Art and World Making in the 1890s

Undergraduate / Graduate

While the final decade of the nineteenth century is often heralded as the cradle of artistic modernism, this seminar will take a more expansive view of artistic practices in the larger world of the 1890s. We will consider the ways in which painters, designers, architects, and art theorists developed a range of formal and innovative techniques to engage and represent a new global order beset by nationalist and populist fervor, unbounded scientific discovery, new forms of labor and social belonging, legal definitions of personhood and property, and the combined force of global conquest and attempts to resist it. Following a case-study approach grounded in Europe yet reaching out to its entanglement with the wider world (including West Africa, North America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia), students will dive deeply into artists', designers', and architects' bids to meaningfully represent experience of this extraordinary period while also reflecting on remarkable parallels with our own moment of global transformation. Participants need not be specialists in the period to enroll, but should be broadly interested in dissecting the ways in which art could meaningfully represent larger social, political, and conceptual concerns, often in unexpected ways. Assignments will include short writing assignments that engage objects from university archives, local collections, and a traveling exhibition.