections and traditions. The course serves as an introduction to the painting, sculpture, photography, and material culture of America.
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Sightseeing: Vision and the Image in the Early Modern Period, Art History 211
Cross-listed: STS
This course examines the complex relationship between theories of vision and the production and reception of images in European art and culture of the early modern period (1500-1750). Areas of study include optical devices such as the camera obscura, telescope, and "peep box"; perspective systems and their distortion; visions of the divine; the ways in which vision and imagery were associated with desire; evidentiary theory; and the representation of sight.
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19th Century Photography and Fine Art, Art History 212
Corss-listed: STS, Victorian Studies
The semester begins with the debate over realism in art that forms the backstory for the complicated reception of photography and then works forward to the pictorialist movement at the end of the 19th century. Along the way, students address such topics as "passing" (how to make photographs that look like art); photography and art pedagogy; photography's role in the "liberation" of painting; and the 20th-century repudiation of 19th-century photography's art aspirations.
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Picturing Nature in Early Modern Northern Europe, Art History 223
Cross-listed: EUS
Early modern artists, scientists, adventurers, and amateurs created a compelling visual record of the natural world. These artists and obseervers benefited from new technologies, including the microscope and telescope, and recording methods (printmaking). This course focuses primarily on images and environments from Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
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Vermeer, Art History 233
A thematic examination of the 17th-century Dutch painter; topics discussed include the Delft School, domestic space, optics, sexuality, belief, and Vermeer's reception. Enrollment is limited to 14, by permission of the instructor.
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Of Utopias, 234
Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities What is the shape of utopia? To imagine and write about a future ideal society requires a reconsideration of the ways in which life will be organized in space. Utopian thinkers utilized drawings, maps, and plans to give shape to their vision and illustrate future social and political reconfigurations. From Sir Thomas More’s Amaurote (1535) to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and Hakim Bey’s The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991), authors challenged the limits of imagination, providing designers opportunities for architectural experimentation. This course will examine key writings and architectural projects in an effort to unpack the history of utopian thought since the discovery of the New World, considering projects for socialist utopias, communes, and industrial colonies. The course requires a final paper and short assignments of imaginative speculation. (Art History requirement: modern) AHVC distribution: modern
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Photography and Empire in the 19th Century, Art History 237
Cross-listed: American Studies, Photography, Victorian Studies
This course surveys the far-reaching work of the peripatetic photographers of the nineteenth century. Travel and exploratory photographs of landscapes, people, and architecture were made by European and American photographers throughout the world. They reflect the photographers' preconceptions and expectations as well as the inherent properties of the subject matter. Such photographs were produced as government surveys, historical records, souvenirs for travelers, scientific documents, and picturesque views. Imperialist expansion of European powers, the romantic poets' reverence for nature, and the projection of the photographers' (and their audiences') fantasies upon alien realms and peoples are among the forces that helped shape the travel photography of this period. The course is of interest to history and social science students as well as art history and photography students. AHVC distributon: 1800-present/European)
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Modern African Art, Art History 244
Cross-listed: Africana Studies
This course looks at the visual arts of Africa and the African diaspora from the postcolonial period to the present. With a focus on painting, photography, installation, video, and conceptual art, the class challenges received ideas about the artistic practice of African artists. Key figures studied incude El Anatsui, Wangechi Mutu, Julie Mehretu, Yinka Shonibare, Nnenna Okore, William Kentridge, and Jelili Atiku.
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19th Century American Art, Art History 250
A study of U.S. art, focusing on painting but also looking at sculpture, architecture, and decorative art, from the Colonial period through the end of the 19th century. Artists considered include John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Thomas eakins, and the painters of the Hudson River School. Several class trips take advantage of the spendid collections of U.S. art in the Hudson River Valley and New York City.
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The Art of the 1980s, Art History 256
While iconic documents of the 1980s (Dallas, Miami Vice, Wall Street, the Brat Pack) dependably reemerge in the realm of popular culture, the serious art practices from this decade are less well known. The class looks at work by seminar painters, sculptors, and collectives - e.g. Schnabel, Sherman, Gonzalez-Torres, Polke, Leirner, Watts, Group Material - through the multivalent lenses of such intellectual movements as postmodernism, appropriation, deconstruction, and liberation theology.
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Art in the Age of Revolution, Art History 257
Cross-listed: Victorian Studies
A survey of European painting from the pre-revolutionary period (c. 1770) to realism (c. 1850). Topics include changing definitions of neoclassicism and romanticism; the impact of the French revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848; the Napoleonic presence abroad; the shift from history painting to scenes of everyday life; landscape painting as an autonomous art form; and attitudes toward race and sexuality. while the emphasis is on French art, time is also devoted to artists in Spain, Great Britain, and Germany.
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Manet to Matisse, Art History 258
Cross-listed: French Studies, GSS
A social history of European painting from 1860 to 1900, beginning with the origins of mdernism in the work of Manet. Topics include the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III, changing attitudes toward city and country in impresssionist and symbolist art, and the prominent place of women in modern life representations.
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20th Century Northern European Art, Art History 262
The emphasis is on art from Austria and Germany - from Jugendstil through expressionism, Dadaism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Nazi and concentration camp art, and the post- World War II era - with brief forays into Scandinavian art. Artists include Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Egon Schiele. The course also looks at more recent artists, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Signar Polke, and Gerhard Richter.
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Dada and Surrealism, Art History 265
A survey of the two major artistic movements in post-World War I Europe. Lectures on earlier modernist movements in Paris, particularly cubism, are followed by a study of the iconoclastic art of Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp.
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Revolution, Social Change, and Art in Latin America, Art History 269
Cross-listed: Human Rights, LAIS
This course examines the role that Christian iconography played in the conquests of the 16th century and the radical new meanings that the same iconograpy took as time went on. It also reviews the visual strategies employed in the presentation of the heroes" of independence (Simón Bolivar, Miguel Hidalgo) and the ways in which art has contributed to the formation of national identities.
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Religious Imagery in Latin America, Art History 273
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, LAIS
This course explores the varied visual manifestations of religious expression in Latin America after the Spanish Conquest. In addition to churches, statuary, and paintings, the class examines folk art traditions, African diasporic religions, and contemporary art and practices.
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Winslow Homer to Jackson Pollack: The Rise of Modernism in America, Art History 278
Cross-listed: American Studies
This course concentrates on early 20th century artists and art movements in the United States. Topics include modernity and nationalism; the roles and representations of technology in art; exhibitions and cultural propaganda; artistic identity and gender roles; and public art, murals, and social activism.
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El Greco to Goya: Spanish Art and Architecture, Art History 286
Cross-listed: LAIS
A survey of the complex visual culture of early modern Spain, with particular attention given to El Greco, Goya, Murillao, Velázquez, and Zurbarán. The class examines the formation of a distinct Spanish style within the context of European art and considers how Spanish artistic identity was a kind of hybrid, complicated both by Spain's importation of foreign artists (Rubens, Titn) and by its relationship to the art and architecture of the colonies.
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Governing the World: an Architectural History, 281
The 1990s found a wider public attentive to the processes of globalization. The term itself acquired a life of its own, making it into journals and newspapers. What appears to be a very recent phenomenon, however, constitutes only a chapter in a longer history of world organization. The course will utilize architecture both as an anchor and lens to study the history of world organization. Slave ships, plantation houses, embassies, assembly halls, banks, detention camps, corporate headquarters, seed bank vaults, as well as atlases, encyclopedias, and communication technologies, will provide us with focal points in an effort to historicize the emergence of a “global space” and decipher its architectural constructions. Readings will include historians and scholars such as Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Woodrow Wilson, Hannah Arendt, Cornelios Castoriadis, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Ulrich Beck, Saskia Sassen, Mark Mazower; as well as architectural projects and texts by Paul Otlet, Le Corbusier, Etienne-Louis Boullée, Buckminster Fuller, among others. Course requirements include response papers and a longer final research paper. AHVC distribution: modern/Africa/Asia
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Experiments in Art and Technology, Art History 287
Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities
This course will explore various connections between art and technology from the 1960s up to the present day. Students will examine a wide range of writings, artworks, performances, and videos by figures including Marshall McLuhan, John McHale, Robert Rauschenberg, and Carolee Schneemann. The idea of the course is to show that both artists and theorists are involved in a common project of responding to new technologies. Questions of distribution, audience, and globablization will be of key concern. In the last weeks, we will consider how these ideas have evolved in the age of the Internet. Students will work on various writing assignments and class presentations.
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Rights and the Image, Art History 289
Corss-listed: Human Rights
An examination of the relationship between visual culture and human rights, using case studies that range in time from the early modern period (marking the body to register criminarily for example) to present day (images from Abu Ghraib). Subjects addressed include evidence, disaster photography, advocacy images, censorship, and visibility and invisibility.
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Arts in China, Art History 290
Cross-listed: Asian Studies
This course begins with Neolithic painted pottery, the earliest expression of the Chinese aesthetic. Next, the early culture of the Bronze Age is reviewed, followed by the unification of China under the first emperor, the owner of 60,000 life-size clay figurines. In the fifth century, Buddhist art achieved expression in colonial sculptures carved from living rock and in paintings of paradise. Confucian and Taoist philosophy, literature, and poular culture are examined through the paintings of the later dynasties.
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Chinese Landscape Painting, Art History 291
Cross-listed: Asian Studies
The Chinese love of landscape can be traced to ancient times, when the mountains were considered the home of the immortals; such deep spirtual connotation maintained their vitality during the evolution of the most highly regarded of the pictorial arts. Through an analysis of the evolution of the Chinese landscape, the society's rich poetic tradition, historical events, and cutural contexts are viewed.
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From Ming to Post-Mao: Modern Chinese Art, Art History 292
Cross-listed: Asian Art
This course begins with the emergence of a modernist aesthetic in the 19th century (at the end of China's last dynasty) and covers the formation of a nationalist modern movement, the political art that served the government under the Communist regime, and the impact of the opening of China to the West. A primary focus is the various ways in which artists respond to the challenges of contemporary life and culture.
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East Meets West, Art History 293
Cross-listed: Asian Studies
A consideration, through art, of the impacts Eastern and Western cultures have had on one another. Broad topics for discussion include the art of Buddhism and the Silk Road; medieval European borrowings from the East; travelers East and West; Arabs as transmitters of Asian technologies; concepts of heaven and hell; Western missionaries and the introduction of Western culture in India, China, and Japan; chinoiserie in European architecture, gardening and decor; and Japanisme - the influence of the Asian aesthetic on modern art movements.
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The History of the Museum, Art History 298
This course traces the transformation of early collecting and display practices into the first modern "survey" museum and considers the emergence of alternatives to this model. Topics include problems in contemporary museum practice (such as contested provenance); the museum as memory and memorial; collections as sites for producing knowledge; artists' intervention in the museum; the virtual collection; and the logic and politics of display.
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History of Art Criticism, 285
This course will explore art criticism as an historical phenomenon. Beginning with the writings of Diderot and Baudelaire, we will examine the emergence of art criticism as a response to the public forum of the Salon and, subsequently, its relationship to other sites of presentation. We will also consider the position of art criticism in relation to film and cultural criticism, as well as models of the poet-critic and the artist-critic. Towards the end of the course we will look at the historical moment in which criticism became increasingly embroiled with theory. As the status of the public has changed in recent years we will ask how the role of criticism has transformed as well. Throughout the course we will ask the question, What can art criticism do? Assignments: Students will be required to submit a weekly response paper. Students will also write two reviews: one of an exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, and one of an exhibition in New York. A final research paper (8-10) pages will be due at the end of the semester.
