Intro to 20th Century Art

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This survey course will introduce students to major developments in 20th-century art, primarily in Europe and the Americas. Emphasis will be placed on modernist and avant-garde practices and their tenets. The first half of the course will trace Modernism's unfolding in the avant-garde practices of the late- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second half of the course will address art production as the neo-avant-garde attempted to construct continuity and repetitions of the heroic modernist legacies of the past. We will consider issues such as the self-criticism of art, the myth of the artist-genius, the reign of abstraction, spirituality in art, race and gender, art and class, and art's intersections with mass culture. Artists we will study include Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. This course is a lecture format and grading is largely exam-based. The curriculum will also include visits to the university museum.