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4.601

Introduction to Art History

4-0-8 units. HASS-A · Undergraduate

Introduction to the history and interpretation of western art in a global context that explores painting, graphic arts and sculpture from the 15th century to the present. Engages diverse methodological perspectives to examine changing conceptions of art and the artist, and to investigate the plural meaning of artworks within the larger contexts of culture and history.

Fall 2018

Topics

  • 1. Introduction: What Is Art?
  • 2a. Learning to Look/Interpreting What We See 2b. The Devotional Image
  • 3a. Pictorial Space and Perspective 3b. Media Revolutions: Paint and Print in the North
  • 4a. Worlding the Italian Renaissance 4b. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael: Making Renaissance Art
  • 5a. Representing Women 5b. The Status of the Artist
  • 6. Art as Theater in 17th-Century Rome
  • 7. Dutch Art in Global Perspective
  • 8a. Art and Absolutism in France and Spain 8b. Public Exhibitions: Enter the Art Critic
  • 9a. The Lure of the Antique 9b. Beyond Representation: Color and Touch
  • 10. Romanticism and Empire
  • 11a. Photography and Photographic Truth 11b. The Artist and the City
  • 12. The Artist and the City, part 2
  • 13a. Modernist Primitivism 13b. Surrealism and Dada
  • 14a. Abstract Expressionism: Art and Politics 14b. After the Art Object: From Pop to Performance
  • 15. Where We Are Now; Concluding Thoughts

Readings

  • There is no textbook for this course. If you think one would be helpful to you (which some students do), any recent edition of Hugh Honour and John F. Fleming’s The Visual Arts: A History is recommended. Used copies are available at online vendors, or it can be purchased new from Amazon:
    Listed reading
  • Hugh Honour and John F. Fleming, The Visual Arts: A History . Laurence King Publishing, 2009. ISBN: 9781780671178.
    Listed reading
  • SES #: 1 · LECTURE Topics: Introduction: What Is Art? · READINGS: No readings assigned.
    Reading assignment
  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 7–33. ISBN: 9780140135152.
    Listed reading
  • Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, “Images, Power, and Politics,” in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9–48. ISBN: 9780195314403.
    Listed reading
  • SES #: 2b · LECTURE Topics: The Devotional Image · READINGS: Michael Baxandall, “Conditions of Trade,” in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–29. ISBN: 9780192821447.
    Reading assignment
  • SES #: 3a · LECTURE Topics: Pictorial Space and Perspective · READINGS: Leon Battista Alberti, “On Painting” (1453), in Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents , ed. C. Gilbert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 51–75. ISBN: 9780810110342.
    Reading assignment
  • SES #: 3b · LECTURE Topics: Media Revolutions: Paint and Print in the North · READINGS: Joseph Koerner, “Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-Century Influenza,” in Giulia Bartram et al., Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 18–38. ISBN: 9780691114934.
    Reading assignment
  • Jill Burke, “ Nakedness and Other Peoples: Rethinking the Renaissance Nude .” Art History 36, no. 4 (2013): 714–739. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Paul Wood, “Renaissance and Old World,” in Western Art and the Wider World (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 12–51. ISBN: 9781444333923.
    Listed reading
  • Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings , ed. M. Kemp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9–10, 19, 38–46, 220–228. ISBN: 9780300090956.
    Listed reading
  • William E. Wallace, “A Week in the Life of Michelangelo,” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture , ed. S. Blake McHam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 203–22. ISBN: 9780521479219.
    Listed reading
  • Suzanna Danuta Walters, “Visual Pressures. On Gender and Looking” in Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 50–66. ISBN: 9780520089785.
    Listed reading
  • Rose Marie San Juan, “ The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance .” Oxford Art Journal , 14/1 (1991), 67–78. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971), in Women, Art, Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 145–178. ISBN: 9780064301831.
    Listed reading
  • Giorgio Vasari, “Introduction” (optional) and “Preface” (1550) to Vasari, The Lives of the Artists , ed. J.C. Bondanella and P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), vii–xiv, 3–6. ISBN: 9780199537198.
    Listed reading
  • SES #: 6 · LECTURE Topics: Art as Theater in 17 th -Century Rome · READINGS: Genevieve Warwick, “ Speaking Statues: Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne at the Villa Borghese ”. Art History 27 (2004): 353–381. ↗
    Reading assignment
  • Julie Hochstrasser, “Remapping Dutch Art in Global Perspective: Other Points of View,” in Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration , ed. Mary D. Sheriff (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 43–71. ISBN: 9780807872703.
    Listed reading
  • Thijs Weststeijn, “Cultural Reflections on Porcelain in the 17 th -Century Netherlands,” in Chinese and Japanese Porcelain for the Dutch Golden Age , ed. J. van Campen and Titus Eliens (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Kunst, 2014), 213–229. ISBN: 9789491196805.
    Listed reading
  • SES #: 8a · LECTURE Topics: Art and Absolutism in France and Spain · READINGS: Norman Bryson, “The Legible Body: Le Brun,” in French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29–57. ISBN: 9780521276542.
    Reading assignment
  • Thomas Crow, “The Salon Exhibition in the Eighteenth Century,” in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–22. ISBN: 9780300033540.
    Listed reading
  • Étienne de La Font de Saint Yenne, “Reflections on Some Causes of the Present State of Painting in France,” in Art in Theory, 1648–1815 , ed. Charles Harrison et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 554–561. ISBN: 9780631200642.
    Listed reading
  • Johann Joachim Winckelmann, from Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) in Art in Theory, 1648–1815 , 450–456. ISBN: 9780631200642.
    Listed reading
  • Anonymous, Salon reviews from Mémoires Secrets (1783, 1785) in Art in Theory, 1648–1815 , 695–701. ISBN: 9780631200642.
    Listed reading
  • Andrew McClellan, “Nationalism and the Origins of the Museum in France,” in The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 29–39. ISBN: 9780894682025.
    Listed reading
  • Angela Dunstan, “ Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and the Imprint of Authenticity .” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19 (2014). ↗
    Listed reading
  • Peter John Brownlee, “ Color Theory and the Perception of Art .” American Art 23, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 21–24. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Judith Walsh, “Winslow Homer and the Color Theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul,” in Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light , ed. Martha Tedeschi and Kristi Dahm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 198–205. ISBN: 9780865592261.
    Listed reading
  • Jordanna Bailkin, “Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader , ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 91–110. ISBN: 9780822354482.
    Listed reading
  • Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), anthologized in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas , ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1005–1009. ISBN: 9780631227083.
    Listed reading
  • Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Westview Press, 1989), 33–59. ISBN: 9780064301879.
    Listed reading
  • Zeynep Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography , ed. J. Beaulieu and M. Roberts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 19–42. ISBN: 9780822328742.
    Listed reading
  • Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 666–672. ISBN: 9780631200666.
    Listed reading
  • Jonathan Crary, excerpt on the stereoscope from Techniques of the Observer (1990), in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader , ed. V. Schwartz and J. M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004), 82–92. ISBN: 9780415308663.
    Listed reading
  • Richard Kreitner, “Stereoscopes could change how we see the world—again.” Boston Globe , August 16, 2015.
    Listed reading
  • SES #: 11b · LECTURE Topics: The Artist and the City · READINGS: Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays , ed. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 1–41. ISBN: 9780714833651.
    Reading assignment
  • SES #: 12 · LECTURE Topics: The Artist and the City, part 2 · READINGS: Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 50–90. ISBN: 9780415007221.
    Reading assignment
  • Simon Gikandi, “ Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference .” Modernism/Modernity 10 (2003): 455–80. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Primitive,” in Critical Terms for Art History , ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff, 2nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 217–233. ISBN: 9780226571683.
    Listed reading
  • Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” and Richard Huelsenbeck, “First German Dada Manifesto,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas , ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 252–259. ISBN: 9780631227083.
    Listed reading
  • William Pietz, “Fetish,” in Critical Terms for Art History , ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff, 2nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 306–317. ISBN: 9780226571683.
    Listed reading
  • Eva Cockroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War” (1974), anthologized in Art In Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts , ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 82–90. ISBN: 9780064302241.
    Listed reading
  • David Craven, “Introduction,” “Abstract Expressionism and Afro-American Marginalization,” and “Dissent During the McCarthy Period,” in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique , ed. E. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 510–526. ISBN: 9780300106138.
    Listed reading
  • Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 49–65. ISBN: 9780300064384.
    Listed reading
  • Adrian Piper, “Performance and the Fetishism of the Art Object” (1981), in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism, 1967-1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 51–61. ISBN: 9780262661539. ↗
    Listed reading
  • SES #: 15 · LECTURE Topics: Where We Are Now; Concluding Thoughts · READINGS: Kate Cowcher, “ Luanda Onde Está? Contemporary African Art and the Rentier State .” Critical Interventions 8, no. 2 (2014): 140–159. ↗
    Reading assignment

Prerequisites & course information

Prereq: None Acad Year 2027-2028: U (Fall) Acad Year 2028-2029: Not offered 4-0-8 units. HASS-A

Sources