Fall 2007 | Courses | Art History and Archaeology

ARTH303 Roman Art and Archaeology (Professor Marlowe)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3215)

ARTH313 Early Medieval Art (Professor Sails)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 (ASY 3211)

ARTH320 Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century Northern European Art (Professor Martinez)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3211)

ARTH324 Sixteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Art (Professor Georgievska-Shine)
TuTh 11-12:15 (3215)

ARTH330 Seventeenth-Century European Art (Professor Georgievska-Shine)
M 4-6:30 (ASY 3211)

ARTH346 Nineteenth-Century Art from 1850 (Professor Hargrove)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3211)

ARTH351 Twentieth-Century Art from 1945 (Professor Shannon)
MW 2:30-3:45 (ASY 3211)

ARTH370 Latin American Art and Archaeology before 1500 (Professor Bernier)
MW 2-3:15 (ASY 3215)

ARTH389A Special Topics in Art History and Archaeology: Kubrick, Lynch and Greenaway: Film on the Borders of Art (Professor Metcalf)
W 3:30-7 (ASY 3215)

ARTH488A Colloquium in Art History (Professor Hargrove)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3217)

ARTH488B Colloquium in Art History: Japan and the West in Japanese Art (Professor Volk)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 (ASY 3217)

ARTH489A Special Topics in Art History: Major Figures in American Art (Professor Kelly)
Th 3:30-6 (ASY 3215)

ARTH489B Special Topics in Art History: Afircan Arts in Atlantic Diaspora (Professor Hill)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3215)

ARTH498 (PermReq) Directed Studies in Art History I. Individual Instruction Course
TBD

ARTH499 (PermReq) Honors Thesis. Individual Instruction Course
TBD

HONR299P Classical Objects in the Modern World: Who Owns the Classical Past? (Professor Marlowe)
TuTh 3:30-4:45 (ASY 3217)

Graduate Courses

ARTH 658: Studies in American Art
Culture Wars
Professor Renée Ater
Thursday 3-5:40 (ASY 4304)

This graduate colloquium will focus on the culture wars of the late 1980s and 90s. Scholars have argued that the culture wars "changed the context in which the art world operates, particularly in its relationship to government." We will consider the role of government and conservative cultural critics in shaping the public debates surrounding art, American culture, and federal funding. The course also will reflect on the way in which the national news media participated in the discussion, often abetting the controversy surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts' support of a diverse group of artists, performances, and exhibitions. Race, gender, sexuality, culture, morality, public speech, censorship, and federal funding collided during this period. We will look closely at some of the key art works, institutions, and documents involved in the culture wars including: the National Endowment for the Arts; Andres Serrano's images related to Catholicism and bodily fluid including Piss Christ ; Robert Mapplethorpe photographic depictions of the homoerotic body and sexual practice in his X Portfolio ; the Corcoran Gallery of Art's denial of the Mapplethorpe exhibition and the related obscenity trial in Cincinnati in 1990; the performance art of the "NEA Four" including Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes; Annie Sprinkle's Post Porn Modernist performance piece; and the 1993 Whitney Biennial. We will also attend to the controversial exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999.

ARTH 678: Studies in Chinese Art
The Geopolitics and Rhetoric of Art History as an Academic Discourse: Postwar American Scholarship on Chinese Painting and Its Historiographical, Cultural, and Institutional Contexts
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,” however, is unmistakable.

There is no doubt that the study of Chinese painting has, over the past five decades, made tremendous progress in the U.S. where even Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and European expatriate scholars in Chinese painting have come to study and work. Many important, world-class collections of Chinese paintings have been formed and many exhibitions of previously unpublished paintings have been held in the U.S. Furthermore, painting has been the most popular subject for people working on their doctorates in Chinese art in American graduate programs. The development of the field of Chinese painting in the United States has been shaped by a number of historical, cultural, and institutional factors. It is important for us to know what these factors were and how they have shaped the study of Chinese painting as an academic discipline, if the field is to maintain its momentum.

The aim of this course is, through critical readings of major texts written by leading Western art historians of Chinese painting, to examine critically the historiography of the field of Chinese painting, to assess what achievements have been made, and to understand what and how personal backgrounds of scholars and institutional constraints (academia, museums, technology, for example) may have affected various practices in the field. As the field of Chinese art history moves into postcolonial studies, institutional critique, and economic and social contextualization, however, it is especially important that studies focused on questions of the canon, value, historiographic interest, and large-scale historical structures not be left behind. In this course, we'll try to place Postwar American scholarship on Chinese painting in its historiographical, cultural, and institutional contexts.

Intellectual inquisitiveness and open-mindedness are expected of all students. The synergy of students with different backgrounds will, it is hoped, contribute to the intellectual richness of the course.

Students interested in taking this course are encouraged to contact the instructor at jck@umd.edu if they have any questions.

ARTH 692: Methods of Art History
Professor Joshua Shannon
Wednesday 6-8:40 (ASY 4304)

This graduate colloquium—designed for new students in the department—provides an introduction to the current methods of art history and to the theories of culture that inform them. With the exception of one meeting, the course is not historiographical (i.e., we will not be considering art history as it was practiced in the sixteenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries); the class is intended rather to offer a broad view of the discipline today. In addition to reading and responding to the work of other scholars, students will consider the tools of art-historical research and will compose short pieces of their own work.

ARTH 708: Seminar in Ancient Art and Archaeology
Representations of Sexuality in Greek Art
Professor Marjorie Venit
Tuesday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)

The study of Greek sexuality — a major field within the discipline — has been, from its inception, primarily the purview of Classicists, who have produced a vast body of literature relying on texts as their main source of evidence. Images routinely serve as handmaidens to the written word. In contrast to the approach assumed by philologists, this seminar aims to interrogate images and monuments of Greek vase painting and sculpture in order to elucidate their role in reflecting or modeling Greek attitudes toward sexuality. Among the themes these monuments engage are eroticism (in all its aspects), female nudity, male nudity, homosexuality, bisexuality, heterosexuality, masculinity, effeminacy, and cross-dressing.

ARTH 739: Seminar in Seventeenth-Century Northern European Art
Dutch Cityscapes
Professor Arthur Wheelock
Monday 3-5:40 (ASY 4304)

The Dutch were enormously proud of their cities. They wrote illustrated city histories that celebrated the beauty of their architectural monuments as well as the achievements of their distinguished citizens. Large wall maps depicted, in amazing detail, their cities' streets, canals, and gardens. And, most of all, their paintings, prints, and drawings allow viewers today special insight into the life and character of these remarkable places, whether Amsterdam, Haarlem, Delft, or one of many smaller communities that dotted the Dutch countryside.

Numerous artists, among them Jan van Goyen, Jan van der Heyden, and Johannes Vermeer, chose the city as the subject of their works. Some positioned themselves in the flat countryside to portray the city's distinctive skyline. Some came within the city walls to capture the visual texture of the community, not only the bricks and mortar, but also the people going about their daily lives. Some even created intimate views of the city through openings or doorways of homes or courtyards, images that gave a wonderful sense of the public/private aspects of urban existence.

The Dutch cityscape had its origins in cartographic traditions of the early seventeenth century, but its main period of artistic excellence occurred after mid century. Although most Dutch cityscapes appear to be “accurate,” artists often took liberties in depicting a specific locale, a phenomenon that offers many questions about the nature of Dutch realism. The different approaches artists adopted in portraying the Dutch city is an issue this course will address.

ARTH 748: Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Art
The Landscapes of J.M.W. Turner
Professor William Pressly
Thursday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)

This course, which will be given in conjunction with the Turner exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Art on October 1st, will stress close scrutiny of the works on view. It will begin with an introduction to English landscape painting in terms of the various artistic categories available to artists (from the topographical to the epic), the various aesthetic theories (the sublime, beautiful, and the picturesque), types of patronage, and the critical reception, both then and now, placing them within a social and political context. At the time Turner was working, history painting was considered art's most exalted genre, and special attention will be paid to his historical landscapes, which will be seen as well in relationship to Constable's six-footers.

ARTH 759: Seminar in Modern Art
“Bauhaus and ‘Bauhauses'”
Professor Steven Mansbach
Monday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)

The seminar will investigate the history, programs, and pedagogy of the innovative school established by Walter Gropius in Weimar and later transferred to Dessau and then Berlin. Then, we shall examine its “progeny” in Budapest, Chicago, Ulm and elsewhere.

ARTH 789A: Selected Topics in Art History
Poetic and Pictorial Narratives in Islamic Illustrated Manuscripts
Professor Marianna Shreve Simpson
Wednesday 3-5:40 (ASY 4304)

This seminar explores the narrative modes of Islamic illustrated manuscripts, with particular emphasis on text-image relations in Persian poetic texts. What are the similarities and differences in the way an author conceives and composes a story and the way an artist interprets and paints it? This fundamental question may be posed to poems with significant pictorial traditions including (but not limited to): Firdausi's Shahnama, Nizami's Khamsa, Amir Khusrau's Khamsa, and Jami's Haft Awrang. Of central concern is the role played by illustrations in enhancing (or otherwise) the reading and meaning of these and other literary productions. Scholarship in western medieval manuscript studies will be reviewed to form a methodological backdrop for the seminar's investigations.