A critical examination of the social and cultural history of 19th-century art. Students will develop critical thinking skills, their ability to write and research on art issues, and will acquire a strong grasp of the main images and issues of the 19th century.

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How does one write about the individual artist after the new cultural history and poststructuralism? Is the Aauthor@ still dead, as Roland Barthes declared her to be? This class will look at how art historians and artists themselves use often mythical elements of biography to explain aspects of art.

A generation ago, art historians rejected the individualism of the art-historical monograph, historians critiqued the Agreat-men-and-great-events@ model of history-writing, poststructuralism emphasized cultural intertextuality instead of author-based notions of intentionality, and postmodernism rejected the hagiography of the towering modernist artist and the notion of the individual=s autonomous art production. However, a host of new writings have begun to appear that reread the artist=s biography through cultural history and this theoretical inheritance. What is this New Biography, as it has been called? How can we reconcile biographical approaches and critical theory? Can cultural history address the individual?

In this seminar, we will read about the mythic and legendary status of the artist in modern history and some of the now-classic theoretical writings that critiqued biographical approaches. The core of the class will focus on recent examples of biographical writing. We will also look at popular imagery of modernist myths, for instance the film version of Van Gogh's biography, Lust for Life.

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The purpose of this course is to give studio and art history graduate students grounding in the theoretical and visual vocabulary of gender studies. Gender has been a subject of art history and criticism only since the 1970s. This class will explicitly contrast early concepts with current ones. (Many of the readings for this class were published within the last two to three years.) We will look at three of the most important focus areas of gender studies in visual art: the gaze, the body, and modernism and postmodernism. In each of these areas, we will look at how original concepts have been challenged and revised by new concerns such as female agency and subjectivity; masculinity as a social construction; racial constructions and exclusions; the body as conduit of agency; and postcolonial studies. The course is thematically (not chronologically) organized, and will draw on art from the 19th and 20th centuries; it is a discussion-oriented seminar class, where substantial weekly readings are followed by in-depth class discussion (rather than lectures).

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Traveling to rural Italy and France, to South America, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tahiti, Africa, and the Caribbean, nineteenth-century artists left metropolitan centers behind. This course looks at a host of artists – from Delacroix and Renoir to Matisse and Gauguin, to name a few – who went beyond the traditional gentleman’s Grand Tour and the classical artist’s requisite visit to Rome, to find new and unfamiliar places. These artists, along with numerous writers, scientists, tourists, and adventurers, sought out exoticism and “otherness” to revitalize western culture. This class will look at mainstream artistic and literary movements of the 19th century from the “outside”: we will consider how these European movements were formed in the “contact zone” with other cultures and on the periphery of Europe.

Our class will ask such questions as: How did travelers understand and represent “others” and how did these “others” respond to their visitors? Is all representation of the “other” exploitative? How does the history of tourism and colonialism change our views of artistic travelers? Our interdisciplinary readings draw on new ideas from a variety of perspectives, from Edward Said’s pioneering Orientalism to post-colonial theory. The course emphasizes critical approaches to the representation of travel, with a special focus on new analyses of imperialism. We will read recent books and articles with differing approaches and geographical emphases, and we look at travel representation in film, painting, prints, travel journals, and literature. The course is issue-based (not a survey); weekly readings are followed by in-depth class discussion (rather than lectures).

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This class looks at the 19th-century Parisian avant-garde through particular case studies, with an emphasis on mythic self-construction. Since the mythology of the avant-garde gives priority to the individual over the collective and institutional, we will focus on modes of self-fashioning, from self-portraiture to mythic self-description, and explicit parodies of tradition and traditional genres. Since the New Art History was to a large extent shaped around study of this period, we will also be particularly attentive to the theoretical underpinnings of the authors we read.

We will consider a larger question underlying most interpretations of the avant-garde: should it be seen as an anti-bourgeois, revolutionary force or as an experimental arm of bourgeois capitalism? Ultimately, readings for this class collectively challenge the modernist reading of the avant-garde as an inevitable, suprahistorical development that moves culture forward in a linear path toward abstraction.

In addition to an advanced knowledge of artists and images of this period, students will acquire good working knowledge of the main themes and tropes of avant-garde culture, its social contexts, and differing interpretive and methodological approaches in cultural studies.

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In 1978 Edward Said published his ground-breaking book, Orientalism, in which he argued that there has been institutionalization of the “Orient” within the West. Orientalist discourse, he claimed, acted on the East to render it visible, to submit it to the mastery of the West. Since then, this view has been revised and criticized, especially by post-colonial theorists who say that the notion of Orientalism disempowers the colonized cultures of the Middle East. Our class will look at this historical and theoretical debate through the filter of art, literature, and film dealing with the Islamic cultures of the Middle East and the Mediterranean (from Turkey to Egypt and North Africa). We will emphasize western representations of the “Orient,” but we will also look at some indigenous artists, writers, and postcolonial theorists of Islamic cultures. The core of the class is historical, with a focus on the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, but we will also look at parallels between this colonial history and contemporary culture and politics.

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The seminar will focus on four major figures of Romanticism, Friedrich, Géricault, Ingres, and Delacroix; the point of the course will be to compare the circumstances -- institutional, political, cultural, social -- in which each artist worked, and to think about how each responded in their art to those circumstances. We will focus on the notion of a developing "public sphere" in the early 19th-century, and the common assumption that Romantic art marks a retreat to the interior.

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Examination of issues and methods in the study of women and gender in the visual arts, with a period focus on modern art. Course covers a range of methodologies, including the early "women's history" approach, theories of gender construction in history, poststructuralism and feminist theory, and recent theories of the female subjective voice in autobiography.

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In this class we study the main artistic developments in Europe and in the United States during the 20th century, examining their connections with cultural, social, political and technological changes. We also pay particular attention to the contemporary context of production and reception of this art, in order to reconstruct its often shocking original effect and to understand the way in which its meanings were circulated and negotiated.

In this seminar, we analyze crucial moments and issues in the art practice, theory and criticism of the last 40 years or so. Our focus is mostly on the United States, and on the concepts of modernism and postmodernism, which artists, critics and historians have used to characterize our recent past, and which are helpful to understand what lies beyond it: our present cultural and artistic condition, and perhaps the future. We start with some of the main interpretations of modernism (Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried), and then study the way in which the neo-avant-garde, pop art, minimalism, site specific art, installation, conceptual art, institutional critique, feminism, performance, video, and photography have challenged the modernist paradigm. After the exploration of these artistic strategies and of their critical interpretations, we examine various notions of postmodernism, including those of philosophers. Finally, we close with a consideration of the role of globalization for contemporary art.

In this seminar, we will examine the radical transformations in the form and notion of painting that artists active throughout Europe produced at the beginning of the last century. In the quest for the “purity” of painting, artists explored the aesthetic resources of its medium and re-thought the modes in which it refers to the world, in some cases pursuing abstraction. In the same years, they also invented collage, papier collé, and the ready-made, thereby questioning and exploding the boundaries of painting. Among the protagonists of this exciting and enormously influential adventure were Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Umberto Boccioni, Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp. We will study their revolutionary innovations by means of careful visual analysis of their works, reading of their texts, and consideration of a variety of art historical approaches.

In this seminar, we study key protagonists and theories of early 20th century painting, with the broader goal to revise some famous interpretations of modernism in the visual arts, and to move towards a new one. Our focus is the concept of the “purity” of painting – a central idea in the history and theory of artistic modernism.

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential (and debated) American critics of the 20th century, used the notion of “purity” to refer to what he thought was the essential goal of modernist artists: the self-critical effort to explore what was “unique to the nature” of each art’s “medium,” which for painting is constituted by form, line, “the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment.” This pursuit of “purity,” according to Greenberg, led modernist painting to attain a condition in which “the picture...  exhausts itself in the visual sensation it produces” and “there is nothing to identify, connect or think about, but everything to feel.” Greenberg’s interpretation will be the starting point of our research, which will aim at understanding and questioning his position.

We will do so by means of a close analysis of:

• painters who used the notion of “purity,” or whose art was described with this term (Picasso, Boccioni, Robert Delaunay, Kandinsky and Mondrian);
• art critics, art theorists and philosophers contemporary to these painters (Apollinaire, Worringer, and Bergson);
• and a wide range of recent important critical and theoretical approaches to these artists and issues (L. Steinberg, V. Spate, P. Crowther, R-C. Washton Long, E. Braun, M. Cheetham, T.J. Clark, W.J.T. Mitchell, among others).

Through this work, we will see that much more was at stake in the “purity” of early 20th century painting than the specificity of its medium.

• History, theory and practice of comics
• Open to all majors
• Projects: Everybody will create a character and put the character into a narrative.
• General rule: projects must conform to comics practice, i.e., be capable of mass production and mass consumption, no weird, one-off arty objects allowed! Collaborations are acceptable (just like real comics). Think of the audience that your comic will "target", such as old men, young girls, college deans, gangsters (political or academic), etc.
• Images can be generated in all media, BUT must lend themselves to reproduction! Traditional strip comics, comic books, single panel cartoons (Like Ziggy and The Farside), photo-funnies, Manga, animation (flip books, gif-cons on the Web, etc...)...
• Films: "Crumb", Sample movie serials based on comic characters, like the early Batman serial, Captain Marvel, Smilin' Jack, etc....)

Be Forewarned

‘Dali and Surrealism” deals with images, ideas and issues that many students may find to be shocking. A few such items listed randomly are the celebration of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, ideas from the writings of Sigmund Freud ranging from sexual symbolism in dreams to the Oedipal Complex, fetishism and other themes of sexual perversion, the impact of both communism and Nazi ideology during the 30s and 40s, madness as a model for art, a continuation of the anti-Christian thought of the French Revolution, the embracing of the occult, and advocacy by the Surrealists of cultural and sometimes political revolution. These and similar themes are commonplace in Surrealist art and writings and in historical and critical analyses of Surrealism. People who find these and similar themes to be repellent are advised strongly to drop the course. Readings, oral reports and other assignments cannot be avoided simply because the theme strikes you as immoral or shocking.

Course Overview

Having said all of the above, it is important to remember that the Surrealists were of a generation that often aimed to shock the much dreaded-bourgeoisie – an early form of cultural shock therapy.If you feel shocked, repelled or creeped out after viewing certain Surrealist works, you get the point!The course isn’t intended to “convert” you to Freudianism, Sadism, Marxism or whatever, but to help you to understand why these and other “isms” were so powerful at the time (they still are for that matter).

The course does not begin or end with a monolithic view of Surrealism good or bad. The approach is more atomistic than in most art history courses, and we approach the topic through a variety of questions, themes, and historical interpretations. The approach is more to point out the limitations of interpretations, whether from traditional art history or the “new” art history. Our understanding of Dali and Surrealism will be built up piece by piece as we listen to student reports, visit the Dali Museum, study Surrealist texts, watch Surrealist films, examine Surrealist prints at graphics Studio and listen to our guest speaker, Peter Tush from the Dali Museum.

The seminar is an advanced art history course in research, writing, historical analysis and professional presentation. If you taking the course because it “fits my schedule” you may regret your decision.

Purposes of the Course

1. To acquaint students with some of the key theoretical issues in their chosen discipline, including the idea that “theory” is as dated as “Post-Modernism”. (The word “theory” always makes art and art history seem important, serious and scientific, but what can the word possibly mean in our discipline?)
2. To emphasize that one cannot simply "learn about art" without the mediation of one intellectual framework or another.
3. To encourage art history students to be more conscious of their own intellectual assumptions and to examine them critically.
4. To emphasize the role of argument and counter-argument in art historical practice and to downplay the passive listing of facts culled from secondary sources. 
5. To help students to decide whether art history is really their thing. 
6. To gain experience in professional methods of research, writing and oral presentations.

"Posters in Action" combines lectures on the history of posters with hands-on design and production of posters for use in the local community. In each Monday session, Brad Nickels will give lectures on the history of posters, including an overview of aesthetic, commercial and political uses of posters. Also, on Mondays we will make announcements, give assignments and look at your thumbnail sketches for posters. Each Wednesday, Brad Shanks will give computer-based design instruction for making silkscreen printed posters. As explained in the list of assignments below, students will make posters for real-life use and must be able to give a perspective on their work in relation to the history of posters.

This period survey course investigates art and architecture produced in Europe during the seventeenth century, a time of enormous scientific curiosity, international trade, exploration and absolutist rule.  Lectures will consider the exciting achievements of artists such as the Carracci, Caravaggio, Bernini, Velázquez, Poussin, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, as well as other important but less familiar works by their contemporaries.  We will explore not only paintings and sculpture, but also architecture such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and Versailles, the palace of Louis XIV.  Throughout the course our focus will be on the political, religious, and economic ideologies that underlay the visual appeal and emotional impact that images, objects, and sites had upon their viewers.  We will discuss the particular individuals and groups that commissioned, consumed, and enjoyed works of art as well as the public and private spaces in which they were displayed.  Lectures and readings are designed to situate seventeenth-century art and architecture within the religious practices, politics, cultural encounters, and socio-economic life of Italy, France, Spain, England, and the Low Countries.

The paintings and prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his contemporaries offer a fascinating point of entry into the art and culture of the sixteenth century in Northern Europe.  This course spans the tumultuous period of the Reformation, Iconoclasm, and Antwerp’s apogee as a center of art and trade.  We’ll employ Bruegel’s work as a touchstone that offers us access to other artistic and cultural currents of the period by thematically focusing on such topics as: Bruegel’s formulation of a ‘vernacular’ Northern artistic idiom and his self-conscious response to earlier artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel’s reinterpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and the relationship between image, text, and language in Bruegel’s depictions of proverbs. In addition, we‘ll investigate Bruegel’s pictorial legacy in the seventeenth century by examining the works of Jan Brueghel, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Adriaen Brouwer, Jan Steen and others.  We’ll explore the art historical controversies surrounding images and the act of interpretation, comic peasants and notions of comedy, and the relationship between art and contemporary theatre and performance

Puking peasants, fools, and bawdy households are but a few of the categories of comic images that figure in the visual culture of the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  This seminar explores the complex and fascinating relationship between art and humor, text and image in terms of various modalities of the comic.  By exploring paintings and engravings in terms of early modern poetics, this course hopes to provide insight into the cultural specificity of humor and to help students better understand why artists chose to depict comic subjects and/or laughter in their art.  We’ll investigate notions of civility, as well as the social, cultural, and ethical attitudes towards laughter and jesting that informed the creation and appreciation of such imagery.  We will think about the rhetorical relationship between early modern art and classical writings on comedy and laughter.  Our attention will first focus on the medieval legacy of the carnivalesque: images of fools, social outcasts, and the peasant imagery of Pieter Bruegel.  In the second unit of the course we will discuss paintings and prints of unequal lovers, giggling courtesans, merry musicians, and jolly topers by the Utrecht Caravaggisti in terms of notions of jesting practices and social mores. Finally, we will investigate the satirical representation of misbehaving beggars by Adriaen van de Venne and the farcical (self-) representations of Adriaen Brouwer, Joos van Craesbeeck, Jan Miense Molenaer, and Jan Steen in terms of artists’ efforts to construct a comic persona.  Throughout the term we will be interested in how images engage their viewers as well as in the cultural functions of laughter and jesting both in images and in social discourse.

Have you ever wondered why some saints weep tears and cry out while others gaze stoically at the viewer?  Why people rarely laugh in portraits, or how artists might depict something as elusive as love?  This course will explore the visual language that artists developed to depict the “passions of the soul,” or what we today call emotions.  Our investigation will focus on four historical moments and their attendant cultural contexts using the paintings and prints of particular artists including: 1) the devotional panels and altarpieces of Rogier van der Weyden and Hugo van der Goes in late fifteenth-century Antwerp and Bruges; 2) the religious and secular paintings, prints and drawings of Leonardo and their impact on the art of Jan van Hemessen, and Quentin Massys in the first half of the sixteenth century; 3) the paintings of Caravaggio and the so-called Utrecht Caravaggisti in the early seventeenth century; and 4) the art of Charles Le Brun and the French Academy during the last quarter of the seventeenth century.  We will consider the changing function of religious art and the impact of the ‘modern devotion’ (devotio moderna) movement; the relationship between the passions and (moral) character in Galenic humoral theory; sixteenth-century artists’ interest in physiognomy (the notion that the shape or appearance of certain facial features revealed one’s character); and art theoretical prescriptions for representing the passions. 

This seminar will explore Dutch visual and material culture of the seventeenth century, focusing specifically on cross-cultural encounters between the Dutch Republic and their colonial possessions and trading contacts.  Through our examination of paintings, prints, maps, and material objects such as weapons, decorative arts, porcelain, and other goods, we will investigate the unique political and economic circumstances that facilitated the unprecedented commercial success of Dutch trade and exploration.  In particular, we will turn our attention to the vibrant art market that existed in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century and discuss contemporary cultures of collecting.  Throughout the term, we will critically question various cultural ideologies of Self, Other, civility, and savageness in terms of the burgeoning national identity (identities) of the Dutch Republic as depicted in and produced by its art and material culture.  In addition, we will consider how other cultures (for example Qing China and Edo Japan) represented the European Other as opposed to focusing exclusively on how the Dutch depicted non-western peoples as “primitive” or “exotic.”  The first half of the term will focus on economies of art, trade and the New World, and (the depiction of) collecting practices.  We'll then look more specifically at the representation of Brazil, China, and to a lesser extent Japan and India in the second half of the course.

This course examines books during the critical period of the shift from script to print (roughly the time period of 1450-1600), although we will sometimes refer to earlier manuscripts and modern books to set the subject in a broader critical and historical context. Special focus will be placed on books as visual objects in Venice.

Students will be encouraged to learn to recognize and critique the assumptions and methods of art and book historians and to develop their own voice in writing. At the same time, it is hoped that students will develop a greater familiarity with some major monuments of manuscripts and printed books.

Venice is famous as a unique, beautiful, exotic, and romantic city. The fascination that the city holds is intensified for many by its fragility.  Once the heart of an empire, the city is sinking as the Adriatic waters are rising, and the resident population is increasingly replaced by tourists. The city is in the midst of a crisis; how can the city be made viable economically and physically for its inhabitants without turning it further into a Disney-like recreation of itself?

This course will trace the development of Venice’s formulation of itself as ‘the most serene Republic,’ and as imperial colonizer, or ‘the other Rome’ in the late middle ages and Renaissance, to its decline and development into a city that has been turned into a work of art colonized by tourists. Key concepts that will be investigated include the transformation of medieval appropriation, or use of spolia, to simulation; and of medieval pilgrimage and colonization to modern tourism. Venice will serve as the subject for a broader inquiry into the nature and history of art historical inquiry in general. Is it possible to unearth a ‘reality’ in the claims a city makes for itself through its art and literature, when we ourselves are in an age of simulacra, when developers in Las Vegas claim to ‘create a Venice more real than Venice itself?’

Class readings and discussions, with position papers and assignments geared toward the development of the seminar paper, will train students to become more familiar with painting in the era of the Bellini, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto.  Students will write a seminar paper, in which they will argue a thesis related to one of a number of methodological and interpretive issues about Venetian painting that will be approached in class, including:

1) What functions did paintings serve in Venetian society and in religion? 2) What was the nature of the profession of painter in this period and how did it change?  3) How do we interpret or read ‘difficult’ paintings such as Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’? 4) What was the nature of art criticism in relation to Venetian painting, and what was the influence of Venetian painting and art criticism?

The exploration and redefinition of identity and selfhood has engaged much recent critical thought, and holds special resonance for scholars of the art still usually called ‘Renaissance’. Debate over whether to use the term ‘Early Modern,’ or even more recently, ‘early colonial,’ instead of ‘Renaissance’ points to transformations of the underlying premises for framing time periods, which have in large part been defined by notions of self and individuation. This course examines changing definitions of the Renaissance, with special attention to uncovering the assumptions about self and identity which underlie these definitions. This is a vast subject, so we will concentrate on examining notions of self in portraiture, self-portraiture, artist biography, and the social standing of artists.

The introduction of exactly reproducible two-dimensional images to Europe in the fifteenth century was a watershed in Western visual culture. In this class we will explore the origins of prints in Europe, and the effect of the multiplication of images on the visual arts and mentalities of the West. Students will write a seminar paper on one, or a set of, numerous Renaissance prints in local collections, in which they will argue a thesis related to one of a number of methodological and interpretive issues.

Questions to be explored include: What are the effects of multiples on notions of an original and originality? How does the practical separation of the idea of the image and its execution in many prints affect the status of artists and craftsmen? What are the practical and psychological effects of a proliferation of manufactured images? What is the relationship between multiples, pornography, and censorship in the period? What were the consequences for science and other fields of inquiry?