Results for ARTHIST

This lecture course surveys the history of architecture and urbanism, from the first societies to the present, in Europe, West and East Asia, the Americas, and Africa. The course progresses by case studies of exemplary monuments and cities, and examines the built environment as both cultural artifact and architectural event. It considers the social and political circumstances of architectural invention as well as plumbing the depth of artistic context by which particular formal choices resonate with an established representational culture.

Given the importance of art to all aspects of their lives, the Greeks had reason to respect their artists. Yet potters, painters and even sculptors possessed little social standing. n nWhy did the Greeks value the work of craftsmen but not the men themselves? Why did Herodotus dismiss those who worked with their hands as "mechanics?" What prompted Homer to claim that "there is no greater glory for a man¿ than what he achieves with his own hands," provided that he was throwing a discus and not a vase on a wheel?n nPainted pottery was essential to the religious and secular lives of the Greeks. Libations to the gods and to the dead required vases from which to pour them. Economic prosperity depended on the export of wine and oil in durable clay containers. At home, depictions of gods and heroes on vases reinforced Greek values and helped parents to educate their children. Ceramic sets with scenes of Dionysian excess were reserved for elite symposia from which those who potted and painted them were excluded.n nSculptors were less lowly but even those who carved the Parthenon were still regarded as "mechanics," with soft bodies and soft minds (Xenophon) "indifferent to higher things" (Plutarch).n nThe seminar addresses these issues. Students will read and discuss texts, write response papers and present slide lectures and gallery talks on aspects of the artist's profession.

The course explores the experience and imagination of medieval journeys through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and skills-based approaches. As a foundations class, this survey of medieval culture engages in particular the art and architecture of the period. The Middle Ages is presented as a network of global economies, fueled by a desire for natural resources, access to luxury goods and holy sites. We will study a large geographical area encompassing the British Isles, Europe, the Mediterranean, Central Asia, India, and East Africa and trace the connectivity of these lands in economic, political, religious, and artistic terms from the fourth to the fourteenth century C.E. The students will have two lectures and one discussion session per week. Depending on the size of the class, it is possible that a graduate student TA will run the discussion session. Our goal is to give a skills-oriented approach to the Middle Ages and to engage students in creative projects that will satisfy 1. Ways-Creative Expression requirement as well as one of the following two: Ways-Analytical Interpretive or Ways-Engaging Difference.

Once a religion looses its claim to truth it enters the sphere of the mythic. From the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, European artists turned to the legends and poetry of Greco-Roman paganism for pictorial subjects. What roles could Venus and Mars, Mercury and Minerva play in a Christian culture? Artists and humanists had different answers to this question. As relics from the past the stories of the ancient gods could serve as the prehistory of worldly and religious institutions and hence legitimize them. Or pagan myth, because of its alien nature, could convey fantasies of the body, which could not be articulated otherwise. Among the artists who explored creatively the ancient legends were Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Bernini, and Poussin. Next to ancient authors such as Homer and Ovid we shall be reading excerpts from the humanists Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Vasari as we explore word/image relationships. The seminar includes excursions to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University to look at Old Master prints from the museum¿s storage, not normally on display, and we shall study paintings and sculptures with mythological subjects in the Legion of Honor, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

The development of modern art and visual culture in Europe and the US, beginning with Paris in the 1860s, the period of Haussmann, Baudelaire and Manet, and ending with the Bauhaus and Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s. Modernism in art, architecture and design (e.g., Gauguin, Picasso, Duchamp, Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Dali) will be explored as a compelling dream of utopian possibilities involving multifaceted and often ambivalent, even contradictory responses to the changes brought about by industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of mass culture.

The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.

The course will focus on American abstract painting from the 1930s to the 1960s, emphasizing the works of art at the Anderson Collection at Stanford. We will focus on looking closely at pictures by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other renowned abstract painters, developing skills of speaking and writing about these works of art. We will also place these pictures in their mid-20th century context: World War II and the Cold War; Hollywood and popular culture generally; Beat literature; and locations such as New York and San Francisco.

Course on the representation of fashion in the 20th and 21st century, with focus on fashion photography. Topics include: history of fashion illustration, fashion photography, and fashion films; intersection of art and commerce; role of designers, photographers, editors, and models; studio v. street photography; the place of mass media, alternative magazines, and online publications; and use of media, photography, and design theory for interpretation of fashion representations. Illustrators and artists include Lepape, Erte, Avedon, Penn, Klein, Newton, Sherman, and Leibovitz.

Episodes of global artistic exchange from the 16th to 19th centuries involving commodities (porcelains and textiles), technologies (printmaking, perspective, and cartography), and imaginaries (Chinoiserie, East Asian Occidenteries, Orientalism, Japonisme). The role of enterprises, institutions, and power relations in artistic economies, from the Portuguese Empire, Jesuit mission networks and East India Companies to imperialist systems.

Iconoclasm, iconophobia, and aniconism as markers of cultural transformation of the Mediterranean in the 7th-9th centuries. The identity crisis in the region as the Arabs established the Umayyad caliphate, conquering the Holy Land, Egypt, and Spain. The West consolidated around the Carolingians versus the East split between the Byzantines and the Arabs. How each of these three empires emerged from the ashes of late antique culture and carved an identity out of a common cultural foundation. The course will take place in the seminar room of the Art and Architectural Library located in the Cummings Art Building.

Notions of cultural superiority in light of changes in Florentine society as it went from being a republic to a duchy ruled by the Medici. Artists and architects such as Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Pontormo praised as having revived the arts and returned them to a level of ancient splendor. The role of the sacred in daily life and uses of the pagan past for poetic and scholarly expressions and as vehicles for contemporary experience.

This seminar will study the complexity and richness of pictures made by Paul Cézanne that affected the course of modernist painting during the early twentieth century. Usually called an Impressionist, Cézanne shares only partially Monet's concern for fleeting effects, and he evokes little of Renoir¿s charm. He did not paint the bustle of city life like Manet or Degas. Cézanne spent most of his career near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence painting landscapes, a few local residents, and many still-lifes. Yet Matisse was serious when he said, "Cézanne, you see is a sort of god of painting. Dangerous his influence? So what? Too bad for those without the strength to survive it." The seminar will explore the foundations of that influence.

A new course on the history and meaning of Pop art in the United States and abroad. The course will feature close study of paintings, photographs, and prints at the Cantor Art Center. The course will be given in the Denning Family Resource Room, located in The Anderson Collection building. If you have any questions regarding the location, please contact Linda Esquivel at lindae@stanford.edu.

Students will open the ¿black box¿ of museums to consider the past and present roles of institutional collections, culminating in a student-curated exhibition. Today, museums assert their relevance as dynamic spaces for debate and learning. Colonialism and restitution, the politics of representation, human/object relationships, and changing frameworks of authority make museum work widely significant and consistently challenging. Through thinking-in-practice, this course reflexively explores ¿museum cultures¿: representations of ¿self¿ and ¿other¿ within museums and institutional cultures of the museum world itself.

The Japanese tea ceremony, the ultimate premodern multimedia phenomenon, integrates architecture, garden design, ceramics, painting, calligraphy, and other treasured objects into a choreographed ritual wherein host, objects, and guests perform designated roles on a tiny stage sometimes only six feet square.. In addition to its much-touted aesthetic and philosophical aspects, the practice of tea includes inevitable political and rhetorical dimensions. This course traces the evolution of tea practice from its inception within the milieu of courtier diversions, Zen monasteries, and warrior villas, through its various permutations into the 20th century, where it was manipulated by the emerging industrialist class for different-but ultimately similar-ends.

Professional experience in a field related to the Visual Arts for six to ten weeks. Internships may include work for galleries, museums, art centers, and art publications. Students arrange the internship, provide a confirmation letter from the hosting institution, and must receive consent from the faculty coordinator to enroll in units. To supplement the internship students maintain a journal and write a research paper related to the experience and their area of academic interest. Evaluations from the student and the supervisor are submitted at the end of the internship. Restricted to declared majors and minors. May be repeated for credit.

May be repeated for credit.

For approved independent research with individual faculty members. Letter grades only. May be repeated for credit.

The development of modern art and visual culture in Europe and the US, beginning with Paris in the 1860s, the period of Haussmann, Baudelaire and Manet, and ending with the Bauhaus and Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s. Modernism in art, architecture and design (e.g., Gauguin, Picasso, Duchamp, Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Dali) will be explored as a compelling dream of utopian possibilities involving multifaceted and often ambivalent, even contradictory responses to the changes brought about by industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of mass culture.

Episodes of global artistic exchange from the 16th to 19th centuries involving commodities (porcelains and textiles), technologies (printmaking, perspective, and cartography), and imaginaries (Chinoiserie, East Asian Occidenteries, Orientalism, Japonisme). The role of enterprises, institutions, and power relations in artistic economies, from the Portuguese Empire, Jesuit mission networks and East India Companies to imperialist systems.

This course is designed for graduate students in Art History and Film Studies preparing to work as teaching assistants in the Department of Art and Art History. The seminar will focus on a range of theoretical and practical concerns pertaining to the successful conceptualization, organization, and execution of class lectures and discussion sections. Students will be exposed to a variety of perspectives and strategies related to quality teaching at the college level.

Iconoclasm, iconophobia, and aniconism as markers of cultural transformation of the Mediterranean in the 7th-9th centuries. The identity crisis in the region as the Arabs established the Umayyad caliphate, conquering the Holy Land, Egypt, and Spain. The West consolidated around the Carolingians versus the East split between the Byzantines and the Arabs. How each of these three empires emerged from the ashes of late antique culture and carved an identity out of a common cultural foundation. The course will take place in the seminar room of the Art and Architectural Library located in the Cummings Art Building.

(Formerly CLASSART 322.) Beyond a focus on artists and patrons: how Roman art was seen and understood by its contemporary viewers. Themes include memory, performance, gender, replication, and constructions of space. Goal is to draft a differentiated model of viewing and literacy, with attention to collective experience, hierarchy, access, and subversion.

TBD

This course focuses on the production, criticism, and curating of art. It encompasses both the study of curatorial work and the organization of an exhibition at the Cantor. Through a series of required readings, intensive class discussions, class trips, guest lectures, and first-hand encounters with art objects and exhibitions, we will investigate the history and contemporary practice of curating. Our work together will culminate in an exhibition at the Cantor organized by class members in close consultation with Cantor staff. The show will open in late fall 2015-16 and will be on view for approximately 12-15 weeks. Students are expected to enroll in both the Spring 2014-15 and Fall 2015-16 quarters. For graduate students only and with the approval of the faculty. Course will be co-taught by Richard Meyer and Connie Wolf.

For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

(Staff)

(Staff)

For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members.

May be repeated for credit. (Staff)

CPT course required for international students completing degree. Prerequisite: Art History Ph.D. candidate.

The dynamic relationship between art and technology and its formative impact on culture, politics and society. Beginning with Aristotle on the notion of techne and its implications for art and craft, the seminar will focus primarily on the modern period as well as contemporary developments. Topics: The invention of linear perspective during the Renaissance as influenced by Arab mathematics; the culture of optical devices and painting; the birth of photography and cinema and new forms of pictorial representation; the avant-garde and the ¿Machine Age¿; art and technology collaborations during the 1960s; interactivity and the rise of media arts; sound art; biotechnology and the arts. Guest speakers and possible field trips. Enrollment limited to STS Senior majors and art and art history majors.