Art History Courses

ARTH 957: Seminar in African Art | Topic: Moving Objects: Art and Agency Across Cultures

Instructor: Rovine | W 2:30PM – 5:10PM

This seminar will explore the art historical fortunes of objects that move across the borders of cultures in contexts of colonial conquest, as well as the postcolonial reckonings some of these objects have inspired. We will investigate these objects’ functions in colonial histories and in the aftermaths of these histories. Using case studies that span the nineteenth century to the present, set both in colonies and in metropoles, we will focus on how designation as art—a category these objects have alternately been assigned to and excluded from—has both reflected and shaped these colonial and postcolonial histories. This course will investigate the use of objects from colonized cultures to legitimize colonial expansion, standing in as simulacra used to invent cultures rather than to represent them. It will also address instances of objects and images as tools for resistance to this expansion.

In addition, we will explore the afterlives of objects that bear the imprint of colonial histories. The past decade has seen an explosion of demands for repatriation of artworks from European and North American institutions. We will situate these movements in the context of wider changes in global art economies and legal structures. Finally, we will investigate the work of modern and contemporary studio artists who have recognized the expressive potential of the objects that have been at the center of colonial histories. What narratives do these forms invoke, and for which audiences? How have the significations of these objects change in their new incarnations?

While many of our readings will focus on Africa, this course welcomes student research focused on other regions, and on colonial and postcolonial cultures across time periods.

ARTH 971: Seminar in Renaissance Art | Topic: German and Netherlandish Renaissance Art (c. 1475-c. 1550)

Instructor: Brachmann | T 2:00PM – 4:50 PM

This class introduces to one of the crucial periods of German and Netherlandish art respectively shortly before and after the Reformation: During the opening decades of the sixteenth century, northern Europe experienced an artistic florescence. In Germany this period is often dubbed the Age of Dürer, an appellation that obscures the remarkable inventiveness and productivity of his peers. Artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Peter Flötner, Matthias Grünewald, Hans Holbein the Younger, Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoss and the Vischer family among a host of others, comprised one of the deepest pools of talent of any era. At the same time, a new generation of Netherlandisch artist, active especially in Antwerp, Brussels, Haarlem, Leiden and Utrecht, brought renewed vigour to an artistic tradition still steeped in the heritage of Van Eyck and Van der Weyden. Buoyed by eager patrons and a rapidly expanding marketplace, at least into the late 1520s, artists proved increasingly self-conscious and stylistically aware.

Goal of the class will be to discover and to discuss the sources as well as the specific qualities of the painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture of this crucial art period, which still based on German gothic art but showed at the same time already strong and clear influence of Italian Renaissance art. In some case studies the course will also explore the interaction of artists and patrons in some of the most important art centers of early modern times like Nuremberg and Augsburg. We will work intensively with the print collection of the Ackland Museum.

ARTH 980: Seminar in Modern Art | Topic: Art and Politics in Mexico, 1921-1945

Instructor: Douglas | M 2:30PM – 5:10PM

This course investigates mural painting and state patronage in post-Revolutionary Mexico, from about 1921 to about 1945, a period during which artists engaged politics in monumental public works. The course will focus on the murals of José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, known in Mexico as “los tres grandes,” “the three great ones,” as well as, more broadly, on the relationship between art and politics.