| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ART HIS 40C | HISTORY OF WESTERN ART | HERBERT, J. | Less a comprehensive survey than a collection of historical vignettes, this segment of the year-long survey course on Western art explores the meaning and function of works of art--painting, sculpture, architecture--in Europe and America at various moments in time from the the mid-seventeeth century to the late-twentieth century. In each case study, we will examine the mechanisms through which works of art formulated, preserved and propagated certain ideas, social and political as well as artistic. |
| ART HIS 42C | HISTORY OF ASIAN ART | WINTHER, D. | This course presents an overview of developments in art in the Japanese archipelago from ancient times to the present day. Focus will be placed on religious expression, artistic technologies, urban design, painting formats, political functions of art, and art historical methodology. Topics include the transmission of continental Asian culture to Japan, castles and other monuments of the age of the warrior, mass print culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, modern developments of visual culture since the 19th century, avant-gardism and popular culture in recent years. Students will be responsible for a midterm exam, writing assignment, and final exam. |
| ART HIS 128 | BAROQUE ART OF THE NETHERLANDS | POWELL, A. | Art After Iconoclasm: In 1566, the Netherlands saw widespread iconoclastic events. Churches were purged of their images, altars stripped, and walls whitewashed. In this course, we will begin by asking what iconoclasm is and why it happened in the Netherlands. We then turn to the lasting impact iconoclasm had on sixteenth and seventeenth-century art production. We will consider its effects on patronage and art markets, and we will look at the more and less obvious marks it left on the work of key artists: from the motif of blindness in Rembrandt’s work to the painting of purified church interiors by Pieter Saenredam to the "domestication" of painting in the works of Vermeer. Finally, we will consider the secular genres that flourished in the wake of iconoclasm. |
| ART HIS 134B | EUROPEAN ART: 1789-1851 | HERBERT, J. | The French Revolution threw long-standing assumptions--about politics, about society, about religion, about art--into question all across Europe. Art did more than reflect or record these turmoils; it was an active agent in shaping the institutions and values of a post-revolutionary world. This course will trace artistic movements in France from 1789 to 1851 as art both engaged social developments and sought refuge from them. We will also examine how artists in Spain, Germany, and England alternatively embraced and eschewed the artistic paradigms from France as they formulated aesthetic strategies appropriate for their own national settings. |
| ART HIS 140B | ART AND POLITICS SINCE 1960 | BRYAN-WILSON, J. | From Andy Warhol's prints of electric chairs to current anti-war graffiti from around the world, this lecture course examines how images have been used for diverse political purposes. We will investigate how art historical movements such as Pop and Minimalism were intimately related to the turbulent social contexts from which they emerged. We will also explore recent street interventions and guerrilla performances by both artists and activists. Topics include race relations, feminism, the environment, DIY culture, queer visibility, and the branding of Obama. |
| ART HIS 155A | ANCIENT INDIA | PATEL, A. | This course will examine the visual history of the region defined as ‘India’ today, but necessarily encompassing modern Bangladesh and Pakistan. After a brief, introductory look at the Indus Valley Civilization (2700-1500 BCE), we will explore the impact of Hellenizing culture on the Buddhist art and architecture of the Indian subcontinent, and the inverse dispersal of Buddhist and Hindu iconographies to East and Southeast Asia. The course will culminate with the supposed Golden Age of the Gupta empire and its far-reaching legacies. |
| ART HIS 165D | AMERICAN ART: 1920-1945 | WHITING, C. | Boom and Bust: Art in the United States between World War I and World War II: After World War I the United States enjoyed a period of unprecedented prosperity, producing and packaging new goods for mass consumption, and for the first time it became a nation of urban dwellers. While artists such as Charles Sheeler embraced America’s burgeoning commercial culture, referring to billboards, machines, jazz music, and skyscrapers in their art, others such as Georgia O’Keeffe migrated to rural regions of the United States in search of folk cultures or, like Gerald Murphy, they expatriated abroad. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression and a period of self reflection about politics, economics, and art. The Federal government established programs that put artists to work painting murals in government buildings and taking photographs of rural poverty around the country. Some artists such as Ben Shahn joined politically radical organizations and conceived of their art as a means to comment on current events, while others, including Grant Wood, turned to the past in search for tried and true values. Despite undeniable differences in the political, economic, and cultural climate of the 1920s and 1930s, artists in both periods had to come to term with modernity, nationalist sentiment, and the emergence of popular culture.
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