Global Arc

Topics in 17th- and 18th-century art and architecture. For department majors, this course satisfies the 1400-1800 historical period distribution requirement. Prerequisite: a course in the art of this period or instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

This seminar will focus in depth on a specific aspect of art, history, theory, and criticism in Europe between 1789 and 1914. Possible topics include French painting and its critics, portraiture and sociability, shifting conceptions of realism and naturalism, the onset of modernism, and representations of interior space. Prerequisites: a course in the art of this period or permission of the instructor. Visits to area museums. For department majors, this course satisfies the 1800-present historical distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

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.

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 1800-present historical period 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 1800-present historical period distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

This seminar explores how the complex and contested concept of "race" intersects with the categories of "art" and "visual culture" in the history of the United States (colonial era to the present). By examining the work of a range of artists and image-makers, we will explore how the concept of "race" is imagined, constructed, used, and/or challenged by artists and audiences as well as the manner in which the discipline of art history approaches considerations of race and racial/ethnic identity. Our approach will be thematic rather than chronological; material studied will include painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and film.

An in-depth exploration of the history, theory, and interpretation of American art and visual culture from the colonial period to the present day. Topics covered will include race and representation in American art and culture; art and science; landscape art and theory; the Harlem Renaissance; and the art and artists of the Stieglitz circle. Visits to the Princeton University Art Museum and other area museums (such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) will be an integral part of this course. For department majors, this course satisfies the 1400-1800 and 1800-present historical period distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

Museums have long disciplined conducts and framed ways of seeing through the production and reproduction of dominant values. But can they also act as instruments of transformation, even emancipation? This course investigates the museum and the exhibition as sites of experimentation within the overlapping spheres of art, society, and technology, with particular focus on their implications and enactment in Latin America. Key components will be hands-on work with the collections of Latin American art in the Princeton University Art Museum and Marquand and Firestone Libraries, as well as visits to museums and artist's studios in New York.

This seminar focuses on the classical and traditional arts of the Yoruba and Igbo peoples of Southern Nigeria. Through readings on key aspects of the groups' philosophies, ritual practices, aesthetics and socio-cultural formations, we examine the conceptual bases and formal conditions of the arts of the two groups, and rethink earlier scholarship on Igbo and Yoruba art, politics and visual cultures.