University of Lyon 2

This course focuses on contemporary art and architecture. Students examine the historical and cultural background of the contemporary art movement in the United States in the 1960s and discuss artworks and artists from this period as well. The course examines the relationships between visual arts, historicity, and issues both at the aesthetic as well as the socio-political level in order to revisit a history of contemporary art of the 20th century structured according to a succession of movements. It observes the distinctions that exist between West Coast art and East Coast art in the United States.

This course provides a panorama of art history from the beginning of the 1900s to the 1950s, following the history of the avant garde in the United States and in Europe. Various topics are explored including color, movement, and deformation. These topics are treated in relation to fauvism, futurism, expressionism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism, as well as the debut of abstraction and the numerous other schools of thought linked to modernity. Additionally, this course investigates the terms of modernity and contemporality to better understand the artistic revolution of the beginning of the 20th century.