HUNTER COLLEGE FALL 2016 UNDERGRADUATE ART HISTORY COURSE DESCRIPTIONS Greek Art

TBA

ArtH 215: Section 001 M 1:10 – 3:50PM Course description forthcoming; please check http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/courses-schedules for the most current information.

Early Medieval ArtH 220

Prof Monti Th 4:00 – 6:40PM

This course surveys Western European art and architecture from third to the twelfth century. In addition to presenting the major monuments, it will explore the following themes through lectures and class discussions: the impact of Christianity as a "Religion of the Book" on art, artistic responses to the cult of relics, medieval image theory, and the art of empire and rulership. Supplementing the textbook will be articles on specialized subjects for class discussion. There will be two short papers and two slide exams.

The Southern Baroque

Prof Prokop

ArtH 235 M 7:00 – 9:40PM Rome was the focal point of Western European art in the seventeenth century. The campaign to modernize the city that had been launched during the Renaissance reached its climax and the papacy poured vast sums into the restoration of their seat of power. Throughout the century, artists and architects from across Europe flocked to Rome to win the prestigious commissions that would transform the city, and their achievements had a profound impact on the arts as practiced across southern Europe. This course will survey the art and architecture of Baroque Rome and trace how artists in Spain and France adapted its innovations. Although the course aims to be comprehensive, many lectures will concentrate on the seminal figures of the period, including the painters Caravaggio, Diego de Velázquez and Nicolas Poussin; the sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini; and the architects Francesco Borromini, Guarino Guarini and Louis Le Vau. Our discussions, however, will not only track the careers of these major figures but also explore the motivations of the patrons responsible for their greatest works. Other topics that will be explored throughout the semester comprise religious architecture, CounterReformation iconography, court portraiture, the rise of genre painting, collecting practices, issues of cross-cultural exchange and the intersection of the arts and sciences. Assigned readings will include one survey textbook supplemented by several short articles and excerpts from primary source documents. Requirements consist of a midterm and a final examination, one short research paper (three to four pages) and active class participation.

Neoclassicism and Romanticism

Prof de Beaumont

ArtH 244 M 1:10 - 3:50 pm This course focuses on European art from around 1789 to 1848, an age of profound political and social upheaval. Neoclassicism and Romanticism—traditionally characterized as clearly opposing artistic styles—will be explored as interrelated creative responses to the constantly shifting ideologies and circumstances of the emerging modern world. In our look at this period we will focus on the contexts in which art works were produced, exhibited, and

understood, in relation to successive political regimes, the effects of the industrial revolution, the rise of nationalism, and the establishment of European colonies in Africa and the Middle East. While Rome and Paris remain major artistic centers throughout this period, due attention will be paid to international developments and innovative trends in Spain, Britain, and Germany. Course requirements include mid-term and final examinations in essay format, and a six-page term paper to be submitted in two stages.

American Art: 1900 – 1960

Prof Lobel

ArtH 20N02 W 9:45 - 12:25PM This course comprises a survey of major figures, movements, and episodes in American art in the first half of the twentieth century. Topics to be covered include the Ashcan School and popular culture; the Armory Show and the impact of European modernism; the Harlem Renaissance and African-American identity; issues of gender and sexuality in the work of the Stieglitz circle; documentary photography and leftist politics in the 1930s; Mexican muralism; and the ascendance of Abstract Expressionism at mid-century. Attention will be paid both to artistic practices and the social, historical, and political contexts that gave rise to them. This is an experimental 200-level course. It will not count toward the Advanced Studies Seminar requirement.

Contemporary Art

Prof Mowder

ArtH 251 T 4:00 – 6:40PM The goal of this course is to help students develop an understanding of key themes and artists in contemporary art and theory, as well as facilitating a familiarity with the language of contemporary art and art criticism. First and foremost, we will seek to answer the question, what is contemporary art? Looking at key works, artists, common themes, and contexts from the 1960s to now, we will establish a firm historical base for answering the aforementioned question. Our class meetings will consist of a lecture and time for discussion of the weekly readings.

20th Century Architecture

Prof Kaplan

ArtH 255 Th 7:00 – 9:40PM This course surveys the evolution of modern architecture, architectural theory, and design from approximately 1870 to 1950. Though we will focus primarily on buildings, complexes, and urban planning in the United States and Europe--with particularly close attention paid to New York--we will also look briefly at developments in other parts of the world. We will see how, in addition to possessing specific formal qualities, each building or plan reflects the cultural, social, economic, and technological conditions under which it was made. In short, architecture does not exist in a vacuum. In exploring various movements and primary source documents, we will find some architects who looked to previous masters for inspiration, while others broke with tradition, thus revolutionizing the built environment.

Latin America

Prof Valle

ArtH 247 M 9:45 – 12:25PM Course description forthcoming; please check http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/courses-schedules for the most current information.

Art of East Asia 1: Ritual and Religion

Prof Chou

ArtH 262 Th 1:10 – 3:50PM As the first part of a year-long sequence on art of East Asia, this course focuses on visual and material culture from 4th century BCE to 10th century CE with an emphasis on art of ancestral worship, funerary spaces and objects, and the transmission of religions on the Silk Road. The first five weeks will be devoted to the study of ritual vessels of Shang and Zhou dynasties (ca. 1600–256 BCE.) and the funerary arts--painting, sculpture, and grave goods--of the Qin and Han (221 BCE-220 CE) in China, Prehistoric Period (11th Mil. BCE-6th c. CE) in Japan, and of the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE-668 CE) in Korea. The remaining ten weeks of the course will trace the spread of Buddhism from Northern India to China, Korea, Japan, and the Himalayas from the 3rd to the 10th century CE by examining religious art and practice in rock-cut cave temples, mural paintings, and temple complexes.

Research Methods

Prof Avcioglu

Research Methods

Prof Pelizzari

ArtH 300, section 001 Th 1:10 – 3:50PM Course description forthcoming; please check http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/courses-schedules for the most current information.

W 4:00 – 6:40PM ArtH 300, section 002 The focus of this course is on the meaning and practice of documentary photography in 1930s America. Between 1935 and 1943, photographers received commissions from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a government organization that aimed to show the dire conditions of poverty and despair in the country. Becoming instrumental towards Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, photography participated in a modern print culture that involved illustrated periodicals such as Life and Look, as well as photo books and exhibition catalogues. We will study this history and will probe the term “documentary” by interrogating the agencies that distributed these photographs to a public sphere of readers and consumers. The goal of this course is to learn how to conduct research on photography as a form of visual culture that lives inbetween the printed media and the art world, and how to write a paper that is supported by primary sources. This class will have weekly workshops, with readings and assignments, and an introduction to the research methods and theoretical writings on photography and the documentary. We will learn how to gather archival and bibliographical materials, develop a formal analysis, shape a theoretical discussion, and organize a bibliography. The subject of the research is a photograph that you will be able to select from the collection at the New York Public Library, and how this image shaped a particular narrative through the printed media. We will also make a field trip and will talk to the Curator of the Department of Photography.

Special Topics: Rococo ArtH 341.04

Prof de Beaumont T 9:45 – 12:25PM

Rococo is a term initially coined in the studio of the great Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), to disparage an earlier style of eighteenth-century art that had—almost from its inception—been both criticized and admired for its unapologetic pursuit of the erratic, the erotic, the exotic and the willfully playful. Despite various Rococo revivals dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and the more gradual evolution of serious scholarly literature on the subject, the meaning and scope of the Rococo remain elusive. In this course we will explore the concept of the Rococo from multiple perspectives: as a unique taste in interior decoration evolving in Paris in the early years of the eighteenth century, spreading throughout Europe and taking

root in differing international contexts; as embodied in the work of great painters like Jean-Antoine Watteau (16841721), François Boucher (1703-1770), and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806); as an expression of the zest for subtle refinements and imaginative freedom that characterized all of the arts, including theatre, music and literature, throughout this period; as a reflection of the rising commodity culture in Europe and the growing globalization of cultural and commercial exchanges with the Middle East and Asia; and as a harbinger of modernity not initially embraced during the Enlightenment but widely recognized and respected today. Requirements for the course will include weekly assigned readings on subjects to be discussed in class, as well as a mid-term (but no final), a term paper and a related oral presentation to class.

Nineteenth-Century Art: Impressionism

Prof Cole

ARTH 245 T 9:45 – 12:25PM This course studies the emergence, cultural significance, and accomplishments of the second half of the 19th century avant-garde in Europe and England. Lectures cover a variety of topics including the development of an urban mentality, gender issues, colonialism, industrialization, idiosyncrasies of individual artistic movements and the changing relationship of avant-gardism to bourgeois society.

Advanced Studies Seminar:

Originality & Repetition in Contemporary Art ArtH 450.07

Prof Weintraub

T 1:10 – 3:50PM

This course considers what is at stake in the terms and rhetoric of ‘originality’ and ‘repetition’ in art. We will situate these terms in an art historical, cultural and theoretical context, and examine their significance as determining forces in modernism and postmodernism. In so doing, we consider the conceptual links between creativity and originality, and the changing views toward the copy and repetition in art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Venetian Art & Architecture

Prof Loh

ArtH 40N01: Section 001 Th 9:45AM – 12:25PM Renaissance Venice was a city of movement. It stood upon the old world of commerce and trade with its relentless flow of goods and upon the new worlds that were being opened up to the literate citizen by printed books and mobile ideas. This confluence of things and thoughts brought the imaginary and far-away delightfully and dangerously close for inspection. The pleasure of variety, difference, and possession in this circulatory world is evident in the art produced during the period. The Venetian artist was at once a producer, philosopher, and magician, whose brush and palette possessed the uncanny power to change oil, dust, and threads into delectable objects of desire and instruments of knowledge and power. This course will look at how visual arts and urban design both formed and negotiated power relations between different gender, class, and regional or national groups in a city that prided itself on its commercial power, naval supremacy, egalitarian rule, intellectual openness, technological innovation, and cultural riches. This is an experimental 200-level course. It will not count toward the Advanced Studies Seminar requirement.

Advanced Studies Seminar:

Prof DeDuve

Duchamp’s Telegram M 4:00 – 6:40PM ArtH450.12 This seminar is not on Marcel Duchamp, even though four out of fifteen classes will be devoted to a survey or indepth analysis of his work. It is on the transition from one art world to another, guided by the hypothesis that Duchamp was its messenger. With the photo of a urinal baptized Fountain, he put a message in the mail in 1917 announcing that the Western art institution had switched from the ‘Beaux-Arts’ system to the art world as we know it today, which I call the ‘Art-in-General’ system. The seminar will take us through a curious back-and-forth journey in time and space, with stopovers at such crucial dates as 1964, 1863, 1648, or 1884, and a lot of commuting between Paris and New-York.