Current and Recent Courses
Survey of the Visual Arts I:
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Survey of the Visual Arts II:
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Single-Artist Seminar:
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Russian, Soviet, & Central Asian ArtThis course examines the development of Russian, Soviet, and Central Asian art from the time of Peter the Great to the 1980s. Tracing the impact of Europe and Asia on Russian visual culture, the upper-level seminar assesses Russian art within the context of international art history by highlighting the variations within specific stylistic movements between western and non-western cultures. The course focuses on the development of Russian painting, sculpture, and printmaking in the 18th and 19th centuries before turning to the avant-garde movements of the 1910s-20s and nonconformist art from the 1960s-80s. All these movements are explored in relation to the systems of social, political, and economic power in each era.
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Women's Experience in ArtFor much of its existence, the discipline of art history focused almost exclusively on male artists and their experiences as creative practitioners. The white Western male viewpoint was unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, severely limiting the scope of the field. The last four decades, however, have seen dramatic attempts to to carry out a systematic rethinking of the discipline. This course builds on the radical efforts of pioneering feminist art historians by serving as a corrective to the traditional art historical survey. It focuses exclusively on the experiences of women artists to reassess the role women played in art-making from the fifteenth century to the present day.
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Introduction to Modern ArtThis course presents an overview of the history of European art from the mid-19th century to 1945. The works of major European artists, movements, and aesthetic theories are studied chronologically as well as thematically to investigate the key driving mechanisms of modern art movements. Students learn to identify and critically evaluate significant works of art from the era under study as well as to describe the main social and political contexts for the changes in art that occurred in the period. Emphasis is placed on engaging with different theoretical perspectives on art production in the modern period through the writings of key art historical figures.
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Past Courses
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Art AppreciationFor many students, the world of art remains inaccessible—lost in a cloud of theories, movements, and processes. In order to demystify art works, their relevance to everyday experience is emphasized in this course through thematic, chronological, and cultural studies of artists and movements. By providing students with examples of the necessary relationship of art to real-life experience, students understand art on a deeper level and are consequently able to appreciate its relevance in their everyday lives. This course allows students to experience visual art as a unique form of human communication, the understanding of which stands to enrich their connection to humanity for a lifetime.
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Single-Artist Seminar: Édouard ManetThis seminar was devoted entirely to the life and work of one artist and allowed for an in-depth experience of art history. Édouard Manet (1832-1883) is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art. A contentious figure even in his own lifetime, Manet served as a bridge between the mid-century Realism movement and the development of Impressionism. Works like his Olympia and Le déjeuner sur l'herbe have long been the subject of invective debates in art history and this course allowed students to delve deeply into his works to determine the influence he had on modernism in the century to come. We analyzed Manet’s works in relation not only to his tumultuous personal biography, the artistic politics of the time, and changing gender ideologies in the second half of the 19th century, but also in terms of what scholarship on his work can tell us about the nature of the art historical inquiry itself.
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Orientalism
The flowering of Orientalist painting among Western artists was closely associated with the apogee of European colonialist expansion in the 19th century. This class assessed the orientalist artistic movement as part of the vast control mechanism of colonialism, which was designed to perpetuate and justify European dominance. Orientalist paintings from the long 19th century were assessed in terms of their aesthetic qualities, but also evaluated in terms of their political and social uses and the implications for gender and sexuality in the societies from which they originated. Key artists included Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Renault, Karl Briullov, and Vasily Vereshchagin.
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Single-Year Seminar: 1820This course focused on a single year in the history of art – 1820 – and brought together artists, poets, composers, and novelists from a number of cultural zones to create an intensive trans-cultural picture of a certain moment in history. Weekly meetings focused on a specific artist or work being developed in this year – from Goya’s Black Paintings and William Blake’s Visionary Heads to Raphaelle Peale’s still-lives and Orest Kiprensky's self-portraits. These were discussed in relation to the writings of Lord Byron, Alexander Pushkin, and Alphonse de Lamartine, all active at the time. We also listened to works by Beethoven and Schubert composed in this year so that students could develop a deep multi-disciplinary perspective on how art historians re-create an age by grappling with a range of source media to form their interpretations.
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Single-Artist Seminar:
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Synartesis
This seminar focused on the idea of synartesis – the act of fastening or knitting together to produce union even among disparate kinds of knowledge and materials. The course explored new potentials for understanding works of art outside the bounds of the traditional linear historical narrative by examining contemporary artworks in relation to those from seemingly distant earlier periods. Synartesis explored how such inter-chronological and thematic comparisons might allow us to develop new understandings of both artworks and their beholders.
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Realism
This course focused on artists from France, England, Spain, Germany, and Russia and the social and political contexts in which their realist works were produced and exhibited. Key artists under study included Adolph Menzel, Ilya Repin and Gustave Courbet and discussions centered on the lingering influence of neoclassical and romantic painters such as Eugène Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich, and Francesco Goya.
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What is Art? (And Who Decides?)
The course was designed not only as a resource for grappling with the eternal question of what art is, but also unearthing the power structures that lie behind such definitions and their maintenance. Discussions were based on readings from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, literature, psychology, and art history. These texts were read for their independent content, as moments in the development of specific bodies of argument, or as instances of a larger tendency within a broad historical period.
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Women and Art
This course explored the role and status of women in art from the medieval period through the present, focusing in particular on the Renaissance and the nineteenth century in Western culture. We investigated both male artists' depictions of women in various historical periods as well as the achievements of women artists. The course was organized thematically and explored the notions of gendered sight, the "ideal" spectator, the nude, the fragmented body, virgin/whore dichotomies, and sexuality in the media.
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Modern Philosophies of Art
This course focused on art-related writings stemming from a range of disciplines, including the writings of philosophers, poets, social scientists and psychologists, especially those in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Outlining major theoretical concerns during the modern period and relating these to the wider political and economic forces of the time, close attention was paid to how the sentiments expressed by such authors have affected current thinking in the field.
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An Introduction to Art History (1789-1900)
This was the first course in a two-semester sequence intended to introduce students to the history and development of art in the modern period. It was organized around a set of themes running through the history of modernity from the 18th century to the present. Students learned to identify and critically evaluate significant works, figures, and movements in the history of art, describe the main social and political context for the changes in art over the last two hundred years, and engage with relevant theoretical issues and methodologies in the history of art during the modern period.
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An Introduction to Art History (1900-2016)This course was the second part of a two-semester art history core sequence and was organized around a set of themes running through the history of modernity from 1900 to the present. Significant works, figures, and movements in art and design were presented chronologically such that students were able to engage with major theoretical perspectives on art production. The course involved museum visits so that students could engage with the history of modernism experientially.
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Poetry, Philosophy, Print & Novel: Paris on Paper
This course, taught for the UL Study Abroad program in Paris, allowed students to become immersed in the philosophical, literary, and artistic works of the Enlightenment and French Revolutionary periods. We read key philosophical treatises as well as examined the poetry and novels of a range of authors in order to think about their relation to the works of leading painters and printmakers. We explored the rich heritage of works on paper that are often not included in survey courses - from prints and drawings to pastel works and photographs - to develop a new appreciation for a range of figures. |
Upcoming
Single-Artist Seminar:
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The Art World:
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Single Year Seminar:
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