Art History

This course consists of an introduction to the major authors and debates in the history of post-45 art. The seminar lays the basis for to further studies and is meant to familiarize students with a set of basic texts that have helped shape and transform our discipline since the mid-20th century. Students read classical and more recent texts by art historians, critics and theoreticians, such as, Claire Bishop, Benjamin Buchloh, T.J. Demos, and Rosalind Krauss, as well as discuss such central concepts as institutional critique, site-specificity, post-modernism, relational aesthetics, post-coloniality and the environmental turn.

The course includes lectures on different media and techniques involved in painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance, and time-based works of art. It also examines how the analysis of a work of art is structured and written; and reflects on changing theories of art history, viewership, and the object.
 

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center Director or Liaison Officer. Specific internships vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. A substantial paper or series of reports is required. Units vary depending on the contact hours and method of assessment. The internship may be taken during one or more terms but the units cannot exceed a total of 12.0 for the year.

This course explores the art of Europe in the long 15th century (approximately 1380-1520) with particular attention to religious culture and belief; how gender and the body were understood and expressed; the role of pilgrimage, suffrages and the saints; the differences of artistic expressions between northern Europe (e.g. Flanders) and southern (Italy); the art of crises such as witchcraft, plague and religious reform; and the ways in which naturalism and humanism challenged existing modes of artistic expression. Students also look at whether the view of the period as one steeped in pessimism, the macabre and thoughts of decay, known according to the formulation of Jan Huizinga as the "waning of the Middle Ages" is still useful. The dominant centers to be examined are the cities of Flanders and Italy, but the art of northern France, England, Germany, and elsewhere is also drawn on.

This course examines images of astrology found in illuminated manuscripts, astrological charts and talismans, playing cards, prints, maps, paintings and tapestries, as well as in architecture in the broad global early modern world to explore their political, medical, divinatory, and magical use. Considering the early modern Western astrology as the result of the intercultural exchanges from Greece, Babylon and India to the rest of the world via images and texts that translated diverse ideas on natural philosophy, the students will learn key concepts from Renaissance Neoplatonism and Hermeticism to discuss the reception of astrological knowledge in a variety of everyday objects. Students will also reflect on the role of astrological images in the transmission of Western knowledge (deemed magical or scientific) via colonization, as well as on the influence that early modern celestial observations taken forth by cutting–edge artifacts and novel circumnavigations around the world had on the global shaping of astrological imagery.

In September 2023, 74 works from the 16th to 19th centuries from the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art were brought to Berlin from Ukraine. Since then they have been studied, conserved, re-framed, and prepared for an exhibition starting in January 2025. In January, the Gemäldegalerie will exhibit the paintings removed from Odessa and put them in dialogue with the existing collection in Berlin. This seminar is devoted to the study of the paintings from Odessa and to the consideration of comparable paintings in Berlin, taking advantage of the juxtaposition of the two collections. It reflects upon the fate of works of art during times of war, considering the impact upon artistic and cultural heritage in the Ukraine since the Russian war of aggression. The history of the dispersal of works of art in Berlin in the 20th century provides a comparative history. The exhibition brings to the forefront works of art by important artists that were previously little-known and little-studied: Francesco Granacci, Frans Hals, Bernardo Strozzi, and others.

This course examines the creation and the reception of the work of art. It commences in 15th century Italy with an examination of the organization of artists' workshops and concludes by analyzing the relationships between contemporary artists, their materials and markets. Topics in the subject are varied but will focus around certain key issues: the changing status of the artist, the determination of authenticity and value, and the role of materials and markets in the construction of meaning.

This course analyzes the overlap between literature and painting at the end of the pivotal 19th century. It studies the representations of the artist Emile Zola, the process and the system of creating at the time, the aesthetic and social circumstances at play, and the emergence of modern painting. The course considers, as a means of understanding this phenomena, the exchanges between literature and visual art, notably analyzing ekphrasis and the "tableau en texte."

This course seeks to synthesize and analyze comparatively and critically the various representations and uses of the body in the history of artistic representations, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, through a series of viewing exercises and classroom presentations, as well as field trips to museums, galleries and other spaces for artistic dissemination. Through group presentations and written works of a critical nature, students will analyze images of corporeality inscribed in the Western tradition, which express a rich and complex fabric of historical circumstances, social discourses and conceptions of the body, ranging from anatomical and anthropological to considerations on modern and contemporary aesthetic categories. It is expected to critically reflect on this disciplinary intersection in presentations and texts of great methodological and conceptual rigor.