AH 144 / World Art IV: Visual Culture of the Modern and Contemporary Periods
Fall 2018 / C. Smyth
Schedule of Classes
Exact Schedule, Readings and Due Dates forthcoming.
(Due dates given here approximate.)
Required Readings will include: Relevant sections from the Textbook, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, vol. II (14thed.), as well as short essays and text selections from art-historical books and articles, and statements of artists and contemporary critics. Forthcoming (being updated)
First Week: Introduction to the Course) Discussion of the Syllabus, requirements, and goals. An introduction to art-historical analysis of 19-20C art.
Part I) The Late 18thC to the Mid-19thC – Neoclassicism and Romanticism:
– Art and architecture in the “Age of Enlightenment: Reason, Science and Nature – and Revolution. Neoclassicism, as an expression of stylistic and moral ideals
– Neoclassical art and architecture in England and the United States: The “Grand Tour,” the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Palladianism, and (in America) imagery for a new democracy
– Romanticism in France: Napoleon and the cult of the hero; Gericault and Delacroix - individualism and feeling
– Romanticism, the “Sublime,” and landscape painting: German Romanticism (Friedrich); English poetic vision (Constable and Turner); Pioneering art in the New World (American landscape painting)
– Architecture: Building for an Industrial Age, historical revival, new public projects
- The Birth of Photography: A look at a new medium – how “real” is it?
DUE: FIRST JOURNAL ENTRY
Part II) The Later 19thC – The Beginnings of Art for a Modern World
– “Realism” in France and the defiance of tradition: Courbet and the artist “as a man”; Daumier and political commentary
- Manet, “the painter of modern life.” Realism in Britain and the United States
EVENING REVIEWS FOR THE MIDTERM EXAM
– Impressionism: “The New Painting” in Paris; new subjects (work and leisure, city and suburbs, new techniques and attitudes; the seemingly spontaneous (Material covered on this date will not appear on the Midterm, but on the Final Examination)
– MIDTERM EXAMINATION
– Post-Impressionism: A modern art “like the art of the museums:” Cézanne makes of Impressionism “something solid and lasting;” Seurat’s pointillism, and the science of color
– Post Impressionism, continued: Individual response, and the search for an inner reality in the art of Van Gogh and Gauguin; Symbolism: The search continues - Munch and Rodin
– The Fin-de-Siècle and the beginning of modern design and architecture: the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, and the Vienna Secession
Part III) The Early 20thC – Modernism
– European Expressionism: the Fauves; “Die Brücke; Der Blaue Reiter (especially Kirschner and Kandinsky) – and Matisse!
NB: Students will be expected to visit the exhibition of Matisse at the Scuderie del Quirinale.
DUE: SECOND JOURNAL ENTRY
– Cubism and its Legacy: Picasso (to Guernica) – We will concentrate on the development of the Demoiselles des Avignon, the artist’s radical explorations of the very basis of representation, his arrival at Cubism, with Georges Braque, and subsequent experiments up to the Guernica. Here also is an opportunity to explore the European usage/creative “exploitation” of non-Western art (African, Oceanic), in preparation – and contrast -for the class on Modern and Contemporary African art, as an independent culture, and its incorporation of “modern” Western concepts.
– Art as expression of Contemporary Modern Life and the Irrational: Futurism and Italy; Dada (especially Duchamp).
– A World Gone Mad: Artists in World War I Germany - Grosz, Beckmann, Dix. Surrealism: The subconscious, the primitive, childhood – de Chirico, Dali, Magritte, and Klee
DUE: COMPARATIVE PAPER TOPICS
– Utopias: Art as aesthetic and social Ideal in Suprematism, Constructivism, and de Stijl; Early 20thC architecture and design: the Bauhaus, the International Style, and Frank Lloyd Wright
- African Art and Culture: Background, and the Modern Experience in African Contemporary Art
PART IV) The Later 20thC to Now – The U.S. (New York) to the Forefront, and Postmodernism
– New York as Art Center – the 1950’s and 60’s: Clement Greenberg and formalism; Abstract Expressionism, “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” Color Field Painting, Minimalism; Painting and sculpture as “Object”
– Outside the Frame! Happenings, Fluxus, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, “Earthworks.” Public art and public controversy
DUE: COMPARATIVE PAPER
– Art and Consumer Culture: Pop art; Superrealism
– Architecture in the later 20thC: From Modern to Postmodern to Deconstructivism. (Students will be expected to have visited recent sites in Rome for discussion).
– Art as Political Statement: Gender, Race, Society
DUE: COMPLETED JOURNAL- ALL FIVE ENTRIES (first two already submitted, and three new ones)
EVENING REVIEWS FOR THE FINAL EXAM:
FINAL EXAMINATION: to be scheduled December 10-14
NB: Do not make plans to leave Rome before December 15!!!