Art History

The course looks at major, predominantly Western, avant-garde movements, from Dada and Surrealism to the break-up of styles and unitary movements that characterise artistic production and display from the 1960s onwards. It concludes with the effects of globalization and radical new conceptions of art that are current in today's world. Course content also addresses cross-cutting themes and issues, from feminism, economics, display, the environment and aesthetic awareness that are all core to the study of art history in the 21st century.

 

This course explores selected topics in the art and visual culture of Asia from Neolithic times to the tenth century CE. A wide range of objects from diverse media, including sculpture, painting, and architecture from India, China, Korea, and Japan, are examined within their respective historical, cultural, social, and religious contexts. Attention is also given to the transcultural paradigm of Asian art history. Topics include Indus Valley Civilization, Neolithic China, Shang Dynasty China, Zhou Dynasty China, Qin Dynasty China, Han Dynasty China, Early Culture and Art in Korea/Japan, Introduction to Buddhism, Early Buddhist Art and Architecture in India, Kushan Dynasty, Gupta Dynasty, and Buddhist Art in China/Korea/Japan.

This course presents a thematic introduction to Irish art, architecture, and design in its broader international context. Subjects are connected across periods and styles – the focus not on presenting individualized summarized histories but rather considering how aspects of Irish visual history are connected and have evolved over time.

Picasso is the most densely inscribed artist of the 20th century, a key figure in histories of modernism and the avant-garde. This course tracks his production across narratives of art, culture and ideology, placing it in historical and theoretical contexts, while attending to the themes and fictions of the reception. Notwithstanding Picasso’s continuing recuperation as an institution or brand-name, his practice submitted the European world-picture to an unprecedented interrogation. This course brings this radical questioning of identity and meaning to the fore.

This course provides an overview of the developments of art in China from the 19th century to the present, relating those developments to the broader changes in Chinese politics and society. It explores art within its political, social, and historical context, searching for the echoes, encounters, and exchanges between artistic trends and politics and society, and investigating the conflicts that underpinned Chinese artistic development and its negotiations with modernity. Topics explored range from artistic identities and the art market to intercultural relations and critical interpretations. The art forms studied range as well, including paintings of various forms and mediums, performance and installation art, graphics, photography, printed illustrations, woodcut prints, and advertisements.

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center 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.

Rome has played a pivotal role in the construction of a global scale culture. It first contributed to unifying the ancient world system as the capital of an empire. Then, in the early modern period (parallel to the age of explorations and colonialism), it became a laboratory for interactions between the local and the global. This course focuses on these interactions roughly between 1550 and 1750, the so-called Counter Reformation and Baroque Age.  Although this is mainly an on-site art history course, each art work, building, or urban plan is studied as a document to understand broader concepts related to geography, politics, religion, science, and philosophy. To assess the value of early modern art and architecture students develop multidisciplinary skills to investigate the multilayered meanings of objects, buildings, and urbanism. Focusing first on Caravaggio, then on the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, and finally on the Renovatio Urbis (the new avenues connecting the main churches of the city), this course simultaneously explores the micro and the macro context of every commission. From the private fashioning of papal families (Borghese, Barberini, Pamphili, and Chigi) to the impression of orbialization (the concept that pervades the papal blessing addressed to the city and to the world), the city promised to be a topographical space of universal salvation. From the different approaches to art and architecture by Bernini and Borromini (theatrical and philosophical respectively) to the impact of the interreligious encounters of the new religious orders, Rome appeared as the laboratory of a globalization actualized in tandem with the colonial powers of Portugal, France, and Spain. The Spanish Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus in 1540 in Rome, shifted the religious discourse toward the universal good setting the program for a possible global society. The Jesuit system with their missionary and educational activities throughout the world was the most important institution for “interactions”. No wonder that in the 17th century, the Roman main educational institutions (Studium Urbis, Collegio Romano, Propaganda Fide) focused on the study of languages and the publication of dictionaries and grammar books. The impact of the Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher over 17th century Rome is as polyhedric as his writings. Kircher created one of the biggest cabinets of curiosities (wunderkammer) of Europe. His collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiques, embalmed animals, botanical rarities, scientific instruments, and a myriad of objects coming from China, India, Mexico, etc. was referred to as theatrum mundi (the theatre of the world), a metaphoric representation of the culture of the early modern city. By the end of the 17th century, Rome simultaneously assumed the connotations of new Jerusalem, Athens, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Babel mirroring the world as if in a theatre of memory and geography while other cities in different continents took the name of Rome of the East or Rome of the West through a religious and architectural response. The visual arts reveal the global resonance of Rome but also the presence of different ethnic groups in the city. The Eternal City was, undoubtedly, one of the loci where the subjective dimension of globalization originated.