This survey will introduce major themes in the art and culture of the United States between 1670 and 1865. We will examine painting, sculpture, and photography with two purposes in mind: first, to trace the rise and development of systems for art making and dissemination; and second, to understand the deep cultural concerns that found expression through art. We will explore the formation and expansion of private collections, academies, art unions, museums, artist societies, and government patronage of the arts. We will chart the influence of and relationship to art movements and institutions in Europe and how these relationships were perceived to facilitate or impede the development of a uniquely "American" art. Concurrently, we will consider how various issues found expression and were debated, resolved, or blown apart in the art: immigration (English and Irish; Colonial and post-Revolutionary), regional and ethnic differences, Native Americans, westward expansion, slavery, the rise of abolitionist societies, evolutionary theories, Transcendentalism and the ever elusive (fictive?) "National Character."

In this course we will study a selection of the most important works of art produced throughout Europe, from the mid sixteenth century to the turn of the eighteenth century, by both male and female artists such as El Greco, Raphael, Caravaggio, Velazquez, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Judith Leyster and Boucher. Each class meeting will be devoted to a different work of art (painting, drawing or print), that we will investigate in depth and through a variety of approaches. These investigations--ranging from stylistic considerations to issues such as patronage and the function of art--will also provide students with a basic introduction to the discipline of art history and to theoretical approaches. The format of this class will be similar to that of a seminar, where students are encouraged not only to participate in class discussions but also to help in the selection of the works of art to be studied in class. The course is intended primarily for first-year students and sophomores.

This course will provide a broad overview of art and cultural production in Latin America including: South America, Central America, Mexico and the hispanophone Caribbean. Beginning with a survey of major Pre-Columbian monuments, the class will then go on to examine the contact between Europe and the Americas during the colonial period, the Eurocentrism of the 19th century, and finally the re-affirmation of national identity in the modern era.

A survey of the arts and crafts of ancient Europe, the Near East, Egypt, and the classical world from the Paleolithic period through the fall of Rome, with an emphasis on the functional and decorative objects that were so highly valued in ancient times, and the painting, sculpture, and architectural remains that are considered the major works of ancient art today. The powerful aesthetic vision that characterized ancient creative endeavor can be recognized and appreciated in works ranging from the most ambitious civic and religious monuments to the most ordinary everyday objects. It was this vision that captured the imagination and affected the outlook of artists and patrons in the medieval, Renaissance, and subsequent eras; this course may serve as an introduction to the works that influenced the style and content of much of the art of the postclassical Western world.

Painting in the Netherlands and Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Special attention will be given to such major artists as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, and Albrecht Durer.

A social history beginning with the art of the pre-Revolutionary period and ending with Realism. Major topics include changing definitions of neoclassicism and romanticism, the impact of the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, the Napoleonic presence abroad, the shift from history painting to scenes of everyday life, landscape painting as an autonomous art form and attitudes toward race and sexuality, The course stresses French artists such as Greuze, Vigée-Lebrun, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Géricault, Corot, and Courbet but also includes Goya, Constable, Turner, and Friedrich. A field trip to New York City is required.

A survey of the major issues and the major artists involved in the sculpture of the twentieth century. Beginning with Rodin in the late nineteenth century and ending with minimal art in the 1960s, the course will examine the various media, styles, and subjects investigated by Picasso, Brancusi, Giacometti, David Smith, and others.

The survey of art in India begins with the most ancient urban civilization dating to the prehistoric period. The flowering and development of Indian philosophical and religious thought is traced through its expression in the arts. The course considers Indian arts' unique exploitation of the sensuous as a metaphor for divinity, as represented in the pictorial arts. Attention is directed to the evolution of an iconic tradition and the development of religious architectural forms and narrative painting and sculpture. Many of the achievements of Indian art have had an enormous impact in the Far East and the West. On-site photographs and slides and a class trip supplement the required readings.

The nineteenth century is so dominated by the female nude that the very term "nude" has come to stand for the female body. And yet, the history of the nude during this period is not devoid of male bodies. How did the female body come to so dominate representations of the nude? And how did the increasing challenge to the ideal (i.e. Realism, photography, Impressionism) affect the credibility of the nude? We will examine how the nude and the discourse of the ideal function to obscure social issues as well as how certain types of bodies have been defined in opposition to the ideal, thereby becoming exoticized or marginalized. Our prime focus is the work of David, Ingres, Géricault, Courbet, Manet, and Renoir but we will also discuss more popular nineteenth-century images and selected works by twentieth-century and contemporary artists.

Introduction to the major painters of the Venetian School; analysis of the art of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Carpaccio, Tintoretto and Veronese. Students will investigate the development of the independent easel painting, the poetic landscapes of Giorgione, the enigmatic Venuses of Titian and Veronese, the pageantry of Venetian narrative cycles, the special character of Venetian patronage and of the city itself, and will attempt to define those qualities that made for a distinctively Venetian style.

This seminar considers the history of recent art. It begins with a survey of the Minimalism of the 1960s and then focuses on artistic developments in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Students give reports on selected artists or topics. The class meets in New York City every fourth week to view current exhibitions

Using sculpture, painting, print, and film, this seminar will focus on the fine and popular art that became a didactic tool either for or against slavery. At issue was the ongoing debate about the nature of the African as compared to the nature of the European. Therefore, the scope of this class goes well beyond 1865, the technical end of the Civil War. Throughout the semester we will read 20th century scholarship designed to give us a critical vocabulary for dealing with the relational nature of "difference" that is based on notions of race, gender, and class. Each week, we will examine in depth works of art and the rhetoric that surrounded these works to understand the cultural investment in ideologies of "race" and "sex" in this country from the 17th to the early 20th century. Beginning with portraits of wealthy Southern planters and their children who were accompanied by their slaves, we will end the class by looking at two early 20th century films that reassess the abolitionist era from completely different perspectives: D.W. Griffiths' "Birth of a Nation" (1913) and Oscar Micheaux' "Within Our Gates" (1919).

First and second year students are encouraged to enroll.

This tutorial is intended for history majors who want to work independently on a specific topic within the general and flexible theme of this tutorial, French Art from circa 1500 to circa 1900. We will meet either as a group or individually once a week either in my office or in museums in New York City. Students may elect to work on one of several topics, ranging from a specific work of art (e.g. a painting by Nicolas Poussin in a New York museum), or of architecture (e.g. the Louvre Palace), a patron of the arts (e.g. King Francis I), a theme (e.g. self-portraiture), an institution (e.g. the Royal Academy), an artist (e.g. Edouard Manet), an artistic movement (e.g. classicism), or even an exhibition (e.g. Chardin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art).