Art History

This course offers an initiation to the study of personal adornment in different historical and cultural contexts. It covers the main styles of art in which personal adornment stood out and developed the most.

This course examines the primacy of aesthetics in comprehending and responding to environmental crises by considering the role of the arts in addressing environmental disasters;  whether the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be grounded in scientific understanding; and the aesthetic dimensions of climate change, wastelands, wetlands, and wilderness. Attending the connection between historical conditions and philosophical notions, the course explores the emergence of environmental aesthetics within the European philosophical tradition of the mid-eighteenth century, concurrent with the first industrial revolution and rise of capitalism. It reviews classical and contemporary texts (from Immanuel Kant and Alexander Baumgarten to Peter Sloterdijk, Sianne Ngai, and Yuriko Saito), and introduces key categories: the beautiful, sublime and picturesque; landscape, scenery, environment; atmosphere, climate; Nature, the Anthropocene–and its critical alternatives. Deploying these concepts, the course analyzes contemporary works of art and literature grounded in awareness of ecological conditions quite different from older traditions (e.g. of landscape painting and nature poetry), examining the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson and his former students, and science fiction writers from Mary Shelley to Kim Stanley Robinson. Finally, this course derives an important lesson from the history of aesthetics and its engagement with the environs: the aesthetic pertains as much to the background as to foreground of attention; to ambient conditions of everyday life as to works of art and unique sites. Thus, the course moves in the direction of a revaluation of our modes of life, with particular attention to our homely environmental aesthetics: the banal, quotidian, routine, and habitual aspects of our lives, homes, and streets. This is the arena in which the impact of environmental crises–and efforts to remediate them–is felt most acutely: in our patterns of consumption of energy and materials, how we dress, do chores, feed ourselves, transport, and communicate. Through these intimate investigations, the course considers how contemporary ideas of the environment call for a rethinking of aesthetics, as well as aesthetic approaches to environmental remediation. 

This course offers an introduction to the major questions in the history of modern and contemporary art in the West, based on a historical and artistic panorama ranging from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. It addresses several themes and questions, including what art history is; what roles figure, movement, and nature play in representation in the West; what an artist and an art critic is; what place the museum and the market occupy in our relationship to art; and what the terms "modern art" and "contemporary art" mean. The course identifies the descriptive and critical terminology developed in France and abroad to comment on artistic productions, as well as the history of terms within the art world. It also mobilizes the fields of general knowledge in art history and archaeology to document and interpret an artistic production and an archaeological object.

Perhaps no single art movement within Western modernism is as constitutive and contested as cubism. While the artists under this label introduced crucial new paradigms for artistic production, they did so in ways deeply entangled with violent histories of European imperialism and colonialism. Accordingly, this seminar pursues three primary tasks. First, students develop a working understanding of cubism as it first unfolded in Paris between the years 1906 and 1917. Next, the seminar critically examines prominent theoretical models for interpreting cubist practices, among them formalism, social art history, structuralist semiotics, feminist critique, and postcolonial theory. Finally, the course turns to artists who both engaged with cubism—including Sonia Delaunay, Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, Wifredo Lam, and Faith Ringgold—and challenged its foundational tenets, premises, and exclusions.

This course examines images and photography to understand the role perspective plays in interpretation and meaning.

This course offers a study of the historical evolution of Greek art and its influence on the artistic processes of the Mediterranean. 

The first part of this course focuses on nineteenth-century British art in context. It considers how artists engaged with key issues of the time such as urbanization and industrialization, nation and empire, gender and class, and modernity and tradition. The second part of the course covers the social and cultural history of British photography from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. It is conceived as an introduction to the main debates around the social uses of photography, with a particular emphasis on documentary photography. The focus is on the British context, and thus the class offers an approach to British cultural and social history through photography. Images as well as theoretical texts on photography are studied and used in critical discussions about the different uses of the medium. This is an opportunity to refine the method of image analysis and to reflect on the aesthetic specificities of the medium. The course is also intended as an introduction to research practices.

This course surveys current developments in curating art, examining expanded definitions of curating (in museums and independently post-2020); and the evolving local, global, and digital landscapes for curatorial work and activity today.
With a project-oriented focus, this course equips students with the contextual knowledge as well as the entrepreneurial skill to plan, develop, and deliver a curatorial project as well as situate it in a rapidly changing landscape. Topics include (but are not limited to) the curator as auteur, facilitator, mediator, and project manager as well as contemporary curatorial approaches and research methodology. Project-based learning throughout the course examines: initiating and defining curatorial projects; sourcing artworks in private collections for object-based exhibitions; building connections and relationships with contemporary artists; expanding exhibition formats and sites for curating (including "pop-ups"); writing curatorial statements and press releases; working in a sustainable and accessible way; fundraising and budgeting; marketing and publicity; and working with digital networks and platforms.

The course introduces students to a range of contemporary critical theories and debates on the body and identity. Students explore the body as a site on which social constructions of difference are inscribed, as well as how these constructions can be challenged and resisted. Bodies are regulated and self-regulated, marginalized, oppressed, erased, owned, visualized, textualized, and designed. The body is not isolated; rather, it extends and connects with other bodies, practices, human and non-human entities, and technologies. The course also examines the ways in which digital developments are reshaping our understanding of our bodies and question what it means to be human.

This course provides an introduction to iconography and iconology and considers the power of the symbol. It covers the foundations of aesthetics and philosophy of the image, hermeneutic methods, and analysis of images and artistic languages. The course discusses the creation, revolution, and destruction of images between East and West; iconological schools; and literal iconoclasms. Finally, it examines the origins of medieval aesthetics to the invention of art in modernity, considering subliminal, ancient, and contemporary iconoclasms.