JOHN CABOT UNIVERSITY

AH 299A Special Topics in Art History:

Classicism: from Renaissance to Contemporary Art

Spring 2019

Instructor: Dr. Sarah Linford

[email protected]

Hours/place: TTH 11:30-12:45 PM (note 2 makeup Fridays)

Classroom: C.2.4       

TOTAL NO. OF CONTACT HOURS: 45

CREDITS: 3

PREREQUISITES: none

OFFICE HOURS:

Thursday after class and/or by appointment.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Specialized course offered periodically on specific aspects of art history. “Special Topics in Art History” courses are normally research-led topics on an area of current academic concern. May be taken more than once for credit with different topics.

SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENT:

The “classical tradition,” or classicism, derived from the art of the ancient Greco-Roman world, is a privileged vantage point from which to view the history of art until the historical avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to this day. This course examines the birth, meanings, and varied significance of the "classical" as attributed to ancient art; its purported rediscovery and reworking in the Renaissance. It then turns to the “neo-Classicism” of the 18th century, including what this return meant in socio-political terms and how variegated were its forms throughout Europe and the United States. Modern art's alternate historicism and disavowal of the subjects, values and institutions associated with classicism and, finally, how it has resurfaced, often ironically, in contemporary practices conclude this course. For in fact, far from disappearing, classicism continues to have a powerful impact, remaining present not only in the fine arts but also in cinema, photography, design and architecture. Students will acquire a clear sense of what classicism has been made to stand for, how it has been repurposed and how, in its many forms, it has pervaded the history and ideology of culture and the traditions of the West, from Antiquity to today.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

You will be able to:

·         Develop a nuanced understanding of one of the most prevalent categories of                        knowledge and visual culture of the Western tradition

·         Gain an understanding of critical approaches to classicism and culture

·         Develop advanced skills in the analysis of art, its history and theory

·         Engage critically with theoretical and historical texts and deploy these in the                        analysis of visual examples

·         Analyze the visual culture of these periods in their historical and political context

·         Structure and write an essay using visual analysis and cited research as evidence

GRADING POLICY

-ASSESSMENT METHODS:

Assignment - Guidelines - Weight

Preparation and Participation in class discussions.      20%

One written response to one of the required readings to serve as introduction to the discussion of that week’s readings; the written response must be handed in to the professor at the beginning of that class. The response demonstrates the student’s ability to briefly summarize, problematize and open up the chosen reading to larger discussion.    10%

Mid-term      The midterm examination will be composed of:

•Short answer questions: Definitions of terms, specific questions regarding artworks we have observed or issues discussed in the assigned readings

•Slide comparisons: identify 2 works, their makers and dates, then compare and contrast the works in a short essay, supporting your discussion with relevant information from assigned readings and lectures

•Essay: topics that treat general themes discussed in the first half of the course. You will need to provide specific examples taken from works discussed in class.        25%

Term Paper You will produce a term paper of on a specific artwork pertinent to the class topic. The paper will be based on a combination of research and direct observation, drawing on the visual and critical skills developed in class. A list of suggested topics will be provided, though students may suggest their own topics, to be approved by the professor. Please refer to the course outline below for deadlines.    20%

Final Exam  The format for the final exam will be the same as the midterm, with slide identifications and comparisons covering only material since the midterm. The essay questions will be on topics taken from themes discussed in the entire course.          25%

-ASSESSMENT CRITERIA:

A Work of this quality directly addresses the question or problem raised and provides a coherent argument displaying an extensive knowledge of relevant information or content. This type of work demonstrates the ability to critically evaluate concepts and theory and has an element of novelty and originality. There is clear evidence of a significant amount of reading beyond that required for the course.

B This is highly competent level of performance and directly addresses the question or problem raised.There is a demonstration of some ability to critically evaluate theory and concepts and relate them to practice. Discussions reflect the student’s own arguments and are not simply a repetition of standard lecture and reference material. The work does not suffer from any major errors or omissions and provides evidence of reading beyond the required assignments.

C This is an acceptable level of performance and provides answers that are clear but limited, reflecting the information offered in the lectures and reference readings.

D This level of performances demonstrates that the student lacks a coherent grasp of the material.Important information is omitted and irrelevant points included.In effect, the student has barely done enough to persuade the instructor that s/he should not fail.

F This work fails to show any knowledge or understanding of the issues raised in the question. Most of the material in the answer is irrelevant.

-ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS:

ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND EXAMINATION POLICY

You cannot make-up a major exam (midterm or final) without the permission of the Dean’s Office. The Dean’s Office will grant such permission only when the absence was caused by a serious impediment, such as a documented illness, hospitalization or death in the immediate family (in which you must attend the funeral) or other situations of similar gravity. Absences due to other meaningful conflicts, such as job interviews, family celebrations, travel difficulties, student misunderstandings or personal convenience, will not be excused. Students who will be absent from a major exam must notify the Dean’s Office prior to that exam. Absences from class due to the observance of a religious holiday will normally be excused. Individual students who will have to miss class to observe a religious holiday should notify the instructor by the end of the Add/Drop period to make prior arrangements for making up any work that will be missed. The final exam period runs until Friday, December 14th, 2018.

ACADEMIC HONESTY

As stated in the university catalog, any student who commits an act of academic dishonesty will receive a failing grade on the work in which the dishonesty occurred. In addition, acts of academic dishonesty, irrespective of the weight of the assignment, may result in the student receiving a failing grade in the course. Instances of academic dishonesty will be reported to the Dean of Academic Affairs. A student who is reported twice for academic dishonesty is subject to summary dismissal from the University. In such a case, the Academic Council will then make a recommendation to the President, who will make the final decision.

STUDENTS WITH LEARNING OR OTHER DISABILITIES

John Cabot University does not discriminate on the basis of disability or handicap. Students with approved accommodations must inform their professors at the beginning of the term. Please see the website for the complete policy.

___________________________________________________________________

CLASS HOURS:

TTH 11:30-12:45 PM  in classroom  C.2.4

(+ Make-up classes scheduled on Friday, February 15th and Friday, February 22nd)

___________________________________________________________________

CLASS SCHEDULE:

Course outline and assignments.

Tuesday, January 22 Introductory lecture 1: What is “Classical”?

                        Course content and logistics (part 1).

Thursday, January 24  Introductory lecture 2: (Re)discovering, inventing, or constructing the classical?

            Course content and logistics (part 2).

This class will explore the key concepts and figures that defined Renaissance understanding of ancient Greek and Roman art. We will address competition between major artistic figures, the influence of the classical on artistic status and styles, and the contribution of these to the particular dynamism of Renaissance art and architecture in the construction of the “classical.”

Essential reading:

Zerner, Henri. “Classicism as Power”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 35-36.

 > handed out hardcopy class 1

Tuesday, January 29   An international style?

We will begin week 3 by considering how classicism migrated, was established and integrated into French art through cross-cultural influence in the 16th and 17th centuries. Students will consider how the “classical” entered European art generally and French art and the Schools of Fontainebleau in particular.

Essential reading:

Sankovitch, A.-M. 2000. Review of `L'art de la Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme,' by Henri Zerner. Art Bulletin. Sep. 2000, 82, 3, 585-591.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, January 31 Classicism as nature corrected by ideal: rules and norms

This class will address the founding of the French Academy with a focus on the work of Poussin, evincing the language and rhetoric of classicism in 17^th century France — and its opponents.

Essential reading:

Lebensztejn, J. 1988. “Framing Classical Space”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 37.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, February 5 The Grand Tour, Antiquarianism and Connoisseurship

This class focuses on the 18th century,  starting with Grand Tour, British antiquarianism and the way in which Antiquity was used in part as a foil for the emergence of  “distinctly English” style.

Essential reading:

Wilton-Ely, J. entry on the “Grand Tour” in The Classical Tradition, Grafton, A.; Most, G.W.; Settis, S. eds. 2013 (2010), Cambridge, 1 p.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 7 Revolution & Empire: on heroic call to arms and armchairs

Here, we will undertake the French Revolution’s programmatic uses of references to Greco-Roman antiquity. We will compare and contrast these to Italian, German and English uses and consider, in particular, the artistic and political career of David from 1789 and through the Napoleonic Empire.

Essential reading:

Mah, H. 2003. “Classicism and Gender Transformation: David, Goethe, and Staël” (excerpt) in Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914. Ithaca: 116-124.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, February 12 Classicism versus Romanticism?

Our class will study the ways in which the early 19th century’s fascination for classical ruins was a mainstay of Middle-European and Anglo-Saxon Romanticism.

Essential reading:

Campbell, G. 2013 (2010). “Romanticism”. In A. Grafton, G. W. Most, S. Settis (Eds.), The Classical Tradition. Cambridge. 2pp.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 14 Academic classicide?

Our first class this week will evaluate the claims made by the nascent avant-gardes in the wake of the 1848 revolutions that the classical tradition has been corrupted by Academic and official art. The reasons why historical painting, allegory and classical iconography are deemed, by some, irrelevant to modern art will be the thrust of this class.

Essential reading:

McWilliam, N. 1989. “Limited Revisions: Academic Art History Confronts Academic Art”

Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1989): 71-86.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Friday, February 15 (Make-up day for Tuesday, February 26 and Thursday Feb 28) GNAM

Note that this is a double class, and runs from 10:15 to 12:45.  

We will meet in front of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna to see some of the 19th-century works studied in class, with particular attention to the way in which Italian painting of the 19th-century takes its cues from other European avant-gardes while attempting to convey privileged access to a posited classical tradition.

Tuesday, February 19 Lines and blotches

We will ask to what extent the early to mid 19th century debates surrounding “drawing versus color” correspond to conceptions and uses of the classical canon and its purported values, from  the Ingres-Delacroix rivalry to the emergence Impressionism.

Essential reading:

Mora, S. 2000. “Delacroix's Art Theory and His Definition of Classicism.”Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34, 1 (Spring, 2000): 57-75.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 21 Cézanne, or “Poussin after nature”?

In this class we will examine how Cézanne’s treatment of landscape, nature and the human body were conceived and promoted as a salutary return to classical values in the late and post-impressionist decades, from the 1880s to the 1910s.

Essential reading:

Reff , T. 1960. “Cézanne and Poussin.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 23, 1/2 (Jan. - Jun., 1960): 150-174.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Friday, February 22 (Make-up day for Thursday, April 25th) Problems in the Third dimension

Sculptural case studies of works by Rodin, Maillol and Bourdelle will flesh out the classical-abstract nexus through a simple question that opens up complex answers: how differently did painters and sculptors approach “the classical” circa 1900?

Essential reading:

McWilliam, N. 1981. Review of The Romantics to Rodin, French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from American Collections by P. Fusco, H. W. Janson and La Tradition Classique et l'Esprit Romantique, Les Sculpteurs de l'Académie de France  Rome de 1824 à 1840 by A. Le Normand. Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, Sculpture (Nov., 1981): 60-62.

> e-text available through MyJCU

(no class held Tuesday, February 26 or Thursday, February 28)

Tuesday, March 5 Midterm review

Thursday, March 7 Midterm examination

(March 11-15 Spring break)

Tuesday, March 19 Post-impressionism and the classical ideal

We look in this class at how Post-impressionist painting, including by the Nabis and the Neo-impressionists, referenced the classical, and to what socio-political ends.  We examine how a posited classical tradition was actually essential to the emergence of non-figurative or abstract painting.

Essential reading:

Dymond, A. 2003. “Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France.” The Art Bulletin, 85, 2 (Jun., 2003): 353-370.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, March 21 Matisse, Fauvism and the classical

Essential reading:

Wright , A. “Arche-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History.” October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998): 44-63.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, March 26 Cubism as anti-classicism?

Touted and instrumentalized as the death of classicism and the Western tradition generally, Cubism’s relation to works from the “golden ages” of Classicism is far more complex than its detractors have claimed.

Essential reading:

Fry, E.F. “Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity.” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4, special issue “Revising Cubism” (Winter, 1988): 296-310.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, March 28 Futurism, Vorticism

How does Marinetti’s 1911 pyrrhic manifesto relate to the works of Balla and Boccioni and how does a short-lived English movement's rejection of landscape and nudes, posited by its 1914 manifesto, compare and contrast in their understandings and uses of “classicism”?

Essential reading:

Antliff, M. 2013.  “Politicizing the New Sculpture” in Antliff and Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives, Oxford, 102-18

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April 2 What “Return to Order”?

Addressing the ways that classicism was referenced by artists in Italy, France and Germany  following World War 1, we will consider how artists legitimized avant-garde art and architecture through references — iconographical, stylistic, ideological and textual — to a posited classical past. We will treat Purism, Esprit Nouveau, Valori Plastici, later Futurism and, more generally, the Return to Order and the historical avant-gardes circa 1920.

Essential reading:

Batchelor, D. 1993. “‘This Liberty and this Order:’ Art in France After the First World War.” In Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, Fer, B.; Batchelor, D.; Wood,P. Eds. New Haven: 1-17.

> Course Post-It PDF

Thursday, April 4 Classicism as Power: European art and the World Wars (1)

This classes considers how ideas and myths about the classical past were appropriated and promulgated by political regimes, from Soviet Russia to Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain and the United States from the 1920s to the late 1940s.

Essential reading:

Antliff, M. 2002. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art Bulletin (March, 2002): 148 – 169.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April  9 Classicism as Power: European art and the World Wars (2)

This class rounds out the question of official and “independent” uses of classicisms from the eve of to the aftermath of the Second World War.

Essential reading:

Bazin, J.; Dubourg Glatigny, P.; Piotrowski, P. 2015. “Socialist Realism/Avant-gardes” in “Introduction: Geography of Internationalism” (excerpt) in Art beyond Borders : Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989). London: 8-21.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, April 11 The Renewed Death of Classicism?

This class counters the dogma that the “New York School” of painting marks (yet again) the definitive death of the classical tradition. Comparisons to German painting of the same period will provide useful comparative material.

Essential reading:

Slifkin, R. 2011. “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured.” Oxford Art Journal

34, 2: 227-246.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April  16 Classical, high and low

This class will focus in particular on the painting of Philip Guston as a case study for the vexed question of the relation of popular and high culture, for which the classical has become short-hand.

Essential reading:

Hyman, T. 2016. “Philip Guston's renewal-by-drawing (1965-67).” In The world new made: figurative painting in the twentieth century. New York: 216-218.

> ND196.F5 H96 2016 or Course “post-it” PDF.

Thursday, April 18 Arte povera, Minimalism and the monument(al)

Focussing in particular on the work of Kounellis and Judd, this class addresses the many kinds of references which “the classical” has come to encompass by the 1970s, in three-dimensional works — and their critical reception — in particular.

Essential reading:

Meyer, J. 2009. “The Minimal Unconscious.” October, 130 (Fall, 2009): 141-176

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April 23  “Return” to figuration; persistence of  “classical” - the late 20th c.

From Twombly to Koons and beyond: neither the classical, nor the figurative, nor the values these have on and off stood for have ever disappeared in Western art. The ways in which art of the past 30 years has (heavily) relied on iconography, literary sources, modes, narration, action, symbolism, intertextuality (…) among other means of referencing the classical tradition is a case in point.

Essential reading:

Holmes, B.; Brooke, KM; Dakis J. 2017. Excerpt from Liquid antiquity. Geneva: 5 pp.

> Frohring N7432.5.C6 L57 2017 or Course post-it PDF.

(Thursday April 25: holiday — makeup day was February 22.)

Tuesday, April 30 Where are we at? What do we call it? How do we use it (or don’t)?

So how, if at at all, can the term “classical” and its cognates be used, today, in a self-aware practice of art history? And how not?

Essential reading:

Vout, Caroline. 2018. “The Death of Classical Art?” (excerpt) Classical Art : A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2018: 220-230.

> Frohring N5613 .V68 2018 or Course post-it PDF.

Thursday, May 2  Final exam review

Week of  May  6-10  Final Exam (date and time TBA)

___________________________________________________________________

Selected bibliography

Antliff, M. 2002. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art Bulletin (March, 2002): 148 – 169.

Antliff, M. 2013.  “Politicizing the New Sculpture” in Antliff and Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives, Oxford, 102-118.

Arthurs, J. 2007. “(Re)presenting Roman History in Italy, 1911-1955” in C. Norton ed, Nationalism, Historiography and the (Re)construction of the Past, Washington DC.

Aymonimo, A. and Lauder, A.V., eds. 2015. Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal. London.

Ayres, P.J. 1997. Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in 18th-century England.  Cambridge.

Barkan, L. 1999. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven.

Barolsky, P. 2014. “Winckelmann, Ovid, and the transformation of the Apollo Belvedere”

Notes in the History of Art, 33, 2 (Winter 2014): 2-4.

Barrow, R. 2007. The Use of Classical Art and Literature by Victorian Painters, 1860-1912. Lewiston.

Baxandall, M. 1971. Giotto and the Orators.  Oxford.

Bazin, J.; Dubourg Glatigny, P.; Piotrowski, P. 2015. Art beyond Borders : Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989). London.

Beard, M. 1994. “Casts and Casts-Offs: The Origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39: 1-29.

Bignamini, I; Hornsby, C. 2010. Digging and Dealing in 18th c. Rome. New Haven.

Blix, G.M. 2009. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of

Archaeology. Philadelphia.

Bloom, H. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York.

Bredekamp, H. 1995. The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Princeton.

Burke, P. 2009. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven.

Butler, R. 1993. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven.

Chard, C. 1999. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour. Manchester.

Clarke, G. 2003. Roman House-Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in 15th c. Italy. Cambridge.

Coltman, V. 2006. Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain. Chicago.

Cowling, E.; Mundy, J. 1990. On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico, and the New Classicism, 1910-1930. London.

Dymond, A. 2003. “Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France.” The Art Bulletin, 85, 2 (Jun., 2003): 353-370.

Fer, B.; Batchelor, D.; Wood,P. Eds. 1993. Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, New Haven.

Fry, E.F. “Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity.” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4, special issue “Revising Cubism” (Winter, 1988): 296-310.

Gombrich, E. 1960 (1959). Art and Illusion. London.

Grafton, A.; Most, G.W.; Settis, S. eds. 2013 (2010)The Classical Tradition. Cambridge.

Harloe, K. 2013. Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity. Oxford.

Haskell, F. 1993. History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven.

Haskell, F.; Penny, N. 1981. Taste and The Antique. New Haven.

Holmes, B.; Brooke, K.M.; Dakis J. 2017. Liquid antiquity. Geneva.

Honour, H. 1968. Neoclassicism. London.

Hyman, T. 2016. “The world new made: figurative painting in the twentieth century. New York.

Johns, C.M.S. 1998. Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary Europe. Berkeley.

Jones, A. 2007. Memory and Material Culture.  Cambridge.

Lebensztejn, Jacques. 1988. “Framing Classical Space”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 37.

MacLeod, C. 1998. Embodying Antiquity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller.  Michigan.

Mah, H. 2003. Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914. Ithaca.

Marlowe, E. 2013. Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. London.

Martindale, C.; Thomas, R., eds. 2006. Classics and the Uses of Reception.  Oxford.

Meyer, J. 2009. “The Minimal Unconscious.” October, 130 (Fall, 2009): 141-176.

Mora, Stephanie. 2000. “Delacroix's Art Theory and His Definition of Classicism”

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 2000): 57-75.

Payne, A; Kuttner, A.; Smick, R. eds. 2000. Antiquity and Its Interpreters. Cambridge.

Penny, N.; Schmidt, E.D. eds. 2010. Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe. Washington DC.

Porter, J.I. 2006. “What is ‘Classical’ about Classical Antiquity?” in Porter, J.I. ed. 2006, Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome. Princeton: 1-68.

Potts, A. 1994. Flesh and The Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of the History of Art. New Haven.

Prange, R. 2013 in “Notes from the Field: Tradition” with O.Udechukwu, J. Brewer, J.Clarke, T.Guha-Thakurta, H. Hayden, G. Horowitz, T. DaCosta Kaufmann, S. Küchler, M. Loh, R. Phillips, A. Russo, The Art Bulletin, 95, 4 (December 2013), 518-543.

Reff , T. 1960. “Cézanne and Poussin.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 23, 1/2 (Jan. - Jun., 1960): 150-174.

Resinski, R. 2006. “Conversing with Homer and Twombly: A Collaborative Project on the "Iliad" and "Fifty Days at Iliam”"The Classical Journal,. 101, 3 (Feb. - Mar., 2006): 311-317.

Rowell, D. 2012. Paris: The ‘New Rome’ of Napoleon I. London.

Sankovitch, A.-M. 2000. Review of ‘L'art de la Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme,’ by Henri Zerner. Art Bulletin. Sep. 2000, 82, 3, 585-591.

Settis, S. 2006. The Future of the Classical. trans. A. Cameron. Cambridge.

Shiner, L. 2001. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago.

Slifkin, R. 2011. “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured.” Oxford Art Journal 34, 2: 227-246.

Vout, Caroline. 2018. “The Death of Classical Art?” (excerpt) Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton: 220-230.

Wright , A. “Arche-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History.” October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998): 44-63.

Zerner, Henri. 1988. “Classicism as Power”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 35-36.

LEARNING OUTCOMES: 

You will be able to:

·         Gain an understanding of critical approaches to classicism and culture

·         Explore the legacies of the visual culture of intimately linked esthetic and political debates

·         Develop advanced skills in the analysis of art, from painting and sculpture to film, architecture and the decorative arts

·         Engage critically with theoretical and historical texts and deploy these in the analysis of visual examples

·         Analyze the visual culture of these period in its historical and political context

·         Structure and write an essay using visual analysis and cited research as evidence

JOHN CABOT UNIVERSITY

AH 299A Special Topics in Art History:

Classicism: from Renaissance to Contemporary Art

Spring 2019

Instructor: Dr. Sarah Linford

[email protected]

Hours/place: TTH 11:30-12:45 PM (note 2 makeup Fridays)

Classroom: C.2.4       

TOTAL NO. OF CONTACT HOURS: 45

CREDITS: 3

PREREQUISITES: none

OFFICE HOURS:

Thursday after class and/or by appointment.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Specialized course offered periodically on specific aspects of art history. “Special Topics in Art History” courses are normally research-led topics on an area of current academic concern. May be taken more than once for credit with different topics.

SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENT:

The “classical tradition,” or classicism, derived from the art of the ancient Greco-Roman world, is a privileged vantage point from which to view the history of art until the historical avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to this day. This course examines the birth, meanings, and varied significance of the "classical" as attributed to ancient art; its purported rediscovery and reworking in the Renaissance. It then turns to the “neo-Classicism” of the 18th century, including what this return meant in socio-political terms and how variegated were its forms throughout Europe and the United States. Modern art's alternate historicism and disavowal of the subjects, values and institutions associated with classicism and, finally, how it has resurfaced, often ironically, in contemporary practices conclude this course. For in fact, far from disappearing, classicism continues to have a powerful impact, remaining present not only in the fine arts but also in cinema, photography, design and architecture. Students will acquire a clear sense of what classicism has been made to stand for, how it has been repurposed and how, in its many forms, it has pervaded the history and ideology of culture and the traditions of the West, from Antiquity to today.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

You will be able to:

·         Develop a nuanced understanding of one of the most prevalent categories of                        knowledge and visual culture of the Western tradition

·         Gain an understanding of critical approaches to classicism and culture

·         Develop advanced skills in the analysis of art, its history and theory

·         Engage critically with theoretical and historical texts and deploy these in the                        analysis of visual examples

·         Analyze the visual culture of these periods in their historical and political context

·         Structure and write an essay using visual analysis and cited research as evidence

GRADING POLICY

-ASSESSMENT METHODS:

Assignment - Guidelines - Weight

Preparation and Participation in class discussions.      20%

One written response to one of the required readings to serve as introduction to the discussion of that week’s readings; the written response must be handed in to the professor at the beginning of that class. The response demonstrates the student’s ability to briefly summarize, problematize and open up the chosen reading to larger discussion.    10%

Mid-term      The midterm examination will be composed of:

•Short answer questions: Definitions of terms, specific questions regarding artworks we have observed or issues discussed in the assigned readings

•Slide comparisons: identify 2 works, their makers and dates, then compare and contrast the works in a short essay, supporting your discussion with relevant information from assigned readings and lectures

•Essay: topics that treat general themes discussed in the first half of the course. You will need to provide specific examples taken from works discussed in class.        25%

Term Paper You will produce a term paper of on a specific artwork pertinent to the class topic. The paper will be based on a combination of research and direct observation, drawing on the visual and critical skills developed in class. A list of suggested topics will be provided, though students may suggest their own topics, to be approved by the professor. Please refer to the course outline below for deadlines.    20%

Final Exam  The format for the final exam will be the same as the midterm, with slide identifications and comparisons covering only material since the midterm. The essay questions will be on topics taken from themes discussed in the entire course.          25%

-ASSESSMENT CRITERIA:

A Work of this quality directly addresses the question or problem raised and provides a coherent argument displaying an extensive knowledge of relevant information or content. This type of work demonstrates the ability to critically evaluate concepts and theory and has an element of novelty and originality. There is clear evidence of a significant amount of reading beyond that required for the course.

B This is highly competent level of performance and directly addresses the question or problem raised.There is a demonstration of some ability to critically evaluate theory and concepts and relate them to practice. Discussions reflect the student’s own arguments and are not simply a repetition of standard lecture and reference material. The work does not suffer from any major errors or omissions and provides evidence of reading beyond the required assignments.

C This is an acceptable level of performance and provides answers that are clear but limited, reflecting the information offered in the lectures and reference readings.

D This level of performances demonstrates that the student lacks a coherent grasp of the material.Important information is omitted and irrelevant points included.In effect, the student has barely done enough to persuade the instructor that s/he should not fail.

F This work fails to show any knowledge or understanding of the issues raised in the question. Most of the material in the answer is irrelevant.

-ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS:

ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND EXAMINATION POLICY

You cannot make-up a major exam (midterm or final) without the permission of the Dean’s Office. The Dean’s Office will grant such permission only when the absence was caused by a serious impediment, such as a documented illness, hospitalization or death in the immediate family (in which you must attend the funeral) or other situations of similar gravity. Absences due to other meaningful conflicts, such as job interviews, family celebrations, travel difficulties, student misunderstandings or personal convenience, will not be excused. Students who will be absent from a major exam must notify the Dean’s Office prior to that exam. Absences from class due to the observance of a religious holiday will normally be excused. Individual students who will have to miss class to observe a religious holiday should notify the instructor by the end of the Add/Drop period to make prior arrangements for making up any work that will be missed. The final exam period runs until Friday, December 14th, 2018.

ACADEMIC HONESTY

As stated in the university catalog, any student who commits an act of academic dishonesty will receive a failing grade on the work in which the dishonesty occurred. In addition, acts of academic dishonesty, irrespective of the weight of the assignment, may result in the student receiving a failing grade in the course. Instances of academic dishonesty will be reported to the Dean of Academic Affairs. A student who is reported twice for academic dishonesty is subject to summary dismissal from the University. In such a case, the Academic Council will then make a recommendation to the President, who will make the final decision.

STUDENTS WITH LEARNING OR OTHER DISABILITIES

John Cabot University does not discriminate on the basis of disability or handicap. Students with approved accommodations must inform their professors at the beginning of the term. Please see the website for the complete policy.

___________________________________________________________________

CLASS HOURS:

TTH 11:30-12:45 PM  in classroom  C.2.4

(+ Make-up classes scheduled on Friday, February 15th and Friday, February 22nd)

___________________________________________________________________

CLASS SCHEDULE:

Course outline and assignments.

Tuesday, January 22 Introductory lecture 1: What is “Classical”?

                        Course content and logistics (part 1).

Thursday, January 24  Introductory lecture 2: (Re)discovering, inventing, or constructing the classical?

            Course content and logistics (part 2).

This class will explore the key concepts and figures that defined Renaissance understanding of ancient Greek and Roman art. We will address competition between major artistic figures, the influence of the classical on artistic status and styles, and the contribution of these to the particular dynamism of Renaissance art and architecture in the construction of the “classical.”

Essential reading:

Zerner, Henri. “Classicism as Power”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 35-36.

 > handed out hardcopy class 1

Tuesday, January 29   An international style?

We will begin week 3 by considering how classicism migrated, was established and integrated into French art through cross-cultural influence in the 16th and 17th centuries. Students will consider how the “classical” entered European art generally and French art and the Schools of Fontainebleau in particular.

Essential reading:

Sankovitch, A.-M. 2000. Review of `L'art de la Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme,' by Henri Zerner. Art Bulletin. Sep. 2000, 82, 3, 585-591.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, January 31 Classicism as nature corrected by ideal: rules and norms

This class will address the founding of the French Academy with a focus on the work of Poussin, evincing the language and rhetoric of classicism in 17^th century France — and its opponents.

Essential reading:

Lebensztejn, J. 1988. “Framing Classical Space”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 37.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, February 5 The Grand Tour, Antiquarianism and Connoisseurship

This class focuses on the 18th century,  starting with Grand Tour, British antiquarianism and the way in which Antiquity was used in part as a foil for the emergence of  “distinctly English” style.

Essential reading:

Wilton-Ely, J. entry on the “Grand Tour” in The Classical Tradition, Grafton, A.; Most, G.W.; Settis, S. eds. 2013 (2010), Cambridge, 1 p.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 7 Revolution & Empire: on heroic call to arms and armchairs

Here, we will undertake the French Revolution’s programmatic uses of references to Greco-Roman antiquity. We will compare and contrast these to Italian, German and English uses and consider, in particular, the artistic and political career of David from 1789 and through the Napoleonic Empire.

Essential reading:

Mah, H. 2003. “Classicism and Gender Transformation: David, Goethe, and Staël” (excerpt) in Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914. Ithaca: 116-124.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, February 12 Classicism versus Romanticism?

Our class will study the ways in which the early 19th century’s fascination for classical ruins was a mainstay of Middle-European and Anglo-Saxon Romanticism.

Essential reading:

Campbell, G. 2013 (2010). “Romanticism”. In A. Grafton, G. W. Most, S. Settis (Eds.), The Classical Tradition. Cambridge. 2pp.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 14 Academic classicide?

Our first class this week will evaluate the claims made by the nascent avant-gardes in the wake of the 1848 revolutions that the classical tradition has been corrupted by Academic and official art. The reasons why historical painting, allegory and classical iconography are deemed, by some, irrelevant to modern art will be the thrust of this class.

Essential reading:

McWilliam, N. 1989. “Limited Revisions: Academic Art History Confronts Academic Art”

Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1989): 71-86.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Friday, February 15 (Make-up day for Tuesday, February 26 and Thursday Feb 28) GNAM

Note that this is a double class, and runs from 10:15 to 12:45.  

We will meet in front of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna to see some of the 19th-century works studied in class, with particular attention to the way in which Italian painting of the 19th-century takes its cues from other European avant-gardes while attempting to convey privileged access to a posited classical tradition.

Tuesday, February 19 Lines and blotches

We will ask to what extent the early to mid 19th century debates surrounding “drawing versus color” correspond to conceptions and uses of the classical canon and its purported values, from  the Ingres-Delacroix rivalry to the emergence Impressionism.

Essential reading:

Mora, S. 2000. “Delacroix's Art Theory and His Definition of Classicism.”Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34, 1 (Spring, 2000): 57-75.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 21 Cézanne, or “Poussin after nature”?

In this class we will examine how Cézanne’s treatment of landscape, nature and the human body were conceived and promoted as a salutary return to classical values in the late and post-impressionist decades, from the 1880s to the 1910s.

Essential reading:

Reff , T. 1960. “Cézanne and Poussin.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 23, 1/2 (Jan. - Jun., 1960): 150-174.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Friday, February 22 (Make-up day for Thursday, April 25th) Problems in the Third dimension

Sculptural case studies of works by Rodin, Maillol and Bourdelle will flesh out the classical-abstract nexus through a simple question that opens up complex answers: how differently did painters and sculptors approach “the classical” circa 1900?

Essential reading:

McWilliam, N. 1981. Review of The Romantics to Rodin, French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from American Collections by P. Fusco, H. W. Janson and La Tradition Classique et l'Esprit Romantique, Les Sculpteurs de l'Académie de France  Rome de 1824 à 1840 by A. Le Normand. Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, Sculpture (Nov., 1981): 60-62.

> e-text available through MyJCU

(no class held Tuesday, February 26 or Thursday, February 28)

Tuesday, March 5 Midterm review

Thursday, March 7 Midterm examination

(March 11-15 Spring break)

Tuesday, March 19 Post-impressionism and the classical ideal

We look in this class at how Post-impressionist painting, including by the Nabis and the Neo-impressionists, referenced the classical, and to what socio-political ends.  We examine how a posited classical tradition was actually essential to the emergence of non-figurative or abstract painting.

Essential reading:

Dymond, A. 2003. “Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France.” The Art Bulletin, 85, 2 (Jun., 2003): 353-370.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, March 21 Matisse, Fauvism and the classical

Essential reading:

Wright , A. “Arche-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History.” October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998): 44-63.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, March 26 Cubism as anti-classicism?

Touted and instrumentalized as the death of classicism and the Western tradition generally, Cubism’s relation to works from the “golden ages” of Classicism is far more complex than its detractors have claimed.

Essential reading:

Fry, E.F. “Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity.” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4, special issue “Revising Cubism” (Winter, 1988): 296-310.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, March 28 Futurism, Vorticism

How does Marinetti’s 1911 pyrrhic manifesto relate to the works of Balla and Boccioni and how does a short-lived English movement's rejection of landscape and nudes, posited by its 1914 manifesto, compare and contrast in their understandings and uses of “classicism”?

Essential reading:

Antliff, M. 2013.  “Politicizing the New Sculpture” in Antliff and Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives, Oxford, 102-18

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April 2 What “Return to Order”?

Addressing the ways that classicism was referenced by artists in Italy, France and Germany  following World War 1, we will consider how artists legitimized avant-garde art and architecture through references — iconographical, stylistic, ideological and textual — to a posited classical past. We will treat Purism, Esprit Nouveau, Valori Plastici, later Futurism and, more generally, the Return to Order and the historical avant-gardes circa 1920.

Essential reading:

Batchelor, D. 1993. “‘This Liberty and this Order:’ Art in France After the First World War.” In Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, Fer, B.; Batchelor, D.; Wood,P. Eds. New Haven: 1-17.

> Course Post-It PDF

Thursday, April 4 Classicism as Power: European art and the World Wars (1)

This classes considers how ideas and myths about the classical past were appropriated and promulgated by political regimes, from Soviet Russia to Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain and the United States from the 1920s to the late 1940s.

Essential reading:

Antliff, M. 2002. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art Bulletin (March, 2002): 148 – 169.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April  9 Classicism as Power: European art and the World Wars (2)

This class rounds out the question of official and “independent” uses of classicisms from the eve of to the aftermath of the Second World War.

Essential reading:

Bazin, J.; Dubourg Glatigny, P.; Piotrowski, P. 2015. “Socialist Realism/Avant-gardes” in “Introduction: Geography of Internationalism” (excerpt) in Art beyond Borders : Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989). London: 8-21.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, April 11 The Renewed Death of Classicism?

This class counters the dogma that the “New York School” of painting marks (yet again) the definitive death of the classical tradition. Comparisons to German painting of the same period will provide useful comparative material.

Essential reading:

Slifkin, R. 2011. “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured.” Oxford Art Journal

34, 2: 227-246.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April  16 Classical, high and low

This class will focus in particular on the painting of Philip Guston as a case study for the vexed question of the relation of popular and high culture, for which the classical has become short-hand.

Essential reading:

Hyman, T. 2016. “Philip Guston's renewal-by-drawing (1965-67).” In The world new made: figurative painting in the twentieth century. New York: 216-218.

> ND196.F5 H96 2016 or Course “post-it” PDF.

Thursday, April 18 Arte povera, Minimalism and the monument(al)

Focussing in particular on the work of Kounellis and Judd, this class addresses the many kinds of references which “the classical” has come to encompass by the 1970s, in three-dimensional works — and their critical reception — in particular.

Essential reading:

Meyer, J. 2009. “The Minimal Unconscious.” October, 130 (Fall, 2009): 141-176

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April 23  “Return” to figuration; persistence of  “classical” - the late 20th c.

From Twombly to Koons and beyond: neither the classical, nor the figurative, nor the values these have on and off stood for have ever disappeared in Western art. The ways in which art of the past 30 years has (heavily) relied on iconography, literary sources, modes, narration, action, symbolism, intertextuality (…) among other means of referencing the classical tradition is a case in point.

Essential reading:

Holmes, B.; Brooke, KM; Dakis J. 2017. Excerpt from Liquid antiquity. Geneva: 5 pp.

> Frohring N7432.5.C6 L57 2017 or Course post-it PDF.

(Thursday April 25: holiday — makeup day was February 22.)

Tuesday, April 30 Where are we at? What do we call it? How do we use it (or don’t)?

So how, if at at all, can the term “classical” and its cognates be used, today, in a self-aware practice of art history? And how not?

Essential reading:

Vout, Caroline. 2018. “The Death of Classical Art?” (excerpt) Classical Art : A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2018: 220-230.

> Frohring N5613 .V68 2018 or Course post-it PDF.

Thursday, May 2  Final exam review

Week of  May  6-10  Final Exam (date and time TBA)

___________________________________________________________________

Selected bibliography

Antliff, M. 2002. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art Bulletin (March, 2002): 148 – 169.

Antliff, M. 2013.  “Politicizing the New Sculpture” in Antliff and Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives, Oxford, 102-118.

Arthurs, J. 2007. “(Re)presenting Roman History in Italy, 1911-1955” in C. Norton ed, Nationalism, Historiography and the (Re)construction of the Past, Washington DC.

Aymonimo, A. and Lauder, A.V., eds. 2015. Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal. London.

Ayres, P.J. 1997. Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in 18th-century England.  Cambridge.

Barkan, L. 1999. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven.

Barolsky, P. 2014. “Winckelmann, Ovid, and the transformation of the Apollo Belvedere”

Notes in the History of Art, 33, 2 (Winter 2014): 2-4.

Barrow, R. 2007. The Use of Classical Art and Literature by Victorian Painters, 1860-1912. Lewiston.

Baxandall, M. 1971. Giotto and the Orators.  Oxford.

Bazin, J.; Dubourg Glatigny, P.; Piotrowski, P. 2015. Art beyond Borders : Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989). London.

Beard, M. 1994. “Casts and Casts-Offs: The Origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39: 1-29.

Bignamini, I; Hornsby, C. 2010. Digging and Dealing in 18th c. Rome. New Haven.

Blix, G.M. 2009. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of

Archaeology. Philadelphia.

Bloom, H. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York.

Bredekamp, H. 1995. The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Princeton.

Burke, P. 2009. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven.

Butler, R. 1993. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven.

Chard, C. 1999. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour. Manchester.

Clarke, G. 2003. Roman House-Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in 15th c. Italy. Cambridge.

Coltman, V. 2006. Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain. Chicago.

Cowling, E.; Mundy, J. 1990. On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico, and the New Classicism, 1910-1930. London.

Dymond, A. 2003. “Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France.” The Art Bulletin, 85, 2 (Jun., 2003): 353-370.

Fer, B.; Batchelor, D.; Wood,P. Eds. 1993. Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, New Haven.

Fry, E.F. “Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity.” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4, special issue “Revising Cubism” (Winter, 1988): 296-310.

Gombrich, E. 1960 (1959). Art and Illusion. London.

Grafton, A.; Most, G.W.; Settis, S. eds. 2013 (2010)The Classical Tradition. Cambridge.

Harloe, K. 2013. Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity. Oxford.

Haskell, F. 1993. History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven.

Haskell, F.; Penny, N. 1981. Taste and The Antique. New Haven.

Holmes, B.; Brooke, K.M.; Dakis J. 2017. Liquid antiquity. Geneva.

Honour, H. 1968. Neoclassicism. London.

Hyman, T. 2016. “The world new made: figurative painting in the twentieth century. New York.

Johns, C.M.S. 1998. Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary Europe. Berkeley.

Jones, A. 2007. Memory and Material Culture.  Cambridge.

Lebensztejn, Jacques. 1988. “Framing Classical Space”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 37.

MacLeod, C. 1998. Embodying Antiquity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller.  Michigan.

Mah, H. 2003. Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914. Ithaca.

Marlowe, E. 2013. Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. London.

Martindale, C.; Thomas, R., eds. 2006. Classics and the Uses of Reception.  Oxford.

Meyer, J. 2009. “The Minimal Unconscious.” October, 130 (Fall, 2009): 141-176.

Mora, Stephanie. 2000. “Delacroix's Art Theory and His Definition of Classicism”

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 2000): 57-75.

Payne, A; Kuttner, A.; Smick, R. eds. 2000. Antiquity and Its Interpreters. Cambridge.

Penny, N.; Schmidt, E.D. eds. 2010. Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe. Washington DC.

Porter, J.I. 2006. “What is ‘Classical’ about Classical Antiquity?” in Porter, J.I. ed. 2006, Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome. Princeton: 1-68.

Potts, A. 1994. Flesh and The Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of the History of Art. New Haven.

Prange, R. 2013 in “Notes from the Field: Tradition” with O.Udechukwu, J. Brewer, J.Clarke, T.Guha-Thakurta, H. Hayden, G. Horowitz, T. DaCosta Kaufmann, S. Küchler, M. Loh, R. Phillips, A. Russo, The Art Bulletin, 95, 4 (December 2013), 518-543.

Reff , T. 1960. “Cézanne and Poussin.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 23, 1/2 (Jan. - Jun., 1960): 150-174.

Resinski, R. 2006. “Conversing with Homer and Twombly: A Collaborative Project on the "Iliad" and "Fifty Days at Iliam”"The Classical Journal,. 101, 3 (Feb. - Mar., 2006): 311-317.

Rowell, D. 2012. Paris: The ‘New Rome’ of Napoleon I. London.

Sankovitch, A.-M. 2000. Review of ‘L'art de la Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme,’ by Henri Zerner. Art Bulletin. Sep. 2000, 82, 3, 585-591.

Settis, S. 2006. The Future of the Classical. trans. A. Cameron. Cambridge.

Shiner, L. 2001. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago.

Slifkin, R. 2011. “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured.” Oxford Art Journal 34, 2: 227-246.

Vout, Caroline. 2018. “The Death of Classical Art?” (excerpt) Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton: 220-230.

Wright , A. “Arche-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History.” October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998): 44-63.

Zerner, Henri. 1988. “Classicism as Power”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 35-36.

JOHN CABOT UNIVERSITY

AH 299A Special Topics in Art History:

Classicism: from Renaissance to Contemporary Art

Spring 2019

Instructor: Dr. Sarah Linford

[email protected]

Hours/place: TTH 11:30-12:45 PM (note 2 makeup Fridays)

Classroom: C.2.4       

TOTAL NO. OF CONTACT HOURS: 45

CREDITS: 3

PREREQUISITES: none

OFFICE HOURS:

Thursday after class and/or by appointment.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Specialized course offered periodically on specific aspects of art history. “Special Topics in Art History” courses are normally research-led topics on an area of current academic concern. May be taken more than once for credit with different topics.

SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENT:

The “classical tradition,” or classicism, derived from the art of the ancient Greco-Roman world, is a privileged vantage point from which to view the history of art until the historical avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to this day. This course examines the birth, meanings, and varied significance of the "classical" as attributed to ancient art; its purported rediscovery and reworking in the Renaissance. It then turns to the “neo-Classicism” of the 18th century, including what this return meant in socio-political terms and how variegated were its forms throughout Europe and the United States. Modern art's alternate historicism and disavowal of the subjects, values and institutions associated with classicism and, finally, how it has resurfaced, often ironically, in contemporary practices conclude this course. For in fact, far from disappearing, classicism continues to have a powerful impact, remaining present not only in the fine arts but also in cinema, photography, design and architecture. Students will acquire a clear sense of what classicism has been made to stand for, how it has been repurposed and how, in its many forms, it has pervaded the history and ideology of culture and the traditions of the West, from Antiquity to today.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

You will be able to:

·         Develop a nuanced understanding of one of the most prevalent categories of                        knowledge and visual culture of the Western tradition

·         Gain an understanding of critical approaches to classicism and culture

·         Develop advanced skills in the analysis of art, its history and theory

·         Engage critically with theoretical and historical texts and deploy these in the                        analysis of visual examples

·         Analyze the visual culture of these periods in their historical and political context

·         Structure and write an essay using visual analysis and cited research as evidence

GRADING POLICY

-ASSESSMENT METHODS:

Assignment - Guidelines - Weight

Preparation and Participation in class discussions.      20%

One written response to one of the required readings to serve as introduction to the discussion of that week’s readings; the written response must be handed in to the professor at the beginning of that class. The response demonstrates the student’s ability to briefly summarize, problematize and open up the chosen reading to larger discussion.    10%

Mid-term      The midterm examination will be composed of:

•Short answer questions: Definitions of terms, specific questions regarding artworks we have observed or issues discussed in the assigned readings

•Slide comparisons: identify 2 works, their makers and dates, then compare and contrast the works in a short essay, supporting your discussion with relevant information from assigned readings and lectures

•Essay: topics that treat general themes discussed in the first half of the course. You will need to provide specific examples taken from works discussed in class.        25%

Term Paper You will produce a term paper of on a specific artwork pertinent to the class topic. The paper will be based on a combination of research and direct observation, drawing on the visual and critical skills developed in class. A list of suggested topics will be provided, though students may suggest their own topics, to be approved by the professor. Please refer to the course outline below for deadlines.    20%

Final Exam  The format for the final exam will be the same as the midterm, with slide identifications and comparisons covering only material since the midterm. The essay questions will be on topics taken from themes discussed in the entire course.          25%

-ASSESSMENT CRITERIA:

A Work of this quality directly addresses the question or problem raised and provides a coherent argument displaying an extensive knowledge of relevant information or content. This type of work demonstrates the ability to critically evaluate concepts and theory and has an element of novelty and originality. There is clear evidence of a significant amount of reading beyond that required for the course.

B This is highly competent level of performance and directly addresses the question or problem raised.There is a demonstration of some ability to critically evaluate theory and concepts and relate them to practice. Discussions reflect the student’s own arguments and are not simply a repetition of standard lecture and reference material. The work does not suffer from any major errors or omissions and provides evidence of reading beyond the required assignments.

C This is an acceptable level of performance and provides answers that are clear but limited, reflecting the information offered in the lectures and reference readings.

D This level of performances demonstrates that the student lacks a coherent grasp of the material.Important information is omitted and irrelevant points included.In effect, the student has barely done enough to persuade the instructor that s/he should not fail.

F This work fails to show any knowledge or understanding of the issues raised in the question. Most of the material in the answer is irrelevant.

-ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS:

ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND EXAMINATION POLICY

You cannot make-up a major exam (midterm or final) without the permission of the Dean’s Office. The Dean’s Office will grant such permission only when the absence was caused by a serious impediment, such as a documented illness, hospitalization or death in the immediate family (in which you must attend the funeral) or other situations of similar gravity. Absences due to other meaningful conflicts, such as job interviews, family celebrations, travel difficulties, student misunderstandings or personal convenience, will not be excused. Students who will be absent from a major exam must notify the Dean’s Office prior to that exam. Absences from class due to the observance of a religious holiday will normally be excused. Individual students who will have to miss class to observe a religious holiday should notify the instructor by the end of the Add/Drop period to make prior arrangements for making up any work that will be missed. The final exam period runs until Friday, December 14th, 2018.

ACADEMIC HONESTY

As stated in the university catalog, any student who commits an act of academic dishonesty will receive a failing grade on the work in which the dishonesty occurred. In addition, acts of academic dishonesty, irrespective of the weight of the assignment, may result in the student receiving a failing grade in the course. Instances of academic dishonesty will be reported to the Dean of Academic Affairs. A student who is reported twice for academic dishonesty is subject to summary dismissal from the University. In such a case, the Academic Council will then make a recommendation to the President, who will make the final decision.

STUDENTS WITH LEARNING OR OTHER DISABILITIES

John Cabot University does not discriminate on the basis of disability or handicap. Students with approved accommodations must inform their professors at the beginning of the term. Please see the website for the complete policy.

___________________________________________________________________

CLASS HOURS:

TTH 11:30-12:45 PM  in classroom  C.2.4

(+ Make-up classes scheduled on Friday, February 15th and Friday, February 22nd)

___________________________________________________________________

CLASS SCHEDULE:

Course outline and assignments.

Tuesday, January 22 Introductory lecture 1: What is “Classical”?

                        Course content and logistics (part 1).

Thursday, January 24  Introductory lecture 2: (Re)discovering, inventing, or constructing the classical?

            Course content and logistics (part 2).

This class will explore the key concepts and figures that defined Renaissance understanding of ancient Greek and Roman art. We will address competition between major artistic figures, the influence of the classical on artistic status and styles, and the contribution of these to the particular dynamism of Renaissance art and architecture in the construction of the “classical.”

Essential reading:

Zerner, Henri. “Classicism as Power”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 35-36.

 > handed out hardcopy class 1

Tuesday, January 29   An international style?

We will begin week 3 by considering how classicism migrated, was established and integrated into French art through cross-cultural influence in the 16th and 17th centuries. Students will consider how the “classical” entered European art generally and French art and the Schools of Fontainebleau in particular.

Essential reading:

Sankovitch, A.-M. 2000. Review of `L'art de la Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme,' by Henri Zerner. Art Bulletin. Sep. 2000, 82, 3, 585-591.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, January 31 Classicism as nature corrected by ideal: rules and norms

This class will address the founding of the French Academy with a focus on the work of Poussin, evincing the language and rhetoric of classicism in 17^th century France — and its opponents.

Essential reading:

Lebensztejn, J. 1988. “Framing Classical Space”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 37.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, February 5 The Grand Tour, Antiquarianism and Connoisseurship

This class focuses on the 18th century,  starting with Grand Tour, British antiquarianism and the way in which Antiquity was used in part as a foil for the emergence of  “distinctly English” style.

Essential reading:

Wilton-Ely, J. entry on the “Grand Tour” in The Classical Tradition, Grafton, A.; Most, G.W.; Settis, S. eds. 2013 (2010), Cambridge, 1 p.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 7 Revolution & Empire: on heroic call to arms and armchairs

Here, we will undertake the French Revolution’s programmatic uses of references to Greco-Roman antiquity. We will compare and contrast these to Italian, German and English uses and consider, in particular, the artistic and political career of David from 1789 and through the Napoleonic Empire.

Essential reading:

Mah, H. 2003. “Classicism and Gender Transformation: David, Goethe, and Staël” (excerpt) in Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914. Ithaca: 116-124.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, February 12 Classicism versus Romanticism?

Our class will study the ways in which the early 19th century’s fascination for classical ruins was a mainstay of Middle-European and Anglo-Saxon Romanticism.

Essential reading:

Campbell, G. 2013 (2010). “Romanticism”. In A. Grafton, G. W. Most, S. Settis (Eds.), The Classical Tradition. Cambridge. 2pp.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 14 Academic classicide?

Our first class this week will evaluate the claims made by the nascent avant-gardes in the wake of the 1848 revolutions that the classical tradition has been corrupted by Academic and official art. The reasons why historical painting, allegory and classical iconography are deemed, by some, irrelevant to modern art will be the thrust of this class.

Essential reading:

McWilliam, N. 1989. “Limited Revisions: Academic Art History Confronts Academic Art”

Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1989): 71-86.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Friday, February 15 (Make-up day for Tuesday, February 26 and Thursday Feb 28) GNAM

Note that this is a double class, and runs from 10:15 to 12:45.  

We will meet in front of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna to see some of the 19th-century works studied in class, with particular attention to the way in which Italian painting of the 19th-century takes its cues from other European avant-gardes while attempting to convey privileged access to a posited classical tradition.

Tuesday, February 19 Lines and blotches

We will ask to what extent the early to mid 19th century debates surrounding “drawing versus color” correspond to conceptions and uses of the classical canon and its purported values, from  the Ingres-Delacroix rivalry to the emergence Impressionism.

Essential reading:

Mora, S. 2000. “Delacroix's Art Theory and His Definition of Classicism.”Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34, 1 (Spring, 2000): 57-75.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, February 21 Cézanne, or “Poussin after nature”?

In this class we will examine how Cézanne’s treatment of landscape, nature and the human body were conceived and promoted as a salutary return to classical values in the late and post-impressionist decades, from the 1880s to the 1910s.

Essential reading:

Reff , T. 1960. “Cézanne and Poussin.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 23, 1/2 (Jan. - Jun., 1960): 150-174.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Friday, February 22 (Make-up day for Thursday, April 25th) Problems in the Third dimension

Sculptural case studies of works by Rodin, Maillol and Bourdelle will flesh out the classical-abstract nexus through a simple question that opens up complex answers: how differently did painters and sculptors approach “the classical” circa 1900?

Essential reading:

McWilliam, N. 1981. Review of The Romantics to Rodin, French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from American Collections by P. Fusco, H. W. Janson and La Tradition Classique et l'Esprit Romantique, Les Sculpteurs de l'Académie de France  Rome de 1824 à 1840 by A. Le Normand. Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, Sculpture (Nov., 1981): 60-62.

> e-text available through MyJCU

(no class held Tuesday, February 26 or Thursday, February 28)

Tuesday, March 5 Midterm review

Thursday, March 7 Midterm examination

(March 11-15 Spring break)

Tuesday, March 19 Post-impressionism and the classical ideal

We look in this class at how Post-impressionist painting, including by the Nabis and the Neo-impressionists, referenced the classical, and to what socio-political ends.  We examine how a posited classical tradition was actually essential to the emergence of non-figurative or abstract painting.

Essential reading:

Dymond, A. 2003. “Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France.” The Art Bulletin, 85, 2 (Jun., 2003): 353-370.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, March 21 Matisse, Fauvism and the classical

Essential reading:

Wright , A. “Arche-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History.” October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998): 44-63.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, March 26 Cubism as anti-classicism?

Touted and instrumentalized as the death of classicism and the Western tradition generally, Cubism’s relation to works from the “golden ages” of Classicism is far more complex than its detractors have claimed.

Essential reading:

Fry, E.F. “Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity.” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4, special issue “Revising Cubism” (Winter, 1988): 296-310.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, March 28 Futurism, Vorticism

How does Marinetti’s 1911 pyrrhic manifesto relate to the works of Balla and Boccioni and how does a short-lived English movement's rejection of landscape and nudes, posited by its 1914 manifesto, compare and contrast in their understandings and uses of “classicism”?

Essential reading:

Antliff, M. 2013.  “Politicizing the New Sculpture” in Antliff and Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives, Oxford, 102-18

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April 2 What “Return to Order”?

Addressing the ways that classicism was referenced by artists in Italy, France and Germany  following World War 1, we will consider how artists legitimized avant-garde art and architecture through references — iconographical, stylistic, ideological and textual — to a posited classical past. We will treat Purism, Esprit Nouveau, Valori Plastici, later Futurism and, more generally, the Return to Order and the historical avant-gardes circa 1920.

Essential reading:

Batchelor, D. 1993. “‘This Liberty and this Order:’ Art in France After the First World War.” In Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, Fer, B.; Batchelor, D.; Wood,P. Eds. New Haven: 1-17.

> Course Post-It PDF

Thursday, April 4 Classicism as Power: European art and the World Wars (1)

This classes considers how ideas and myths about the classical past were appropriated and promulgated by political regimes, from Soviet Russia to Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain and the United States from the 1920s to the late 1940s.

Essential reading:

Antliff, M. 2002. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art Bulletin (March, 2002): 148 – 169.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April  9 Classicism as Power: European art and the World Wars (2)

This class rounds out the question of official and “independent” uses of classicisms from the eve of to the aftermath of the Second World War.

Essential reading:

Bazin, J.; Dubourg Glatigny, P.; Piotrowski, P. 2015. “Socialist Realism/Avant-gardes” in “Introduction: Geography of Internationalism” (excerpt) in Art beyond Borders : Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989). London: 8-21.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Thursday, April 11 The Renewed Death of Classicism?

This class counters the dogma that the “New York School” of painting marks (yet again) the definitive death of the classical tradition. Comparisons to German painting of the same period will provide useful comparative material.

Essential reading:

Slifkin, R. 2011. “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured.” Oxford Art Journal

34, 2: 227-246.

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April  16 Classical, high and low

This class will focus in particular on the painting of Philip Guston as a case study for the vexed question of the relation of popular and high culture, for which the classical has become short-hand.

Essential reading:

Hyman, T. 2016. “Philip Guston's renewal-by-drawing (1965-67).” In The world new made: figurative painting in the twentieth century. New York: 216-218.

> ND196.F5 H96 2016 or Course “post-it” PDF.

Thursday, April 18 Arte povera, Minimalism and the monument(al)

Focussing in particular on the work of Kounellis and Judd, this class addresses the many kinds of references which “the classical” has come to encompass by the 1970s, in three-dimensional works — and their critical reception — in particular.

Essential reading:

Meyer, J. 2009. “The Minimal Unconscious.” October, 130 (Fall, 2009): 141-176

> e-text available through MyJCU

Tuesday, April 23  “Return” to figuration; persistence of  “classical” - the late 20th c.

From Twombly to Koons and beyond: neither the classical, nor the figurative, nor the values these have on and off stood for have ever disappeared in Western art. The ways in which art of the past 30 years has (heavily) relied on iconography, literary sources, modes, narration, action, symbolism, intertextuality (…) among other means of referencing the classical tradition is a case in point.

Essential reading:

Holmes, B.; Brooke, KM; Dakis J. 2017. Excerpt from Liquid antiquity. Geneva: 5 pp.

> Frohring N7432.5.C6 L57 2017 or Course post-it PDF.

(Thursday April 25: holiday — makeup day was February 22.)

Tuesday, April 30 Where are we at? What do we call it? How do we use it (or don’t)?

So how, if at at all, can the term “classical” and its cognates be used, today, in a self-aware practice of art history? And how not?

Essential reading:

Vout, Caroline. 2018. “The Death of Classical Art?” (excerpt) Classical Art : A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2018: 220-230.

> Frohring N5613 .V68 2018 or Course post-it PDF.

Thursday, May 2  Final exam review

Week of  May  6-10  Final Exam (date and time TBA)

___________________________________________________________________

Selected bibliography

Antliff, M. 2002. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” The Art Bulletin (March, 2002): 148 – 169.

Antliff, M. 2013.  “Politicizing the New Sculpture” in Antliff and Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives, Oxford, 102-118.

Arthurs, J. 2007. “(Re)presenting Roman History in Italy, 1911-1955” in C. Norton ed, Nationalism, Historiography and the (Re)construction of the Past, Washington DC.

Aymonimo, A. and Lauder, A.V., eds. 2015. Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal. London.

Ayres, P.J. 1997. Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in 18th-century England.  Cambridge.

Barkan, L. 1999. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven.

Barolsky, P. 2014. “Winckelmann, Ovid, and the transformation of the Apollo Belvedere”

Notes in the History of Art, 33, 2 (Winter 2014): 2-4.

Barrow, R. 2007. The Use of Classical Art and Literature by Victorian Painters, 1860-1912. Lewiston.

Baxandall, M. 1971. Giotto and the Orators.  Oxford.

Bazin, J.; Dubourg Glatigny, P.; Piotrowski, P. 2015. Art beyond Borders : Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989). London.

Beard, M. 1994. “Casts and Casts-Offs: The Origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39: 1-29.

Bignamini, I; Hornsby, C. 2010. Digging and Dealing in 18th c. Rome. New Haven.

Blix, G.M. 2009. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of

Archaeology. Philadelphia.

Bloom, H. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York.

Bredekamp, H. 1995. The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Princeton.

Burke, P. 2009. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven.

Butler, R. 1993. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven.

Chard, C. 1999. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour. Manchester.

Clarke, G. 2003. Roman House-Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in 15th c. Italy. Cambridge.

Coltman, V. 2006. Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain. Chicago.

Cowling, E.; Mundy, J. 1990. On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico, and the New Classicism, 1910-1930. London.

Dymond, A. 2003. “Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France.” The Art Bulletin, 85, 2 (Jun., 2003): 353-370.

Fer, B.; Batchelor, D.; Wood,P. Eds. 1993. Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, New Haven.

Fry, E.F. “Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity.” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4, special issue “Revising Cubism” (Winter, 1988): 296-310.

Gombrich, E. 1960 (1959). Art and Illusion. London.

Grafton, A.; Most, G.W.; Settis, S. eds. 2013 (2010)The Classical Tradition. Cambridge.

Harloe, K. 2013. Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity. Oxford.

Haskell, F. 1993. History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven.

Haskell, F.; Penny, N. 1981. Taste and The Antique. New Haven.

Holmes, B.; Brooke, K.M.; Dakis J. 2017. Liquid antiquity. Geneva.

Honour, H. 1968. Neoclassicism. London.

Hyman, T. 2016. “The world new made: figurative painting in the twentieth century. New York.

Johns, C.M.S. 1998. Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary Europe. Berkeley.

Jones, A. 2007. Memory and Material Culture.  Cambridge.

Lebensztejn, Jacques. 1988. “Framing Classical Space”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 37.

MacLeod, C. 1998. Embodying Antiquity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller.  Michigan.

Mah, H. 2003. Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914. Ithaca.

Marlowe, E. 2013. Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. London.

Martindale, C.; Thomas, R., eds. 2006. Classics and the Uses of Reception.  Oxford.

Meyer, J. 2009. “The Minimal Unconscious.” October, 130 (Fall, 2009): 141-176.

Mora, Stephanie. 2000. “Delacroix's Art Theory and His Definition of Classicism”

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 2000): 57-75.

Payne, A; Kuttner, A.; Smick, R. eds. 2000. Antiquity and Its Interpreters. Cambridge.

Penny, N.; Schmidt, E.D. eds. 2010. Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe. Washington DC.

Porter, J.I. 2006. “What is ‘Classical’ about Classical Antiquity?” in Porter, J.I. ed. 2006, Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome. Princeton: 1-68.

Potts, A. 1994. Flesh and The Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of the History of Art. New Haven.

Prange, R. 2013 in “Notes from the Field: Tradition” with O.Udechukwu, J. Brewer, J.Clarke, T.Guha-Thakurta, H. Hayden, G. Horowitz, T. DaCosta Kaufmann, S. Küchler, M. Loh, R. Phillips, A. Russo, The Art Bulletin, 95, 4 (December 2013), 518-543.

Reff , T. 1960. “Cézanne and Poussin.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 23, 1/2 (Jan. - Jun., 1960): 150-174.

Resinski, R. 2006. “Conversing with Homer and Twombly: A Collaborative Project on the "Iliad" and "Fifty Days at Iliam”"The Classical Journal,. 101, 3 (Feb. - Mar., 2006): 311-317.

Rowell, D. 2012. Paris: The ‘New Rome’ of Napoleon I. London.

Sankovitch, A.-M. 2000. Review of ‘L'art de la Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme,’ by Henri Zerner. Art Bulletin. Sep. 2000, 82, 3, 585-591.

Settis, S. 2006. The Future of the Classical. trans. A. Cameron. Cambridge.

Shiner, L. 2001. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago.

Slifkin, R. 2011. “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured.” Oxford Art Journal 34, 2: 227-246.

Vout, Caroline. 2018. “The Death of Classical Art?” (excerpt) Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton: 220-230.

Wright , A. “Arche-tectures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History.” October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998): 44-63.

Zerner, Henri. 1988. “Classicism as Power”. Art Journal. March 1988; 47(1): 35-36.