Global Arc

Topics in 17th- and 18th-century art and architecture. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 2 distribution requirement. Prerequisite: a course in the art of this period or instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

A broadly based view of the artist's career, principally as seen through the writings of his first and most articulate fan, Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists remains the founding classic of Art History. We will consider a wide range of works ranging within the complete Michelangelo corpus, including sculpture, painting, and architecture. Along the way, we will read Vasari carefully and compare what we see with what he saw; we will also have occasion to talk about what it means to read words about pictures.

The Artist as Idea, from Leonardo to Warhol. Seminar will explore the myth of the artist in Europe and the U.S. from the Renaissance to the present. Topics will include ideas of the artist as a privileged social being, notions of artistic temperament and "genius," the gendering of the artist, modernist myths of bohemianism and madness, and the postmodern artist's engagement with mass media. Analysis of self-portraiture, artists' writings, representations of the studio, and artists in film. Case studies will include Leonardo, Michelangelo, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Delacroix, van Gogh, Picasso, Pollock, O'Keeffe, and Warhol.

Does art have an essential nature? Do different mediums--painting, sculpture, photography, film, television, video--have specific ontologies that demand specific methods? How is the autonomy of art debated, and why is this debate so central to modernism? With images and texts by primary artists and critics, the seminar will investigate the "ends" of art in the sense of posited goals and presumed deaths. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 3 distribution requirement. Prerequisite: a course in the art of this period or instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

Caricature, originally the art of distorting the human face for comic effect, provided one of the earliest challenges to the ideally "beautiful" and the academic art training that developed in Europe after the Renaissance. This course will examine the explosion of caricatural prints and comic illustrated books in France and Great Britain from the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 to World War I. Topics will include the influence of physiognomic and racial theories on caricatural depictions; French Realism and the work of Daumier; Rodolphe Töpffer and the invention of the comic strip; and the origins of Dada and Cubism in comic illustration.

Topics on the aesthetic and stylistic development of photography, including the study of movements and related critical theory, and on the artistic achievement of particular photographers. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 3 distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

Although "alienation" might seem passé as a concept, modern art and literature were long steeped in this condition. This seminar will explore its principal expressions by its primary voices--artists, writers, and philosophers--from Baudelaire, Marx, and Manet through Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Gauguin, to Existentialist philosophy and outsider art, and on to "Black Dada" today. Among our themes will be the underground, spleen, dandyism, detachment, primitivism, art brut, absurdity, and objectification.

Topics in contemporary painting, sculpture, or criticism in Europe and America since World War II. Prerequisite: a course in the art of this period or instructor's permission. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 3 distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

A study of some of the major themes and movements of modern architecture from the late 19th century to the present day. Students will be encouraged to examine the social and political context, to probe the architects' intellectual background, and consider issues of class and gender in their relation to architectural and urban form. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 3 distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

A practicum for developing critical approaches to the use and interpretation of archival materials, with emphasis on the way archives have been deployed to construct the idea of Latin American art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Departing from recent developments such as digital meta-archives, the display of historical archives within contemporary art exhibitions, and the construction of new documentation centers, the class considers specific case studies alongside theoretical texts that explore how archives constitute institutional authority, how they produce their objects of study, and how we can narrate absences within them.