Art History

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. 

This course focuses on not-for-profit arts organizations and related bodies in cultural creative industries. Topics covered include the evolution of the field, economic impact, value creation, the intrinsic and effectual structure, marketing, fundraising, and others. Students are introduced to a wide range of arts organizations and its projects, working as arts managers through lectures, readings and project research. In addition to understanding the organizational structures and functions of an arts organization, students have begun to develop a philosophy of management in the arts, a theoretical model for general management, and practical tools of its practice.

In this course, the art of the later Middle Ages from approximately 1300 to the 1530s is studied from a perspective where the art works are seen as manifestations of the visual culture of the period. Rather than approaching them as works of art in the conventional sense, the course focuses on the way the objects have made sense to their original beholders by virtue of the visual and material qualities that constitute their essential characteristics. It reviews medieval theories of vision, visuality, and materiality, and discusses the perception, reception, and use of images in various cultic settings, i.e., from Norwegian stave churches to convents on the European continent, as well as in secular contexts. The discussions concern art works of various media, with some extra attention given to manuscripts, relics/reliquaries, and polychrome sculpture. The course is taught as a combination of lectures and seminars which take place either at campus or in museum collections. 

This course explores the place of food in art in France, with a focus on the modern and contemporary periods. The course studies representations of food as a means to survey the evolution of French art within a global context, and as significant markers of social, ethnic, and cultural identity. An analysis of these depiction provides the opportunity to learn about dietary and dining customs, habits and beliefs prevalent in France from the early modern period to the present. The course begins by decoding the archetypal representations of succulent food in the still life and genre painting of 16th-17th century Holland, then examines how the rise of these previously minor artistic genres in 18th century France coincided with the birth of French gastronomy. Frivolous depictions of aristocrats wining, dining, and indulging in exotic beverages like coffee and hot chocolate then give way in post-Revolutionary France to visions of austerity and “real life,” featuring potato-eating peasants. The focus then shifts to representations of food and dining in the age of modernity, when Paris was the undisputed capital of art, luxury, haute cuisine, and innovation. Drawing from these pictorial and social innovations, the course observes the place of food and dining themes in the avant-garde movements of early 20th-century Paris. The course questions the place of food—or its absence--in art to capture the suffering and violence of upheavals like the Second World War. The course considers the place of food and dining in contemporary art: from the Pop Art movement calling into question postwar consumer society through its representations of industrialized, mass-produced food; to contemporary creators in a plural and globalized art scene who use these traditional themes to challenge the status and roles of the artist, the spectator, and the work of art itself; to how depictions of food in visual art grapple with multiculturalism in France today.