Art History

This course examines a focused corpus of artworks: Jacques-Louis David, THE DEATH OF MARAT and THE INTERVENTION OF THE SABINE WOMEN; Antoine-Jean Gros, BONAPARTE VISITING THE PLAGUE VICTIMS OF JAFFA; Théodore Géricault, THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA; Eugène Delacroix, LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE; Gustave Courbet, A BURIAL AT ORNANS; and Edgar Degas, LITTLE DANCER AGED FOURTEEN. It conducts an historical study of these landmark works, while opening onto broader perspectives such as the history of the tableau vivant, theater, and cinema, and initiating a reflection on their place within contemporary visual culture. Two sessions are devoted to the relationship between history painting and early cinema, with a particular focus on Jean-Léon Gérôme's JERUSALEM and Luc-Olivier Merson's REST ON THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT.
 

The course explores major movements and artists from Neoclassicism to contemporary art, including Impressionism, avant-garde, postwar trends, and current artistic languages. Students analyze artworks, understand historical contexts, and use diverse sources—including digital tools—for research and interpretation.

This course covers artistic creation during the Italian Renaissance: the work and its spatial context. It discusses methodology of analysis, analyzing architectural and pictorial works, analysis of the building's integration into the site, architectural analysis of the building, analysis of the work's integration into the space, analysis of the iconographic program, exhaustive analysis of a work from the iconographic program. Students create a commentary on a work, including fixed works (architectural creations, frescoes, mosaics) permanently linked to a place (bearing in mind that a fresco can be detached, a mosaic dismantled, a building reassembled); mobile works (easel paintings, sculptures, manuscripts), which can be moved from one place to another (but can only occupy one place at a time), heritage furnishings.

This course studies art and architecture created in East Asia during the seminal period when Buddhism was introduced to China and then transmitted to Korea and Japan. Focusing on the period c.300-c.1500, it examines selected key sites and significant works in all three countries. Students become familiar with important figures in the Buddhist pantheon; the iconography, gestures, and postures associated with Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and other deities; and popular narratives and architectural features associated with early Buddhist practice. These visual and iconographic features are studied in their historical, political, economic, and social contexts.

Korean Art in the Modern and Contemporary Era is an introductory class for any students who are interested in art, especially Korean visual art. This course explores the dynamic evolution of Korean art from the early 20th century to the present day, and examines how Korea’s historical, social, and cultural transformations have influenced its artistic expressions. Students engage with diverse media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video art, and installation art, while critically analyzing works by prominent  artists. Through lectures, discussions, and visual analyses, students develop a deeper understanding of Korean art's significant role in shaping contemporary visual culture. This course includes field trips to art museums and art galleries. 

This course examines the burgeoning development of contemporary Chinese art in relation to its shifting socio-political and cultural realities since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Structured around a series of thematic studies on major exhibitions and artworks made and displayed at different stages, this course addresses issues relating to art criticism, institutional censorship, public engagement and art market, investigating unprecedented transnational flows and cross-cultural exchanges within the increasingly interconnected, yet unevenly developed contemporary art world. This course draws particular attention to the practices of Chinese women artists, including Shen Yuan, Lin Tianmiao, Yin Xiuzhen, Lu Qing, Xing Danwen, Kan Xuan, Cao Fei and others, interrogating and challenging the unacknowledged, unquestioned and marginalized status of women in the mainstream discourses of Chinese avant-garde art. Prerequisite: One 1000-level Art History course.

Students are required to master the basic concept of Chinese art archaeology, understand the discovery history of Chinese art archaeology, and understand the role and significance of art archaeology in the study of Chinese culture and history.

This course examines the evolution of British painting, sculpture, architecture and music from Wellington's victory at Waterloo in 1815 to the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Students observe, analyze and assess the role of art and artists within this rapidly evolving society and the British world in the 19th and early 20th century. Topics include the conservative canvases of Victorians at the Royal Academy to the Modernist abstractions of the Rebel Art Centre, and the painters of the Great War in The Roaring Twenties in the West End of London.

The course is concerned with the close analysis of works of art out on site rather than in the seminar room, along with the physical, cultural, and social contexts in which art is produced and consumed. It provides students with an introduction to the rich and diverse opportunities available to study art in situ that Brighton and the surrounding area provides. The course is structured around a series of specific case studies, selected both to highlight some of Brighton’s main resources and to represent broader issues central to the study and understanding of Art History. The course takes in a wide selection of sites, ranging from those specifically designed to house and present works of art, such as museums and galleries, to buildings and spaces that serve alternative functions, such as churches and houses. The course also pays close attention to art’s relationship to the built environment, looking at issues relating to architecture and planning.

As a professional elective course of the Department of Cultural Relics and Museology, this course, on the one hand, aims to enable the undergraduate students of the Department of Cultural Relics and Museology to have basic knowledge of art history, on the other hand, to cultivate students' application of iconology, formal style analysis and other methods in art history in actual cases.