Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Art as viewed through the history of art forms, ideas, material culture, and/or literature. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course introduces students to the study of art from different regions in the world and to ways of approaching art critically, historically, and through different cultural perspectives. In our analyses, we will pay attention to the formal qualities of artworks, the development of artistic genres and traditions of art history, contexts of production and reception, and the cross-cultural encounters between artists of different times and spaces—from Botticelli and Vermeer to Frida Kahlo, Pan Yu-liang, and Bill Reid. Our discussions will combine traditional methods of analysis of art history (i.e., connoisseurship, iconography and formalism) with multidisciplinary approaches from cultural and critical theory.

The course consists of four modules, focusing on post-antiquity developments until the modern age:

1. The figurative art of late medieval Europe, especially Gothic and Byzantine artifacts, the illusionism of Renaissance Art (Early and High) and post-Renaissance Art (Mannerism and the Baroque) in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, as well as in the Netherlandish, Flemish, and German masters.
2. Neo-classicism and Northern European Romanticism, French Realism, the influence of the medium of photography in post-Realism painting, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. We will also look at a few examples of the transformations of European art in North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
3. The artistic worldviews from selected regions in Africa, Latin America, and Oceania—traditions steeped in indigenous and non-Western understandings of space, time, dwelling, and in the relation of communities to the natural and spiritual world—as well as the aesthetic values and artistic forms that developed throughout the long history of Imperial China (ritual art, Buddhist art, ink painting, landscape, and literati painting), alongside a few examples from Japan.
4. The last chapter of our discussions will focus on a few examples from the modern and contemporary world, ranging from Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism to Modern Realism and Abstract Art, in order to consider the challenges brought on by late modernity, the increasingly dominating role of commodification and the international market, the worldview of Indigenous art, and the influences of feminism and Black culture.

The course will appeal to students who are interested in how artworks from different periods have set the stage for the development of modern visual culture and how critical theory has approached questions about aesthetics, representation, the production of taste, and the gaze. But also, quite simply, students who want to be introduced to the enjoyment of art!

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Through in-class discussions and a range of written assignments, students will be able to sharpen their critical skills, and, at the end of the course:

1.  Demonstrate an understanding of the historical development of artistic forms within and across different regions and cultural traditions (Europe, North America and Meso-America, East Asia, West Africa and East Africa, Oceania, Indigeneity).
2. Place works of art in their historical and cultural context, understanding the perspectives of the peoples that they are studying.
3. Use the basic methodological approaches to the study of art history.
4. Demonstrate familiarity of the terminology and concepts developed in the field of art studies.
5. Interpret and discuss works of art through the different perspectives of art theory, cultural studies, and critical theory, showing an understanding of the knowledges and controversies that are central to the field of art studies.
6. Communicate effectively and develop their own scholarly voice

Grading

Materials

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RECOMMENDED READING:

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