Art History

Visual arts courses allow students to integrate the practice and historical analysis of painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, prints, photographs, video, and other media. Art history courses provide a historical and theoretical grounding for studio courses. Studio arts courses enable students to experiment with various media, practicing techniques they learn about in both art history and the studio, and developing their own creative vision. The art history program is designed for arts majors, and also for other students who want to increase their understanding of art, culture, and history. The introductory courses develop basic skills in art analysis and critical writing and introduce concepts and images fundamental to the issues considered in the upper-level courses. The 200-level courses explore topics in greater depth, both historical and aesthetic. The 300-level courses are designed for advanced students and offer the opportunity to examine both art-historical writing and art objects.

Visual Art and Writing This course is an introduction to the practice of art historical analysis. We use several writing techniques to investigate the process of looking at art. The objects we analyze are taken from a variety of periods, cultures, and media. We focus mostly on 19th- and 20th-century modern art, works by Impressionists such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt; Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin; avant-gardists Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock; postmodernist Barbara Kruger. We compare our own observations to writings on art by poets and scholars. We think carefully about the role of language and how it can enrich or detract from our experience of art. We consider some basic questions in approaching art’s “history,” including the use of the primary source and the art object’s relationship to specific historical events. The course moves toward the integration of careful looking, creative writing, original thinking, and historical grounding. Students regularly read their writing aloud for class critique. Longer paper assignments are written on topics which students choose. No prerequisites.

Survey of Western Art: Ancient to Medieval A survey of developments in the visual arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture) from prehistory through the Gothic period, this course focuses on major works of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe. Basic skills in stylistic analysis and interpretation of subject matter are emphasized; cultural background as an aid to the appreciation and understanding of art is explored. Students may take Art History 101 and Art History 102 in sequence or independently.

Survey of Western Art: Renaissance to Postmodern This course, the second half of the Western art survey, covers developments in European and American art since c. 1400. Lectures and class discussions focus on the changing roles of art and the artist in society; on art as the expression of individual and cultural values; on stylistic issues; and on the relationships between art and philosophy, history, and politics. Students develop their critical and analytical skills while becoming familiar with a broad selection of works in relation to their cultural contexts.

The Meaning of the Nude in Greek Art and Thought The nude is a defining motif in the art and thought of classical Greece. This course examines and analyzes the principles and meanings of “ideal form” and their impact and power in the development of Western ideas and art, focusing on the ideas of rationality, idealism, symmetry, and universality. Does the “spirit” of the nude originate in the Apollonian or the Dionysian; in the rational or the irrational? How do our contemporary understandings of the body, of sexuality, and of what it means to be human illuminate, contribute to, or obscure our understanding of these principles? This course satisfies one half of the arts requirement.

Heaven and Hell: The Struggle for the Soul in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Thought Hell and heaven are transcendental concepts of great antiquity and power used to explain, understand, and control the purpose and order of the temporal world, death, and life after death. What are the sources of these concepts and how do they manifest themselves in the arts? The course will explore these ideas, examining art of the Christian world as well as the Christian liturgy, the Bible, the Apocrypha, and works by Dante, Milton, Plato, and Blake. These concerns are considered: 1) the effects of cataclysmic events such as famine, war, disease, and pestilence on conceptions of the Last Judgment, hell and apocalypse, heaven and redemption; 2) challenges to religious orthodoxy; 3) the status of men and women; and 4) the relationship of religion to political and economic systems. This course satisfies one half of the arts requirement.

History of Photography This course is a chronological and thematic survey of the history of photography from the 1830s to the present in Europe and the United States. We look carefully at the subject, style, and technique of representative photos and place them in their social and political contexts. We analyze a range of photographs: early technical experiments, motion studies, popular portraits, avant-garde photos, landscapes, and documentary images. We discuss the historical debates over photography as mechanical tool or medium for artistic expression; relationships between photographs and painting; photography as a medium of personal and political expression; and works by African- American and women photographers. This course is the first of a two-semester sequence in the history and analysis of photography; the two courses can be taken independently of each other. There are no prerequisites.

Critical Studies in the Northern Renaissance: Dürer, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Bosch, and Bruegel The art of 15th- and 16th-century Flanders, Germany, and the Netherlands is studied, including works by Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Bosch, Bruegel, and Dürer. How is this work related to the scientific developments, religious controversies, and the political and economic changes of the period? The course examines patronage, the changing social status of artists, the commodification of art, and the impact of the rise of the middle class on art. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the class explores the different and changing methodologies in the analysis and valuation of art and the work of artists, including an examination of how these judgments affect our ways of seeing, understanding, and assigning meaning to a work. Course fee to cover museum trip.

Cultural Perspectives: Women Artists This course examines the art produced by women from the Renaissance to the present with particular emphasis on contemporary American women artists. Feminist art historians in the 1970s unearthed several past women artists from the obscurity into which they had fallen. A group of younger scholars, benefiting from the groundbreaking work of the previous generation, is addressing new issues: What is the value of the female artist’s biography in understanding women’s art? What are the standards by which women’s art can be appraised? How is traditional female craft being redefined? What are some new ways of thinking about the roles of woman artist and critic? How are representations of “the feminine” by “the female artist” constructed at specific historical moments? How do issues of race and class enter into the analysis of art by women? Students present their original research topics to the class. Course fee to cover museum trip.

Cultural Perspectives: Japanese Woodblock Prints (Ukiyo-E) Ukiyo-e, or woodblock prints, were produced in Japan beginning in the 17th century. This course investigates the phenomenon of ukiyo-e prints, their subjects (including geishas, courtesans, actors, wrestlers, and landscapes), styles, and techniques. To understand the prints more fully we read excerpted translations from Edo literature and a detailed anthropological study of geisha life, and we listen to Japanese music. We situate the prints in the context of Japanese society, culture, and politics. This course satisfies one half of either the cultural perspectives requirement or the arts requirement.

Cultural Perspectives: Impressionism and Japonisme When Edo Japan was opened to traders in the 1850s, woodblock prints were one of several commodities imported into the West. In France and England, Impressionist artists used them as a point of departure for their own artmaking. After investigating how the prints were imported, we consider their new meanings and associations for avant-garde artists such as Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, and van Gogh, who sometimes quoted from ukiyo-e in their art and sometimes borrowed their formal or thematic qualities. Emphasis is on the difference between original and borrowed meanings, the appeal of the prints for the middle classes in each country, and on the range of Western attitudes toward Japanese culture implied by such borrowings. This course satisfies one half of either the cultural perspectives requirement or the arts requirement.

Cultural Perspectives: Imagining the Harem For centuries Western observers have been fascinated by the harem, based as it was in multiple wives and slavery. This course interrogates that cross-cultural fascination, as evidenced in paintings and prints of the harem made mostly in the 19th century in England and France. We use poetry, literature, and travel accounts to understand such imagery, including written works by Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Florence Nightingale. We take a backward look at 18th-century writers and artists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Montesquieu, and even Mozart. Some 20th-century texts are also analyzed: French photographs of North African "harem women" c. 1930 and a miniseries titled "The Harem" made for television in the 1990s. Commentators have repeatedly asked questions along these lines: is the harem a legitimate form of social organization or is it a site of sexual oppression, and personal enslavement, an institution that must be "liberated" (by the West)? The course integrates writing by theorists such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha.

Clothing in Art A focus on clothing in artworks of the modern era opens a new world of inquiry, a fascinating means of entry into culture, society, history, and gender of the last two centuries. This course considers how clothing is represented in specific painted and photographic art of the West. We theorize about why “masculine” and “feminine” clothing choices appear in visual art after c.1830 when women become the “marked” or decorated gender. In a variety of case studies, we suggest how clothing indicated identity, status, and power in various cultures and eras. We trace how images of clothes can be “read” (given meanings) in their own day and today using current theoretical models. Students choose their own research topics. This course fulfills the Arts requirement for the AA degree. Art History 102 or another art history or theory course or permission of the instructor is required for admission to the course.

Picasso’s Art: Politics and Sexuality This course looks at Picasso, starting from his youth and continuing through the Rose and Blue periods, the innovative cubist experiments, the neoclassical phase, his involvement with Dada and Surrealism, and ending with his monumental Guernica produced in 1937. Students are provided with a method of analyzing his paintings, arthistorical writing about them, and their relationships to events in his life: the anarchist movement in Barcelona, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, his relationships with women. Thus, the course analyzes the connections among art, politics, and sexual politics. No prerequisites.

Theories of Photography In this course we think about what theory is and what it contributes to our understanding of photography. We read some of the most interesting and influential writing about photography, including the work of its classic theorists: Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and critical post-structuralists. We correlate theory to the analyses of specific photographs taken from the last 160 years of photo history. The course is based on the premise that no photograph simply captures reality and, instead, that all photos, like any other form of cultural representation, are subjective constructions of experience. As such, photos are imbued with conventions and social and political ideologies of the photographer and her/his times. In the second half of the semester we read critics who have been influenced by the classic theorists and evaluate their case studies of individual photographs and broader issues in the history of photography. This course is the second of a two-semester sequence in the history and analysis of photography; the two courses can be taken independently. There are no prerequisites.

Analyzing Television The focus of this course is perhaps the most pervasive element in the American popular culture landscape: television. Since its inception, commercial network TV has also been considered one of the primary means for inculcating social values and ideologies. The course provides critical, historical, and multidisciplinary perspectives on viewing network TV as ways to understand, rethink, appreciate, and resist the discourses television offers. It explores how TV contributes to the making of a “mainstream” that upholds the status quo, most evident in “the news” and commercials. We consider portrayals of gender and race and explore the topic of violence on network TV. The problem of employing “elite” tools (postmodern and feminist critical theories) to analyze an accessible and “popular” medium is also explored. Prerequisite: sophomore status or the permission of the instructor.

Graphic Art and Social Protest An investigation of the relationship between the graphic arts and the “art of conscience,” this course examines individual artists as part of a larger community. The course begins with an analysis of work from 1900-1930 in Europe, then considers the protest art of the Americas since 1930, including the Social Realists (whose primary concerns were work, poverty, and class), the Mexican Muralists’ struggle with national identity, revolution, and socialism, and the art of imperialism and war. Finally, the class addresses the role of the poster in protest art, using the Cuban Experiment model. The course also has a studio component that includes demonstrations of printmaking techniques, discussions with artists, and student projects. Course fee to cover museum trip. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor required to take the course at the 300-level.

African-American Art and Thought This course explores the experience, work, and ideas of 20th-century African-American artists in the United States. We seek to understand responses of African- Americans to those defining moments in our national history: slavery, Emancipation, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the Civil Rights and feminist movements. African-American thinkers have defined for themselves the great complexity, diversity, and contradiction in documenting these events and responding to them in art produced within the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Power movement, and the problematic politics of multiculturalism. We foreground the voices of African-American artists, activists, writers, and musicians. Controversies to be analyzed include the politics of anonymous art done by slaves, including quiltmaking; assimilation of the influence of both Paris and Africa; folk art, which raises issues of legitimacy and authenticity.

Critical Issues in Contemporary Photography This course looks at the work of contemporary photographers in the context of the critical discourse that both surrounds and fuels its creation. Among the topics to be discussed are the staged tableau, still-life constructions, appropriation, the body/the self, photography and abstraction, new narratives, reinventing the landscape, and the continual blurring of boundaries between photography and other media. We will read theorists and critics who have influenced, and responded to, the changes in visual strategies used by postmodern photographers. With permission from the instructor, students with the prerequisite of Photography I, Studio Art 102, may take this class at the 300 level for 4 credits and complete additional studio work as part of this course. While prior experience in the studio is not necessary, the work of students in the class who are active photographers will serve as a resource for dialogue and critique.

Transference: Image Memory History This course, an investigation of Architecture and the Poetics of Place and of Color and Light in Painting, is designed to incorporate the methodologies of the studio arts into the framework of the art historical survey. It attempts to provide hands-on approach to seeing, and talking about the histories and philosophy of art. Students will learn the Polaroid photographic image/emulsion transfer process. We will begin by using the Polaroid process to explore ideas and concepts of civic, public and private space, of country and city, of the spiritual aspects of Site, and the psychological and emotional aspects of our relationship to them. The second half of the course will be devoted to an examination of the works by Giotto, Piero, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Degas and Manet, Cassatt,Whistler, Turner and Cezanne, among others. The focus will be on the painters’ use of color and light and the ways in which these mediums are mobilized as “meaning” in art. The slide library collection will provide the core images and students will also produce their own slides and transfers for their final portfolios. Readings will include criticism, literature, poetry, and philosophy of related and contemporary periods. Course requirements: Weekly studio and writing assignments. Midterm project/paper, final portfolio/paper. Sophomore standing or permission of the instructor. Lab fee: $100. This course may be taught later as 2 modules.

Lacan and Visual Pleasure This module consists of a close reading of texts written by Jacques Lacan, a major contributor to the reformulization of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, whose influence today can be traced in almost every discipline of the humanities and social sciences. Selections from Lacan are read deeply but also contextualized within the frameworks of intellectual and political (feminist) thought in the last 30 years. We also watch film and look at visual art, and read theories about them influenced by Lacan. We investigate the process of looking as a place at which gender gets constructed. “The gaze” is also a geographical concept that registers sexual power relationships, anxieties, and fears. Given a Lacanian spin, visual texts such as painting or photography can take on a richness of interpretations that reveal profound relevance to human experiences of self and other, looking and being seen, desire and lack. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Victorian Art and Poetry This course is an inquiry into the relationships of English art and poetry of the Victorian era (1837-1901). Sometimes these relationships are explicit, as when William Holman Hunt painted his enormous Lady of Shalott in response to Tennyson’s poem; in other cases correlations are implied. Major emphasis is given to the Pre-Raphaelites, who worked in both media, but we also explore how to read fairy painting, landscape painting, ladies’ fashion, and images of Queen Victoria in light of poems on these subjects. We consider how the meanings of these artworks and poems might be related to issues of social power and control. Expected behaviors from women, servants, workers, children, and colonial “others” are played out in visual art and poetry. Prerequisites: Survey of Western Art 102 and Sophomore Seminar or permission of the instructor. Course fee to cover museum trip.

The Arts, the Artist, and the Law Problems have arisen in every culture about the artist’s right to create, to control production, and to choose subject matter. The focus of this course is both historical and contemporary because the timeless concerns of liberty and creativity are at the heart of the matter. What is the significance of the view that the “product” of artistic endeavor is property? Does it make a difference that in the United States this “interest” in property is protected through contract and copyright law, while in Europe these “interests” are considered both moral and economic? Do music and art pose different legal, philosophical, and creative problems in regard to regulation and to protection of individual rights? Also considered are the problems raised by museums and production rights, the role of government and corporations in arts funding, and the impact of the law on the individual artist. Works of art, music, and literature that have been the subject of controversy are addressed specifically.

Art History Tutorial Under these course numbers, juniors and seniors design tutorials to meet their particular interests and programmatic needs. A student should see the prospective tutor to define an area of mutual interest to pursue either individually or in a small group. A student may register for no more than one tutorial in any semester.