Art History

This course is a challenging introductory course and is specifically for non-History of Art students. It examines early modern European art from the 13th to the 16th century, focusing on objects in London's galleries and museums and taught predominantly in front of works in these collections. The specific content of this course changes each year but the aim is to introduce students to key issues in Italian Renaissance and northern European art, focusing on paintings, sculpture, and the decorative arts in London institutions such as the National Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

This course covers almost 1400 years of the history of art, from c.500 to c.1700, from the Early Medieval period to the Baroque. The course (though it follows a roughly chronological sequence) is not a chronological survey and does not pretend to provide comprehensive coverage of this vast and complex subject. Instead the work of prominent artists, important types, key periods and diverse geographies of art are selected to provide representative examples for study. All teaching considers the visual arts as a reflection of the societies in which they were produced.

This course has two parts. The first part surveys some of the main stages in the evolution of the American horror film. Starting from its literary influences, it then focuses on its growth and relationship with the then budding television in the 1950s. It analyzes the role of the TV news and the Hays code in the 1960s. And, as it reaches the heydays of horror films in the 1970s (with the involvement of the New Hollywood in the field of horror), it eventually observes how the conventions of the genre have successfully spread into some of the best TV series at the turn of the century. The course provides a mix of theory and practice with the analysis of some scenes, echoing what will have been shown in the first part of the class. The study of these excerpts develop the ability to express skills for commenting on cinematographic works of art and provides an opportunity to write a short file on a film or a TV series. The second part of the course provides an introduction to the formal analysis of comics as a medium based on “sequential” images, to be distinguished from photography’s still images and film’s moving images. It is based on the analysis of various samples of primarily American comics by means of the interpretive grids presented by Scott McCloud’s UNDERSTANDING COMICS: THE INVISIBLE ART (1993), an introductive study of the comics medium presented as a book-length comic. 

This course examines the relationship between art and philosophy. Art is the fruit of practical life and the object of philosophical reflection. We gain insight into ourselves and our world through philosophical thought. The course discovers the historical origin and context of the major concepts regarding art, the background and meaning of philosophical discourses around art, and the process of formation and transfiguration of the definition of art and its critical categories.