| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ART HIS 40C | HISTORY OF WESTERN ART | HERBERT, J. | Less a comprehensive survey than a collection of historical vignettes, this segment of the course explores the meaning and function of works of art--painting, sculpture, architecture--in Europe and America at various moments in time from the dawn of the seventeenth century to the beginning of twenty-first 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: JAPAN | WINTHER, D. | This course presents an overview of developments in art in the Japanese archipelago from prehistoric 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 transformation of Buddhist art in Japan, castles and other monuments of the age of the warrior, mass print culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, and modern developments of visual culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. |
| ART HIS 100 | PALACES AND POLITICS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD | CASSIBRY, K. | This course will survey the palatial arts of the ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. We will pay special attention to the evidence palaces preserve for ancient political systems. We will also analyze the surprisingly diverse functions of these ancient complexes, which could include residences for kings and queens, tombs for their dynasties, offices for administrators, spaces for religious ceremonies, and even elaborate circuses for chariot-racing. We will examine the urban significance of palaces, some of which anchored newly founded cities, some of which redefined the spaces of cities already hundreds of years old, and some of which rejected the city altogether in favor of the countryside. We will also consider the arts of adornment. Genres of art deemed appropriate for palaces ranged from historical relief sculptures detailing violent military campaigns to whimsical floor mosaics imitating unswept floors. Course requirements include participation in class discussions of assigned readings, a research paper, and midterm and final essay exams. |
| ART HIS 107 | ROMAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE | CASSIBRY, K. | This course will survey the art and architecture of the Roman Empire. Lively debates are currently reshaping this field of study and have led to an expanded canon of monuments as well as new methods and theories for understanding them. Four current issues will focus our analysis. Material Culture and Society: We will examine the active role that art and architecture played in the empire’s defining social events, from grandiose triumphal processions to intimate household banquets. “Romanization” of Italy and the Provinces: Most Roman monuments lie far beyond the city of Rome, yet scholars have traditionally deemed these “provincial” monuments mere propagandistic echoes of their counterparts in the capital. We will problematize this approach by focusing our attention on the contexts and motivations of the provincial patrons responsible for commissioning their community’s art and architecture. “Hellenization” of Rome: Just as provincial cities balanced “Roman” forms and local imperatives, Rome itself negotiated the cultural legacies of Classical Athens and the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Mediterranean’s previous power bases. Rather than considering Rome a passive recipient of a more dominant Hellenic culture, we will examine how the cities of the Roman empire actively incorporated a variety of art and architectural forms into a flexible and internationally recognizable visual language of luxury, erudition, and power. Significance of Style: Scholars have struggled to fit Rome’s diverse sculptural styles into a strict linear development. By acknowledging the co-existence of a plurality of styles during the Roman Empire, we will instead consider the significance of stylistic choice. An artwork’s subject matter and location and the social status of its patron were but a few of the factors that impacted the selection of a particular style. Course requirements include participation in class discussions of assigned readings, a research paper, and midterm and final essay exams.
Note: Art His 107 ROMAN ART & ARCH Spring 2010 CASSIBRY, K. (20310) is the same as Art His 107 ROMAN ART & ARCH Spring 2011 KENNEDY-QUIGLE, S. (20310) and cannot be repeated for credit between these two quarters. |
| ART HIS 120 | EARLY MODERN LANDSCAPES | POWELL, A. | This course will explore 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 128 | ART AFTER ICONOCLASM: NETHERLANDS AND THE BAROQUE | 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.
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| ART HIS 140A | ART OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM | BRYAN-WILSON, J. | This lecture course provides an overview of contemporary art—circa 1960 to today—with an emphasis on the contested relationship between art, audiences, and museums. How has art increasingly migrated beyond the walls of the gallery—into public spaces for instance, or onto the internet? We will look at practices that confront the conventional boundaries of the art object and challenge the traditional publics of art institutions. While special attention will be paid to site-specificity, activist art, community-based performance, electronica, earthworks, and street interventions, we will also investigate how current photography, painting, and sculpture are being reshaped by new viewers and display practices. Our approach will be chronological as well as thematic, as we address debates within contemporary art: artists as cultural workers, globalization and internationalism, collective memory and memorialization, surveillance, the construction of difference, the commodity status of art, and the corporatization of culture. Lectures will emphasize formal means and aesthetic strategies as well as social context, and readings will include critical theories and artists’ writings. |
| ART HIS 155C | INDIA – MODERN THROUGH CONTEMPORARY ART | PATEL, A. | This course spans the 12th-21st centuries of the visual traditions of South Asia – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. We will begin with the establishment of Islam on a political level in South Asia, and the many sultanates that ensued during the late 12th through 16th centuries. The course will continue with the Mughal empire (1526-1857), one of the great Islamic states of the early modern world, and conclude with the contemporary artistic production of an increasingly globalized South Asia. The course will cover the changing political, commercial, religious and artistic landscape of South Asia as British, Dutch and French colonizers-adventurers came to the region. We will also examine changing religious identities and the creation of nation-states against the backdrop of expanding European colonialism in Asia. Weekly readings; mid-term, final examination, museum assignment; no prerequisite.
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| ART HIS 165B | AMERICAN ART DURING THE GILDED AGE | WHITING, C. | Spanning the period from the beginning of the Civil War until the end of the nineteenth century, this course covers artists such as Winslow Homer, who were closely associated with certain regions of the United States, and artists such as Mary Cassatt, who spent most of their careers abroad. We consider how artists were educated in the United States, why they traveled to Europe and even chose to live permanently abroad, and how some of them became public celebrities. At the same time we will consider patrons of the arts, including those who collected art and those who helped establish the first art museums in the United States. The emergence of art museums, galleries, auction houses, and critics, and their conflicting commercial and educational goals will also be discussed. |
| ART HIS 190W | PRACTCUM FOR MAJORS | COOKS CUMBO, B. | A required course for all art history majors, the practicum cultivates basic skills and knowledge necessary for specialized study in art history. Students focus on basic bibliographic research skills and analytic reading skills in the field, while learning methodological approaches to writing about art. Accordingly, students write, edit, and revise numerous formal analysis and research assignments. |
| ART HIS 295 | URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS: CITIES & THE “MODERN” IN SOUTH ASIA | PATEL, A. | ATTENTION: This course is a Graduate Seminar for the UC Irvine Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies. it is being offered jointly between UC Irvine and UCLA. Serious, interested and high achieving undergraduate students in Art History may petition the instructor of this course for enrollment.
Visual Studies 295
Cities in South Asia are a curious and telling mixture of “traditional” and “modern” life-worlds: they are loci where material indices of the past and present come together, where gleaming skyscrapers tower over 14th-century buildings and their tightly knit neighborhoods, bullock carts and motorcycles together negotiate traffic, and labor ties based on family loyalty confront corporate hierarchies. This seminar will focus on the South Asian City as depicted in various media, including 19th-century photography, architectural panoramas, and film. We will also compare the various theorizations of the “modern” in relation to South Asia. By using the city as a focal point of social, temporal, cultural and political interactions, the course aims to interrogate the meanings of both “modernity” and “tradition” in the South Asian context, questioning whether global definitions of these terms are possible. |
| ART HIS 295 | URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS: CITIES & THE “MODERN” IN SOUTH ASIA | PATEL, A. | ATTENTION: This course is a Graduate Seminar for the UC Irvine Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies. it is being offered jointly between UC Irvine and UCLA. Serious, interested and high achieving undergraduate students in Art History may petition the instructor of this course for enrollment.
Visual Studies 295
Cities in South Asia are a curious and telling mixture of “traditional” and “modern” life-worlds: they are loci where material indices of the past and present come together, where gleaming skyscrapers tower over 14th-century buildings and their tightly knit neighborhoods, bullock carts and motorcycles together negotiate traffic, and labor ties based on family loyalty confront corporate hierarchies. This seminar will focus on the South Asian City as depicted in various media, including 19th-century photography, architectural panoramas, and film. We will also compare the various theorizations of the “modern” in relation to South Asia. By using the city as a focal point of social, temporal, cultural and political interactions, the course aims to interrogate the meanings of both “modernity” and “tradition” in the South Asian context, questioning whether global definitions of these terms are possible. |
| ART HIS 295 | URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS: CITIES & THE “MODERN” IN SOUTH ASIA | PATEL, A. | ATTENTION: This course is a Graduate Seminar for the UC Irvine Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies. it is being offered jointly between UC Irvine and UCLA. Serious, interested and high achieving undergraduate students in Art History may petition the instructor of this course for enrollment.
Visual Studies 295
Cities in South Asia are a curious and telling mixture of “traditional” and “modern” life-worlds: they are loci where material indices of the past and present come together, where gleaming skyscrapers tower over 14th-century buildings and their tightly knit neighborhoods, bullock carts and motorcycles together negotiate traffic, and labor ties based on family loyalty confront corporate hierarchies. This seminar will focus on the South Asian City as depicted in various media, including 19th-century photography, architectural panoramas, and film. We will also compare the various theorizations of the “modern” in relation to South Asia. By using the city as a focal point of social, temporal, cultural and political interactions, the course aims to interrogate the meanings of both “modernity” and “tradition” in the South Asian context, questioning whether global definitions of these terms are possible. |