| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ART HIS 40A | ANC EGYPT GRC ROME | MILES, M. | In this course we study the Great Pyramids and Sphinx, the Palace of Minos at Knossos, the Parthenon, the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory, Pompeii, the Colosseum and Pantheon in Rome: a selection of the art and architecture around the early Mediterranean, admired for many centuries or in some instances only recently excavated. We consider how and why the peoples of antiquity created art and architecture, the significance of art within its social, religious and historical context, how visual arts can illuminate cultural issues, and how ancient art takes on various meanings to us today. Some attention is given to archaeological methods, and the issues of ownership, conservation and presentation of ancient artifacts. Rel Std Category: 3 |
| ART HIS 42A | ARTS OF INDIA | PATEL, A. | This course explores the art and architecture of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka from ancient through contemporary times. We will learn about the Indus Valley, the Bamiyan Buddhas, Hindu temples, the Taj Mahal, and other architectural masterpieces. We will explore modern and contemporary works of art and the effects of nationhood on cultural and political identities. Our study of the Indic visual traditions will include the world’s great religions, such as Islam, and the wide pantheon of gods and goddesses of Buddhism and Hinduism. No prerequisite. Rel Std Category: 2 |
| ART HIS 114 | MEDIEVAL SPAIN | BETANCOURT, R. | This course looks at the immense diversity of people and religions in Medieval Spain, looking at the life, culture, and art of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula and its connections with the rest of Mediterranean world. Particular attention will be given to the notion of convivencia, or living-together, among these disparate but intimately connected groups. The course as such considers the role and effects of multiculturalism in the medieval world. Each week focuses on another city or region, looking closely at the art, literature, and culture of the site in question as a way of orienting the course’s historical and thematic issues. |
| ART HIS 120 | EARLY MODERN LANDSCAPE | POWELL, A | Explores the politics and aesthetics of landscape in early modern Europe. We will examine the rise of the genre of landscape in the sixteenth century and its development through the first half of the nineteenth century. Paintings, drawings, prints, maps, and gardens are some of the media and forms to be considered. Among the questions to be asked are: how did the representation and manipulation of real and imaginary landscapes—and their inhabitants—reflect social life, political power structures, religious beliefs, and racial, class, and gender ideologies? Artists to be discussed include Leonardo, Giorgione, Titian, Patinir, Altdorfer, Bruegel, Poussin, Cozens, Constable, Turner, and Friedrich. |
| ART HIS 140B | STREET ART | NISBET, J. | Visual art produced directly upon buildings, signs, and subway cars has become fundamental to the experience of urban life in the twenty-first century. This course will explore the history of art in the streets. Covering contemporary artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, we will situate and evaluate such practices within a tradition of producing art in the public spaces of the late-modern metropolis. Key artists and topics include Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, site specificity, Claes Oldenburg, street photography, VALIE EXPORT, Italian Neorealism, Dziga Vertov, and Impressionism. |
| ART HIS 151C | MODERN CHINA | WUE, R. | This course is an exploration of art and visual culture in modern China from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. It will focus on how the visual arts participated in and engaged with a period of immense social and historical change, and will investigate a wide range of media, ranging from brush-and-ink painting to photography, oil painting, mass media, and printmaking, concluding with installation and performance art. Major themes we will investigate include the constantly shifting issues of modernity, politics, and identity as defined by the Chinese art work. |
| ART HIS 155A | ANCIENT INDIA | PATEL, A. | This course will examine the visual history of the region defined as ‘India’ today, but necessarily encompassing parts of modern Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and eastern Afghanistan. After an introduction to the Indus Valley Civilization (2700-1500 BCE), we will explore the legacies of Alexander the Great's campaigns to the edges of India and their impact on the Buddhist art and architecture of the Indian subcontinent. We will also examine the inverse dispersal of Buddhist and Hindu iconographies both eastward and westward in Asia. The course will culminate with the supposed Golden Age of the Gupta empire and its far-reaching legacies from Iran to China. |
| ART HIS 183C | RISE OF PHOTOGRAPHY | GLEBOVA, A. | This course examines the origins of photography, starting with its multiple inventions around 1839 to the end of the nineteenth century. From bitter personal rivalries of photography’s pioneers to the toxic chemicals employed at the photographer’s risk to the many uses—from the scientific to the bizarre—of the new medium, we will look closely at the history of photography from a number of viewpoints. While paying close attention to the multiple pressures that influenced the development of photography on the material and local levels, we will also ask the big questions: how did photography shape modernity as we know it? How did it transform the way we see and understand the world? How did it serve the powers that be—colonialism, monarchies, the newly emerging nation-state—and in what ways did it provide emancipatory potential to marginalized groups? We will also study the work of several contemporary photographers who have returned to nineteenth-century technologies and processes, and think about the importance of such interventions in our increasingly digital world. Assignments will include essays as well as hands-on experiments, such as making cyanotypes (or blue prints). All materials will be provided in class. This course will include a field trip to the Getty for the “In Focus: Daguerreotypes” show in November.https://eee.uci.edu/15f/21140/home/image_view/03-comtesse-de-castiglione-theredlist.jpg |
| ART HIS 190W | PRACTCUM FOR MAJORS | WUE, R. | This seminar offers an overview of the major approaches and methodologies in art history; it is also a writing-intensive course that seeks to improve students’ writing skills as they relate to looking at, analyzing and researching visual works of art. We will examine various approaches in art history; by reading, discussing and writing about a selection of art historical essays, students will come to a fuller understanding of the tools used by art historians to investigate the art work. Students are expected to make use of these tools in their own writings on art, and through the process of writing, editing and revising, reflect on their own approaches to the art work. This course is a requirement for art history majors |
