Art History

This is a special studies course with projects arranged between the student and faculty member. The specific topics of study vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. The number of units varies with the student's project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student's special study project form.

This course focuses on the impact of the AIDS crisis on American and European artists and activists, from the first census of cases of the disease in 1981 to the therapeutic revolution in 1997. Based on numerous visual representations inhabited by all that was at work in societies at the time of the epidemic, the course constructs a political, economic, and social history of this era haunted by the catastrophe. In doing so, it mobilizes and crosses disciplines, and develops questions and issues specific to the history of art by calling on the human and social sciences.

This course examines the politicization manifested in works of fiction and the political effects of the creation and the use of artwork. Incorporating an international and comparative dimension, it explores censorship, politics, mobilization, and conflicts within the art world. The course studies several aesthetic registers including cinema, television, literature, and painting to examine the tension present in various worlds of art, between artistic recognition and the politicization of works and creators. It explores the mechanisms of this tension as well as the practices and forms of action and creation through which artists engage and see their creations become objects of disruption.

This course considers travelling artists and artworks in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the way in which people and objects interacted, thus shaping different local cultural contexts and places around Europe. Through the study of iconic travels such as those by Albrecht Durer, Raphael, Lorenzo Lotto, Martin van Heemskerk, El Greco, Sofonisba Anguissola, Federico Zuccari, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Pieter Paul Rubens, as well as the travel of major artworks within Europe, the course addresses the dynamics and forms of cultural encounters, their narratives, and meaning for today’s art history and its methodologies. Visits to the collections of Berlin museums (depending upon pandemic restrictions) allow students to study in depth specific artifacts and to learn how to look closely at works of art.

This course provides students with a general overview of how Spanish artists in the 20th and 21st centuries seek references and are influenced by religion, politics, identity, gender and popular culture while simultaneously re-appropriating historical icons and images to provide new readings and modify traditional interpretations. It examines specific art works that have shaped Spain's contemporary history and society such as Picasso's “Guernica,” Dalí's references to psychoanalysis and sexuality, or Miró's multiple interpretations of Abstraction. The course also focuses on the role of the viewer in the 21st century: that of an active viewer that must interact with art works to decode their meanings via the study of Abstract Expressionists such as Tàpies or Saura, the Abstract Geometric such as Chillida, political and social critics such as Arroyo and Grupo Crónica, more well-known contemporary artists, such as García Alix or Plensa, as well as young emerging artists. This course highlights important events in Spanish history such as the Civil War, Franco's dictatorship, the transition to democracy, terrorism or today's current economic and political crisis through the public art works or manifestations that—officially or not—influence the city of Madrid and demonstrate how contradictions become compatible and how a city might become the ultimate example of a Post-Modern society.

This is a historical survey of three thousand years of Chinese visual arts with emphasis on painting. The course covers the historical transformation of Chinese art from the classical towards the modern and contemporary, as well as key aesthetic and philosophical conceptions underpinning the production of visual arts in the Chinese culture. In addition, the course provides some comparative studies of Chinese and Western visual arts. There will also be a component introducing the special linkages between the history of Singapore art and the Chinese context.