2007–2008 Art History Courses
Critical Models in Art and Theory, 1965 to the Present
Level: Advanced
Semester: Spring
This course seeks to consider the interrelationship between contemporary art and critical theory. Taking up methodologies of theory elaborated over the past decades such as post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, post-colonialism, and critical modernist studies, this course will re-examine art practice since 1965, institutional critique most centrally, in the light of its close connections to theory. Looking closely at the careers of artists such as Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Michael Asher, Mark Dion, Isaac Julien, and Andrea Fraser, particular attention will be paid to the function of theory in (post) modernist art discourse and to critical evaluations of the role of institutions in the fields of political theory, literary criticism, cultural geography, and cultural history.Early Modern Art
Level: Open
Semester: Year
The early 20th Century was a period of extraordinary innovation in the arts. The Fall semester class treats the first quarter of the 20th Century, beginning with the late works of Paul Cézanne, whose strange, awkward paintings exerted an extraordinary influence over divergent movements, including Fauvism and Cubism. The phenomenon of Primitivism will be a central issue treated by this class, especially in the work of Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Pablo Picasso. Issues include the appropriation by European artists of forms taken from African and Oceanic cultures, as well as engagement with non-canonical work such as paintings by the naïve European artist Henri Rousseau, eccentric predecessors of Modernism such as El Greco, and various forms of archaic European art. Authors include T.J. Clark, Hal Foster, William Rubin, and Thomas McEvilly. Other featured artists and movements include Paul Gauguin, Piet Mondrian, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, and Dada. The Spring semester class treats the second quarter of the 20th Century, emphasizing Surrealism, from André Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto to the early works of Jackson Pollock.
Mexico: Art and Culture
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
The opposing belief systems of the leading imperial powers of the Old and New worlds collided with one another in Mexico. The violent consequences of this world historical encounter between the Spanish and the Aztecs left a legacy of tragedy, beauty, and magnificence, and gave rise to modern Mexico. This class provides an introduction to the Aztecs, including their principal gods, mythologies and religious practices, such as human sacrifice. Emphasis is placed on the post-1910 Revolutionary period, during which time Nationalist sentiments led to a rejection of Eurocentrism. This resulted in a positive reappraisal of indigenous civilizations and in a valorization of mestizaje (racial mixing) and popular traditions. After looking at works by the Olmecs and the Aztecs, we turn to the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, who was retrospectively repositioned as the progenitor of Modern Mexican art. Featured artists include the muralists Jean Charlot, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as the innovative modernism of Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo. We shall also examine Day of the Dead as a popular tradition in the context of highly contentious nationalist debates. Authors include Jean Charlot, Diego Rivera, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Dawn Ades.
First-Year Studies: Thinking Art/Works
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
To the deceptively simple question, “What is art?” the refrain has often been, “I don’t know, but I know it when I see it.” This statement, in its apparent obduracy, betrays several fundamental insecurities. Leaving aside its aggressivity, we might identify these insecurities through a series of questions: Is “art” a property particular to a given object, or is it a product of the beholder’s experience? How do we recognize it? What does it do, how does it work? Who makes it? Who experiences it? How and why? This first-year studies course traces the continuities and the changes in the ways art has been thought about and through in Western tradition, from Plato to yesterday. Drawing on textual sources from ancient Greece to the contemporary metropolis, we will ask what the visual arts might consist of and what their purposes might be. We will begin with the establishment of a common language with which to describe what it is we see when we look at works of art. Over the course of the year, we will attempt to articulate and to historicize—and, perhaps, to change—our own definitions of artwork, audience, purpose, etc. In the second semester, we will focus on the modern and the contemporary, with special units devoted to transnational models and critiques of modernism and Western aesthetics.
World Architecture and Urban Design: 1945-Present: Postwar, Postmodern, Post-Theory
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
The theory and practice, semantics and structure of architecture and the development of cities from 1945 to the present will be studied through close reading of primary and secondary texts, slide lectures, and discussions. Initial weeks will be spent developing familiarity with the assumptions and architects of High Modernism—Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto—and the organicists—Antoni Gaudí, Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn. In the next weeks, we will cover the developing issues of monumentalities, spatialities, pop-technism, pomo-ornament, deconstructive constructionists, and sustainable symbolists. Architects studied and situated will include Louis Kahn (U.S.), Arata Isozaki (Japan), Luis Barragan (Mexico), Zaha Hadid (U.K. and Iraq), Coop Himmelblau (Austria), and others. Emphasis will be equally on individual achievements and the problematic circumstances of cultural production and modern capital. Cities to be used as case studies will be Berlin and the Cold Warriors, Toyko and the Metabolists, Los Angeles and the Critical Regionalists, Brasilia and the International Nationalists, New York and the Post-9/11 Memorialists. Group conference in the first semester will include works by Michel Foucault, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham. The second semester will focus either on readings in contemporary urbanism, analyses of student’s hometowns as urban planning, and develop- ment projects or design workshops dealing with campus or park design.
Christianity and the Roman Empire
Cameron C. Afzal, David Castriota
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Roman culture has traditionally been studied for its capacity to absorb and transform the ideas and beliefs of others, most notably those of the Greeks. This course, however, seeks to examine the interaction between traditional Greco-Roman religious belief or ideology and various religious movements within Judaism from the late Hellenistic period onward. Judaism of this period was itself complex and diverse, including the Pharisees, Sadducees, and breakaway groups like the Essenes, as well as the messianic movement that eventually produced Christianity. The course will consider such developments against the background of Hellenistic Greek and Roman imperial religion and ruler glorification, various forms of Judaism in the Second Temple period, eventually focusing on the transition of Christianity from its initially Jewish setting into a movement that spread to peoples throughout the Roman Empire. We will study the Jesus movement, the spread of the Church under Paul, and the development of early Christian church institutions, doctrine, and theology as an evermore significant component of Greco-Roman culture, increasingly divergent from its Hellenistic Jewish origins, in the first Christian centuries. The course will conclude with the imperialization of Christianity as it became the dominant religion and ideology of a new Christian Roman empire under Constantine. Though focusing extensively on historical and religious texts, the course will also examine the evidence of artistic monuments.
Ancient Albion–Art and Culture in the British Isles from Stonehenge to the Viking Invasions
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Given their geographical setting at the northwestern extreme of Europe, the arts and cultures of “Albion,” or Britain and Ireland, have often been described by the term “insular” in the sense of isolated, discrete, or peripheral, yet nothing could be further from the truth. No less than six Roman emperors spent time in Britain, and four came to power there. To a great extent, Irish clerics were responsible for the survival of classical learning during the Dark Ages. Indeed, throughout history cultural developments in the British Isles were intimately related to ideas and events on the European Continent and the Mediterranean. Following this basic premise, in the fall semester the course will examine civilization in Britain and Ireland from the late Stone Age or Megalithic period, through the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, to the coming of the Celts and the Roman conquest. In the spring, we will focus on later Roman Britain, Irish monasticism, and the emergence of Anglo-Saxon culture down to the arrival of the Vikings. At every turn, we will consider interactions with the urban civilizations to the south and west—the early Aegean, Greece, Rome, and the early medieval Continent—to discover that Albion was an integral part of the political, religious, and economic forces that have shaped the art and history of Europe up to the present time.
The Art and Architecture of the Italian Renaissance
Level: Open
Semester: Year
An in-depth survey of the major monuments of Italian art and architecture from 1300 to 1550. Equal emphasis will be given to the canon of art works by artists such as Giotto, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo; to readings of major critics and historians of Italian art; and to the broader intellectual trends and social realities and movements that provide a context for our understanding the artist’s and, to a lesser extent, the critics’ creations. Thus, unified Italian churches will be juxtaposed with gender-segregated social practice, theories of genius with concepts of handicraft, pagan ideals with Christian rituals. The first semester will focus on a close reading of texts surrounding the first polemical pamphlets about art in early modern history, Alberti’s On Painting and On Architecture, and will include works by Erwin Panofsky, Michael Baxandall, and Anthony Grafton. The second semester will engage the intellectual and aesthetic debates surrounding Michelangelo as genius, model, courtier, and outcast. Class papers will deal with developing a vocabulary for compositional analysis, critical issues in Italian intellectual and social history, and varied interpretive strategies, applied to works of visual art and culture. Conference projects can engage from a variety of critical and historical viewpoints, European art and architecture from 1300 to 1800, and relevant historical and literary issues from 1400 to 1700.
Revolution to Romanticism: Art in the Era of Napoleon
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
While Napoleon’s political impact was extraordinary, his cultural legacy was equally dynamic and still has strong resonance today. This course will concentrate on two seemingly divergent styles that, nevertheless, were often intertwined—neo-Classicism and Romanticism. Neo-classicism was the artistic style most favored by Napoleon, and it served to promote his republican ideals at the beginning of his career, and later, the aesthetic vision of his empire. His official painter, Jacques-Louis David, and David’s disciples and pupils such as Gros, Gérard, Girodet, and Ingres, helped to spread Napoleonic images of power far beyond French shores. How closely were art and the politics of the age entwined? How did artists employ the tools of propaganda? Why did the stylistic conflation of classical austerity and romantic fantasy occur? What was the significance of Napoleon’s global reach in the arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative objects, and costume—among both his allies and his enemies? Sessions will include the roots of the classical revival in the late eighteenth century and the demise of rococo style; David and the French Revolution; propaganda and caricature; Napoleon as military hero and the history of battle painting; the all-powerful emperor and Goya’s images of dissent in Spain; Turner, Constable, and English art in the Napol-eonic era; Runge, Friedrich, and the rise of German nationalism; Canova, Thorvaldsen, and monumental sculpture in Italy; Géricault and the fallen hero; and finally, the revolutionary vision of Delacroix and the Romantic ideal.
African Art: Images of Transformation
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
In this seminar, we will examine in depth the art of a number of African societies and focus on art that is used in rites of passage to mark transitions from one status or condition to another. We will examine art objects used in initiation rites that celebrate one’s movement from childhood to adult. We will look at how an ordinary person becomes (and remains) a sacred king. Finally we will analyze the performance of weddings and funerals to see how they make use of space and architecture. In these ways, we will try to gain a sense of the complex cultural meanings, the ambiguity and expressive power, and the dynamic transformation of past and present African art.