Prerequisite: upper-division standing. Recommended preparation: Art History 6A or 105C or 105E.
Twelfth- and thirteenth-century architecture in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and England.
Prerequisite: a prior course in art history; not open to freshmen.
Visual culture produced in Northern Netherlands between 1579 and 1648. Classes devoted to individual artists (e.g. Rembrandt, Frans Hals) and genres (e.g. landscape, portraiture, history painting) in relation to material culture and thought of the period.
Prerequisites: a prior course in art history; not open to freshmen.
Focus on the construction of gender identity and the cultural function of gendered subjects in sixteenth and seventeenth century European imagery.
Prerequisite: not open to freshmen. Examines the life and work of Gianlorenzo Bernini, best known as a brilliant and innovative sculptor, in their historical context. Also considered is the international influence that Bernini exerted on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art.
Not Open to Freshmen
In the eighteenth-century Grand Tourists flocked to Italy to see the great works of the past, while contemporary art, responding to the influx of travelers or to more traditional demands, was flourishing. This course will examine the works of artists such as Piranesi and Tiepolo, important building programs, and the establishment of some of the first public museums in Europe.
Prerequisite: not open to freshmen.
The course takes a holistic approach to the ways in which Europeans first understood the American environment on the East Coast—how and what they built, what things they made, how they saw themselves. Out of this visual culture comes the foundation of the United States. Many of the traits we think of as quintessentially American today—individualism, entrepreneurship, environmentalism, racism—are formed and developed in the years just before and after the Revolution. We will look at silver and furniture, homes and statehouses, portraits and landscapes. It is through these visual products that the first citizens of the United States explored the West, came to terms with slavery, understood the place of women, glorified the landscape, and worried about their place in the world. We still do.
Prerequisite: not open to freshmen.
Beginning with the Islamic, Medieval and Renaissance arts of Spain, this course will chart their influence and transformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century arts of the New World. Special emphasis on the creative interaction of the European and indigenous traditions in colonial arts of the Americas
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. May be repeated for credit to a maximum of 8 units with different topic.
(186T. Seminar in Photographic History
Advanced studies in photographic history. Topics will vary. This course requires weekly readings and discussion, and the writing of a research seminar paper.)
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. Same course as Slavic 144A. Not open for credit to students who have completed Russian 144A. The Russian avantgarde in its European context. The avantgarde and the revolution of 1917. Analysis of key figures and movements within the Russian avantgarde. Taught in English.
Prerequisite: upper-division standing. May be repeated for credit to a maximum of 8 units with different topic.
Advanced studies in fifteenth and sixteenth century southern renaissance art. Topics will vary. This course requires weekly readings and discussion, and the writing of a research seminar paper.
Prerequisites: graduate standing; open to Art History majors only. Required of all first-year M.A. and Ph.D. students.
Introduction to art-historical methods, with emphasis on the historical development of current practices, critical theory, debates within the field, and cross-disciplinary dialogues.
Prerequisite: graduate standing or senior art history majors with consent of instructor.
Recent debates on museums, archaeology and the ownership of cultural heritages underline the political and historical significance of questions concerning cultural patrimonies and the ownership of the past. Focusing on the late Ottoman attempts to define its identity through its mixed and multi-cultural past (but not limited to that geographical and chronological period), we will look into the broader questions and contemporary efforts of forging a national identity through the creation of a real or fictional image based on multi-ethnic and multi-cultural pluralisms. We will attempt to see the efforts of western powers over emerging nations in controlling, and sometimes co-opting, their cultural patrimonies—as well as stocking their national museums with objects that can defined as “looting” or “saving” depending on which side of the debate you stand—following worrisome neo-colonial attitudes. While anchored to the critical events of the last one-hundred years or so, we will consider contemporary and relevant developments in global ownership of the past and its artifacts, most recently (and some might say chillingly) articulated by our leading museums.
In may ways this will be a “pro-seminar”, preparing the participant in the issues and bibliography on this subject and paving the way for the larger concerns subsumed under this broad topic. Readings will range from real “archival material” (supplied by me) to current articles in the New York Times. A paper may or may not be required. Your input from your wider fields of specialization and studies will be useful and appreciated.
Prerequisite: graduate standing.
This seminar will examine the visual construction of alterity as an
integral part of formulating and protecting cultural identity not only
among Precolumbian cultures, such as the Aztec and Inka, but also by the
European colonizers. The conquest of the Americas both reinforced and
contradicted European preconceptions of otherness. We will explore issues
of ethnicity, race, color, gender and cultural difference using examples of
both indigenous self-representations as well as work by mestizo and
European artists, using a postcolonial theoretical framework. A field trip
is planned to LACMA in Los Angeles for the spectacular, "The Arts in Latin
America, 1492-1820."
Prerequisite: graduate standing. Same course as Women's Studies 291B.
Course will focus on the construction of gender identities through high art and popular media, the construction of femininities and masculinities through images and the significance of gender as a basic representational category. Topics will vary.
Prerequisite: graduate standing May be repeated for credit.
This seminar will be team-taught by Kathryn Kanjo, Director of the University Art Museum, and Professor Bruce Robertson.
In 2009, the University Art Museum will celebrate its 50th anniversary. This seminar is designed to help the UAM formulate its plans and its identity in the run-up to that event. We will be examining the exhibition history and the collections closely, in order to arrive at some definitions of the UAM’s history, its intellectual and aesthetic strengths.
This work will be framed within the current spate of museum building, rebranding, and change that seems to have reached a high point in the art museum world today. We will examine other case studies, and look critically at such phenomena as mission statements, exhibition programs, public outreach and so on.
Some of the outcomes of the seminar may include a redeveloped website for the UAM, collection highlights exhibitions, and so on.
