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 Hargrove)
MW 10-10:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH 250 Art and Archaeology of Ancient America (Professor Bernier)
TuTh 11-11:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH275 Art and Archaeology of Africa (Professor Ater)
MW 11-11:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH290 Art of Asia (Professor Suzuki)
MW 9-9:50 + section (ASY 2203)
ARTH313 Early Medieval Art (Professor Sails)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3215)
ARTH320 Fourteenth and Fifteenth-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 (3211)
ARTH330 Seventeenth-Century European Art (Professor Colantuono)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3215)
ARTH335 Seventeenth-Century Art in the Netherlands (Professor Wheelock)
M 3-5:40 (ASY 3211)
ARTH351 Twentieth-Century Art from 1945 (Professor Shannon)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3211)
ARTH376 Living Art of Africa (Professor Hill)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3211)
ARTH384 Art of Japan (Professor Volk)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 (ASY 3215)
ARTH389A
Special Topics in Art History and Archaeology: Western Film and the Vision of the West (Professor Metcalf)
W 3:30-7 (Hornbake - Non-Print Media, Room J)
ARTH389K Special Topics in Art History and Archaeology: Arts of Korea (Professor Shin)
TuTh 2-3:15 (ASY 3211)
ARTH389N Rembrandt's Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age (Professor Gregory)
TuTh 3:30-4:45 (ASY 3215)
In 1631, a twenty-five year-old Rembrandt, brimming with confidence, moved to Amsterdam and found in that cosmopolitan city a success that equaled his ambition. Rembrandt's fame, his genius, are impossible to imagine without the context of this city, through which the world's commerce and goods poured in the seventeenth century and new ideas found expression. This course will explore the many connections between Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn and Amsterdam , arguably the greatest artist during that city's - and the Dutch Republic 's - greatest age. From the land in and around Amsterdam to its varied population, Rembrandt was drawn to all facets of and spared no energy chronicling, shaping, and ultimately eternalizing, his adopted city. Examining Amsterdam through the lens of Rembrandt's engagement with the city, in both his art and his personal life, offers a unique understanding of what was perhaps the most vital city in seventeenth-century Europe . Amsterdam was a city in which diverse faiths and peoples were tolerated (if not embraced), Descartes could nurture radical new thoughts, and much of modern capitalism's character was forged. The bustling city, alive with seemingly limitless opportunities and electric with new ideas, drew Rembrandt, as it did many Dutchmen and foreigners, to its mast-filled harbors and stately townhomes along the Amstel.
Through an exploration of richly nuanced “portraits” of both Rembrandt and Amsterdam students in this course will emerge with an enhanced sense of the importance of both Amsterdam and Rembrandt to the development of thought, practice and arts in later Western society. A broad array of accessible readings will present the salient issues necessary for such an understanding of artist and city. To ensure their grasp of material, students will be responsible for gaining a working knowledge of a particular area of inquiry and briefly framing its key points to the class. In addition to this in-class component, students will be responsible for producing a substantive research paper as well as a final exam.
ARTH488B Colloquium in Art History: Japanese Art since 1945 (Professor Volk)
TuTh 12:30-1:45 (ASY 3217)
ARTH488G Colloquium in Art History: Seventeenth-Century Italian Sculpture: From Theory to Practice (Professor Colantuono)
TuTh 9:30-10:45 (ASY 4304)
ARTH488H Colloquium in Art History: Royalty and Religion in Sixteenth-Century English Art (Professor Martinez)
TuTh 11-12:15 (ASY 3217)
ARTH489F Special Topics in Art History: Modern Chinese Film and Visual Culture (Professor Kuo)
TuTh 11-12:15 (Hornbake 0302J)
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
Theaters of Power: The Arts in the Italian Renaissance Court
Professor Meredith Gill
Thursday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
We will focus in this seminar on the geographic and political entity of the Early Modern court and, most centrally, the court as a vibrant and competitive cultural arena. We will analyze well-known and less-known works of art (such as those by Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Botticelli, Leonardo, Titian, Giulio Romano, Correggio, and others) in symbiotic relationship with their patronage and architectural contexts. We will test definitions of style, mindful of critical interrelationships among the arts, including music, poetry, theater, pageantry, sculpture, and the decorative arts. We will assess the court -- to a degree in an anthropological sense -- as a site at which to interrogate gender, material culture, and the global marketplace. We will consider historiographic traditions that have tended to focus perhaps too exclusively on Florence and Rome.
ARTH 658: Studies in American Art
History and Memory in American Sculpture before 1910
Professor Renée Ater
Wednesday 3-5:40 (ASY 4304)
This course will consider the role of history and memory in American sculpture before 1910. Our focus will be primarily on sculpture in the form of public monuments. What role does sculpture play in the struggle over the experience of the past and the organization of it? What is the role of monuments in fostering national unity and patriotism, an "official" culture? What is the role of monuments in realizing the special concerns of ordinary people, a "vernacular" culture? What do monuments say or leave unsaid to the various people that experience them? How are race and gender realized or neglected in public monuments? How do these often contested "memory sites" articulate and continually redefine the spaces they inhabit? Are monuments static, "mere stones in the landscape"? We will spend significant time evaluating sculpture from the post-Civil War period that is concerned with the visualization of African Americans in the context of slavery and emancipation, and the representation of men of war as patriots, heroes, and the vanquished.
ARTH 692: Methods of Art History
Professor Joshua Shannon
Tuesday 3-5:40 (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
Imaging Death in the Ancient Greek World
Professor Marjorie Venit
Tuesday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
In antiquity, when taxes were far less consistently assessed than today, death was the single certainty. Yet as the seventh-century bce Greek lyric poet Sappho was quick to point out, “To die is an evil, for the gods have judged it so; otherwise they would choose to die” (201 Voigt). Therefore, in light of this specter of death, Greeks (and other Mediterranean peoples, such as Etruscans), developed an eschatology intent on overcoming “the radical alterity of death” (Dunand and Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Ancient Egypt , 191).
This seminar focuses on the mutable concepts of death and afterlife in the Greek world from the sixth through the first century BCE. It interrogates architectural and sculptural monuments, objects, images, and texts of the post-Homeric world in order to gain a better understanding of Greeks' (and, perhaps, Etruscans' and other Italic peoples') relationship with dying, death, and the afterlife.
ARTH 749: Seminar in Nineteenth-Century European Art
War and visual culture from Napoleon to the First World War
Professor June Hargrove
Thursday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
This seminar will explore the visual representations of war, ranging from public commemorations to individual condemnations, in Europe and America over a span of 150 years. The intent is to explore a wide variety of visual responses to conflict on both sides of the Atlantic (or the Pacific!).
ARTH 778:
Seminar in Chinese Art
Visual Culture in Modern China
Professor Jason Kuo
Friday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
Modern Chinese visual culture embodies the heroic story of constant renewal and reinvigoration of Chinese civilization amidst rebellions, reforms, and revolutions, even if the process may appear confusing and bewildering. It also demonstrates the persistence of tradition and the limits of continuities and changes in modern Chinese culture.
Issues in modern Chinese visual culture to be examined in the seminar include: “visuality” and “modernity”; “tradition” versus “modernization”; cultural nationalism in “national painting”; Chinese responses to Western visual culture; Japanese influences on modern Chinese visual culture; Japanese colonial photography in Taiwan; Chinese influences on modern Korean print-making; visual culture in Shanghai in its broader historical, social, and cultural contexts and in comparison with developments in other metropolitan centers in Asia and elsewhere; and other topics of interest to members of the seminar.
This course will attempt to answer the following questions: How extensively can cultural tradition be reinterpreted before it is subverted? When is creative re-invention an act of betrayal of tradition? How has selective borrowing from Chinese tradition and foreign cultures enabled modern Chinese artists to sustain themselves in the modern world? By comparing the formation of modern visual culture in China with that in other countries, it is hoped that a trans-cultural and transnational understanding of modernity and modern art can be attained.
ARTH 779: Seminar in Japanese Art
Japanese Buddhist Art of the Heian Period
Professor Yui Suzuki
Monday 12-2:40 (ASY 4304)
The Heian period (794-1185CE) is considered the “golden age” of Japanese culture, a time when the aristocratic court culture thrived, stimulating a flowering of both religious and secular arts (music, painting, literature, architecture, etc.). In the religious sector, talented Japanese monks such as Saichō (767-822CE) and Kūkai (774-835CE) were sent to China to study and bring back the most sophisticated forms of Buddhism. They returned with hundreds of Buddhist artifacts including sacred texts, ritual implements, paintings and statues and introduced new canonical, iconic and ritual traditions which further stimulated the development of Japanese Buddhism.
The primary objective of this course will be to examine these religious arts, mainly Buddhist sculpture.
