Art History

This course discusses the various creative fields in which Barcelona has been a pioneer. Topics include: urban design, art, culture, design and fashion, theater, dance, music.

This course explores the various ways that artists—male, female, and genderqueer—have used their work to examine, question, and criticize the relationships between gender and society. The course involves sustained visual analysis, as well as a critical engagement with both primary and secondary texts.

This course develops skills which enhance our interpretation, appreciation, and enjoyment of paintings. Lectures combine in-depth visual analysis with art historical understanding, imparting students with the skills and confidence to engage critically and creatively with paintings from a range of eras and places. Students incorporate other visual arts (sculpture, drawing, installation art, for instance), where these have been relevant to methods and histories of painting, as well as modern and contemporary strategies of display and exhibition-making. The course focuses on histories of British art and art collections in Britain (especially public collections accessible to students, in Oxford or London), though the course gives students a rounded understanding of painting made in prominent art centers, especially across Britain, Western Europe, and the United States.

The course surveys the art and archaeology of ancient Greece from the Bronze Age (c. 3000-1100 B.C.) to the early Roman imperial period (1st century AD). The chronological sequence of lectures considers the physical remains of ancient Greek life and society, including religion, domestic life, civic spaces, burial practices, social practices, the military, and interactions with other cultures.

This course surveys international visual art and architecture of the Enlightenment from the 17th through the 19th centuries, including specific Spanish examples. It compares movements within this period, examining Romanticism alongside Realism in art or historicism versus the modern city in architecture.

This course introduces art history both as a field of academic knowledge concerned with works of art (including painting, sculpture, and architecture) and as a discipline with a distinctive methodology, vocabulary and theoretical foundations. The course surveys the main trends in the artistic traditions of Europe and Asia paying special attention to cross-cultural comparative analysis (i.e. how the human body and landscape are represented in different artistic traditions). The course introduces the discipline's methodology and frameworks to appreciate broad comparative surveys of the major artistic movements in the history of art. Concepts such as idealism, realism, iconography, among others frame major art historical themes.