Undergraduate Courses
ARTH200 Art of the Western World to 1300 (Professor Venit)
TuTh 9:30-10:20 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH201 Art of the Western World after 1300 (Professor Colantuono)
MW 9-9:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH 250, Art and Archaeology of Ancient America (Professor Bernier)
MW 10-10:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH275 Art and Archaeology of Africa (Professor DeCarbo)
TuTh 11-11:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH290 Art of Asia (Professor Kuo)
MW 11-11:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH300 Egyptian Art and Archaeology (Professor Venit)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3215)
ARTH313 Early Medieval Art (Professor Sails)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3215)
ARTH321 Sixteenth-Century Northern European Art (Professor Martinez)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3215)
ARTH323 Fifteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Art (Professor Gill)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 (ASY 3211)
ARTH335 Seventeenth-Century Art in the Netherlands (Professor Wheelock)
M 3-5:40 (ASY 3211)
ARTH350 Twentieth-Century Art to 1945 (Professor Metcalf)
M 6-8:30 (ASY 3211)
ARTH351 Twentieth-Century Art from 1945 (Professor Shannon)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3211)
ARTH361 American Art since 1876 (Professor Promey)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 (ASY 3215)
ARTH375 Ancient Art and Archaeology of Africa (Professor DeCarbo)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3211)
ARTH386 (PermReq) Experiential Learning; Individual Instruction Course
TBD
ARTH462 Twentieth-Century Black American Art (Professor Ater)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3211)
ARTH488A Colloquium in Art History: Between Art & Life: The Changing Roles of American Sculpture, 1955-1980 (Professor Shannon)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3217)
ARTH489A Special Topics in Art History: Art and Film Between the Wars: Constructivism, Expressionism, Surrealism (Professor Metcalf)
W 3-6:30 (HBK 4210T)
ARTH498 (PermReq) Directed Studies in Art History I. Individual Instruction Course
TBD
ARTH499 (PermReq) Honors Thesis. Individual Instruction Course
TBD
Graduate Courses
ARTH 619: Studies in Italian Renaissance Art
The Science of Sight in the Renaissance
Professor Meredith Gill
Tuesday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
This colloquium will focus on how concepts of sensory perception, and of sight, in particular, reveal aspects of reception and meaning in Renaissance art. We will be working at the intersection of optics, metaphysics, art theory, and theology, relating theories of seeing to definitions of naturalism and the visionary. We will consider how views about visual experience have played a part in the history of perspective, in notions of spiritual exemplarity (as in the lives and writings of the saints), and in the representation of the invisible. We will begin with medieval writings on vision and light, such as those of Bonaventure and Grosseteste, before examining the works of Alberti and Leonardo, among others. We will analyze works in all media, including sculpture, manuscript illumination, panel and fresco cycles, as well as architecture.
ARTH 692: Methods of Art History
Professor Sally Promey
Thursday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
This course provides a graduate-level introduction to art historical method and the philosophical foundations of the discipline of art history.
ARTH 738: Seminar in Seventeenth-Century Southern European Art
Later Seventeenth-Century Italian Painting and Sculpture: Biography, Criticism and Theory
Professor Anthony Colantuono
Monday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
This Graduate Seminar uses the major later-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century biographers including Bellori, Passeri, Pascoli and others, as a guide to the artistic landscape, theoretical innovations and critical language of the period. While the great masters born in the last years of the sixteenth century (i.e. Bernini, Reni, Domenichino, Cortona, Poussin) have all been studied quite extensively, the following generations (the best known names might be Maratta, Gaulli, Giordano, Colonna/Mitelli, etc.) have received considerably less art-historical attention. In the process of surveying the artistic material itself we shall examine the reasons for this neglect, and strategize about ways in which it might be remedied. Paper topics will be developed in close consultation with the instructor.
ARTH 758: Seminar in American Art
Homer, Eakins, Bellows and American Realism
Professor Frank Kelly
Thursday 3-5:40 (ASY 4304)
This seminar will consider the work of three of the greatest painters of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America: Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and George Bellows. All three have been the subject of extensive--and often conflicting and contradictory--scholarship in recent decades, and students will be expected to provide critical assessments of books and articles that will be assigned for reading. Students will also make seminar presentations that will in turn serve as the basis for final written papers that will contribute to the scholarship on these artists.
ARTH 759: Seminar in Twentieth-Century Art
DADA: East and West
Professor Steven Mansbach
Wednesday 3-5:40 (ASY 4304)
Of the myriad of modern movements, perhaps Dada was the most universal. Beginning as early as the first decade of the twentieth century in Romania, by the middle years of the next decade it had blossomed–to use a metaphor by one of its German practitioners–in Central Europe. And by the early 1920s it was manifested in Asia, the Americas, and off the coast of Africa.
Dada was not merely–or primarily–a negation of received values, though it occupied an essentially oppositional stance to prevailing conventions: aesthetic, political and social. Although Dada's many forms, formations, and sometimes contradictory objectives were themselves frequently unstable, adherents of Dada advanced a “call to action” through which to envision a better world. Thus, Dada's impact was both consequential historially and art historically, as well as both wide-spread and prolonged.
The present seminar will focus on Dada's strategies, meanings, scope, variety of expressions, and legacies. Depending on the interests of the seminar's participants, we shall endeavor to consider Dada critically from a global perspective.
ARTH 778: Seminar in Chinese Art
Discourse, Power, Art Historical Knowledge, and the Making of a Postwar American Historian of Chinese Painting: A Critical and Historiographical Study of James Cahill
Professor Jason Kuo
Friday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
Starting with the Greek myth of the luxury and decadence of Asia, through Marco Polo's account of the gorgeous “East,” to the influence of Japanese art on Manet, Whistler, and Van Gogh, to the French writer Victor Segalen's literary encounter with and “recreation” of Chinese art, the story of Westerners' changing images, perceptions, impressions, and constructions of Asian art is a history of mutual misunderstanding and understanding between “East” and “West.” In the writings on Chinese painting by some of the most perceptive art historians and critics—for example, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Ernest Gombrich, and Arthur Danto—the trope of “difference” is unmistakable.
In the field of Chinese painting, Cahill is generally regarded in the United States as the most important art historian. In 1978–79, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University; these lectures were published in 1982 as The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth Century Chinese Painting. The book was awarded the College Art Association's Morey Prize for the best art history book of 1982. His 1991 Bampton Lectures at Columbia University appeared in 1994 as The Painter's Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China . He gave the Reischauer Lectures at Harvard University in 1993; these lectures appeared as a book in 1996 under the title The Lyric Journey: Poetic Panting in China and Japan . His Getty Lectures, given at the University of Southern California in 1994, will appear as a book to be entitled The Flower and the Mirror: Representations of Women in Late Chinese Painting . The College Art Association, recognizing that this is “a time of great methodological shifts in the field” and that the profession must foster a “dialogue within and among the different generations of art historians,” saluted him as the Distinguished Scholar at its annual convention in 2004. In this course, we'll try to place Cahill's scholarship in its historiographical, cultural, and institutional contexts through a critical examination of his writings and his personal and professional papers, now housed in Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution.
In conjunction with this course, students will have the opportunity to participate in a conference on “Imagining Chinese Art in United States: Art History and Historiography.” The conference will feature Cahill and other important American historians of Chinese painting.
This course would be appropriate for students who are intrigued by the historical and social construction of art historical knowledge, rhetoric and art historical imagination, and the history of art history as an academic discipline. Interested students may begin their preparation for the course by reading Cahill's writings mentioned above, East Asian Art and American Culture by Warren I .Cohen (1992), and Discovering Chinese Painting: Dialogues with American Art Historians edited by Jason C. Kuo (2000). A working bibliography is available upon request ( jk103@umail.umd.edu ).
