ART HISTORY

CRN	90538	Distribution	A
Course No.	ARTH 101
Title	Perspectives in World Art, Part I
Professor	Susan Aberth
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 102

Cross-listed: LAIS

Related interest: AADS

The objective of this two-semester course is to introduce students to the breadth and diversity of the visual arts worldwide. The painting, sculpture, architecture and other cultural artifacts examined will range from the Paleolithic period through the fourteenth century. The class will encompass works from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, arranged chronologically in order to provide a more integrated historical context for their production. In addition to the course textbook, readings will be chosen to broaden critical perspectives and to present different methodological approaches. This course is designed for those students with no background in art history as well as for those who may be contemplating a major either in Art History or Studio. First year students are welcome and encouraged to enroll.

CRN	90766	Distribution	A
Course No.	ARTH 125
Title	Modern Architecture: from the Revolution to World War II
Professor	Felicity Scott
Schedule	Tue Th 4:30 pm - 5:50 pm OLIN 102

This course will address the history of modern architecture from its emergence in Western Europe during the eighteenth century through to its widespread presence and diversification by the end of World War II. The course will pay particular attention to the way in which architects have responded to, and participated in, formal and aesthetic developments in other arts as well as broader technological, economic, and socio-political transformations. As architecture encountered the industrialized condition of modernity and the rise of the metropolis it gave rise to a fascinating range of aesthetic and programmatic experimentations. Covering many aspects of architecture--from buildings, drawings, models, exhibitions, and schools, to historical and theoretical writings and manifestoes--the course will investigate a range of modernist practices, polemics, and institutions. The readings have been selected both to provide an overview of the history of modern architecture and to offer a number of critical and historical approaches to evaluating its legacy. First year students and prospective majors, as well as anyone interested in architecture, are welcome and encouraged to enroll. This course does not require background in the topic.

CRN	90539	Distribution	A
Course No.	ARTH 213
Title	The Classical Tradition in Architecture
Professor	Diana Minsky
Schedule	Tu Fr 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 102

Cross-listed: Classical Studies

The class will focus on the development of the "classical" vocabulary in ancient Greek and Roman, and primarily Italian Renaissance, public architecture. Lectures, discussion, and reading will explore both secular and religious structures in terms of stylistic details, urban design, and iconographic message. Towards the end of the semester, attention will turn to how classicism was adopted and modified in the post-Renaissance world.

CRN	90357	Distribution	A
Course No.	ARTH 242
Title	Rococo to Revolution: Art in Eighteenth Century Europe
Professor	Tom Wolf
Schedule	Th 4:30 pm -5:50 pm OLIN 301 Fr 10:30 am - 11:50 am OLIN 102

This course will survey painting and sculpture in Europe during a tumultuous century. It began with the aristocratic classes living in extreme extravagance and ended with the French Revolution upending accepted norms of society and government. For the first half of the semester we will focus on France, where art went from the playful and licentious Rococo style to the severe and moralizing Neo-Classical during the course of the century. Brilliant exponents of each style, including Watteau, Fragonard, and David will be studied. In the second half of the semester we will concentrate on developments in other European centers, and will examine the careers of Gainsborough and Blake in England, and Goya in Spain, as well as others.

CRN	90537	Distribution	A
Course No.	ARTH 269
Title	Revolution, Social Change and Art in Latin America
Professor	Susan Aberth
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 102

Cross-listed: LAIS

Related interest: AADS

The use of art in the service of political change has been pervasive within the history of Latin America, from colonial times to the present. This course will first examine the role that Christian iconography played in the Conquests of the sixteenth century, and how that same iconography took on radical new meanings as time went on. We will then investigate the visual strategies employed in the presentation of the "heroes" of Independence movements (Simon Bolivar, Miguel Hidalgo, etc.), and how art contributed to the formation of national identities. In the twentieth century we begin with an analysis of the Mexican Mural Movement and how the artists involved promoted and reaffirmed the nation's new leftist political policies in public spaces, including the influence on the muralists of the WPA in the United States and recent building campaigns in Mexico. Also covered will be printmaking as a political tool, the use of the image of Che Guevara as martyr and catalyst for social change, murals in Nicaragua, art by Chicano activists in the United States, and the role of folk art traditions. The course will end with a look at the use of performance, installation and video as means of promoting dialogue on such complex issues as the "Border," racism, feminism, and the AIDS epidemic.

CRN	90354	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ARTH 290
Title	Chinese Art
Professor	Patricia Karetzky
Schedule	Th 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 102

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

The course beings with the earliest expression of the Chinese aesthetic, in neolithic painted pottery. Next, the early culture of the Bronze Age is viewed, followed by the unification of China by the first emperor, who was the owner of sixty thousand life-size clay figurines. In the fifth century Buddhist art achieved expression, as evidenced by the colossal sculpture carved from the living rock and by paintings of paradise. Confucian and Taoist philosophy, literature, and popular culture are examined through the paintings of the later dynasties, with an accent on landscape painting. The course ends with a consideration of twentieth century art.

CRN	90439	Distribution	A
Course No.	ARTH / PHOT 314
Title	The Body and its Image
Professor	Carol Ockman / Laurie Dahlberg
Schedule	Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 301

Cross listed: History of Photography

No subject in the history of representation has received more conflicted treatment or reception than the human body. Artists have interrogated it as the site of gender and sexuality, used it to express ideality and aberrance, celebrated it as the source of regeneration, and pushed beyond societal taboos in exploring it as the playground of decay and putrefaction. Seminar participants will study the West's historical ambivalence toward the body and its representation, as expressed in art of the modern period (1780-2000). Beginning with the neoclassical heroic nude, we will study depictions of the body from the past two centuries that reflect the preoccupations and obsessions of their cultural moments in a particularly revealing way. Topics may include: Manet's "Olympia," pornography and early photography, physical abjection in Symbolism and German Expressionism, the "oriental" body in 19th-century art, body art of the 1960s and 1970s, and obsessive treatments of the body by contemporary photographers. Readings will be drawn from philosophy, cultural criticism, and art history. Short writing assignments and oral presentations will culminate in a significant final research paper.

CRN	90358	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ARTH 365
Title	Seminar in Twentieth Century Sculpture
Professor	Tom Wolf
Schedule	Th 1:30 pm -3:50 pm OLIN 301

This class will combine a brief survey of modern sculpture with examinations of specific topics, mostly selected by the students, in depth. Several trips to look at sculpture in person will precede class discussions and student presentations. The chronological scope of the course will be from 1900 to the present.

CRN	90767	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	ARTH 373
Title	Mies van der Rohe and the Vicissitudes of Modernism
Professor	Felicity Scott
Schedule	Th 9:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 301

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is among the most important architects of the twentieth century. While seemingly devoted to a singular modernist vision, his work in fact underwent a series of transformations and frequently inaugurated modernist strategies. More importantly, it has become the focus of a number of critical reassessments of modern architecture and urbanism. Mies work continues to elicit contestation among historians, theorists and practitioners and is the subject of two blockbuster exhibitions in New York, "Mies in Berlin" at MoMA and "Mies in America" at the Whitney, both of which the class will visit. This seminar will undertake a close analysis of Mies design work, pedagogy, and writings from his involvement with avant-garde artists, designers and filmmakers in Weimar Germany (including Lilly Reich and Hans Richter) to his role in the development of corporate modernism in postwar America and its subsequent global dispersal. The class will also trace transformations in the contemporary reception and historiography of Mies: from polemicist to master to the multiple "Mieses" of contemporary scholarship (the minimalist Mies, the postmodern Mies...). No prior knowledge of Mies is necessary to take this course.

Special Opportunity: these two courses at the Center for Curatorial Studies that are open to limited enrollment by undergraduates. These seminars are open for limited enrollment by undergraduates. Undergraduate prerequisites: junior or senior status, permission of the instructor, and approval of the student's academic adviser. Interested undergraduates should call Letitia Smith at the Center for Curatorial Studies (ext. 7598). The first meeting of the seminar is Wednesday, August 29.
A survey of Art since 1945 and a Methods course focusing on artists' biographies will be taught by Michael Lobel in spring 2002.

CRN	90772	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	CS 555
Title	The Work of Art after Minimalism and Pop
Professor	Rhea Anastas
Schedule	Wed 10:00 am - 12:30 pm CCS

In this course minimalism will not be treated as an exclusive set of individual practices. Rather it will be our aim to question discursive and historical constructs of "minimalism" by means of the close analysis of works of art as well as the reevaluation of a range of critical responses in primary documents, exhibitions, criticism, and art historical texts. Historical and methodological questions will be raised through our consideration of an expanded field of works: minimalism's chronological simultaneity with pop, proto-conceptual practices, and select works in performance, dance, video, and film. The course lectures and readings will trace a series of themes, first focusing on the early years of minimalism (1963-1968) and then taking up select topics in the reception of minimalism during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The goals of the course are twofold: to create a revised view of the history of minimalism while developing rigorous methods for contextualizing current artistic production through our reckoning with the practices and discourses of this most significant period in postwar art.

CRN	90773	Distribution	A/C
Course No.	CS 557
Title	Literature, Art, and Theory, 1950-1999
Professor	Nico Israel
Schedule	Tue 1:40 pm - 4:10 pm CCS

The course explores intersections between literature, visual art, and critical theory produced in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is organized under four overlapping rubrics: "essence," "surface," "sex," and "globe." These rubrics will define our orientation to particular constellations of issues: the shifting nature of the avant garde and the waning confidence in narratives of totality; abstraction and the (im)possibility of representation; ideological complicity and political responsibility; globalization and uneven development; repetition, remembrance, trauma, and shame. Writers and artists to be discussed include: Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Pollock, Rothko; Nabokov, Ashbery, Deleuze and Guattari, Warhol, Smithson; Davis, Gaitskill, Butler, Sherman, Levine, Walker; Walcott, Rushdie, Appadurai, Hatoum, Pardo, and Neto.

Assignments to include one 5-6 page paper and one 10-12 page paper and possible weekly oral presentations or shorter writing assignments.