ARTHIST 1A:
Introduction to the Visual Arts: Prehistoric through Medieval (CLASSICS 56)
A survey of the art and architecture from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the Gothic Cathedrals of France; the material is organized both chronologically and thematically and covers a multiplicity of religions: pagan, Christian, and Islamic.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 1B:
Introduction to the Visual Arts: History of Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present
This course surveys the history of Western painting from the start of the 14th century to the late 20th century and our own moment. Lectures introduce important artists (Giotto, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Goya, Manet, Matisse, Pollock, and others), and major themes associated with the art of particular periods and cultures. The course emphasizes training students to look closely at - and to write about - works of art.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 2:
Asian Arts and Cultures (JAPANGEN 60)
An introduction to major monuments, themes, styles, and media of East and South Asian visual arts, in their social, literary, religious, and political contexts. Through close study of primary monuments of architectural, pictorial, and sculptural arts and related texts, this course will explore ritual and mortuary arts; Buddhist arts across Asia; narrative and landscape images; and courtly, urban, monastic, and studio environments for art from Bronze Age to modern eras.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 3:
Introduction to World Architecture (CLASSICS 54)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 10SC:
Photography: Truth or Fiction or...
"All photographs are accurate. None is the truth." Richard Avedon (1923-2004)nThe invention of photography inspired the belief that there could be a truthful and objective way to visually record the world. From portraits to travel photographs to documentary, photography has influenced how modern history is understood and remembered. Yet, a photograph is a manipulated image, shaped by the perspective of the photographer and further framed by its printing, presentation, and interpretation. The complex ethical and political issues associated with photography significantly impact how events and moments are recorded by history. Consider, for example, the US government's 18-year ban (ended in 2009) on photographing the flag-draped coffins of America's war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States. What matters most: protecting the privacy of military families or protecting American citizens from the death toll of war?nnOver the past decade, the number of photographers has increased exponentially, further blurring the boundary between what is truth and what is fiction. Even the concept of "gatekeepers" is obsolete: anyone with a smartphone is armed with a camera and can create their own stories, their own records, and their own truths. Further, the Internet grants nearly universal freedom to document and disseminate images that record, incriminate, illuminate, persuade, enrage, and glorify. In this course, we will examine the ethical parameters of photography and the many ways in which photography contributes to presenting powerful truths, creating compelling fictions, and recontextualizing history.nnThe course will feature opportunities to work with photographs in the Cantor's collection and to explore the many photographic communities of the Bay Area including extensive field trips to museums, galleries, artists studios, private collections, photo studios, and more. Our discussions will also be informed by course readings. In addition, special sessions covering photographic techniques will familiarize students with the diversity of the medium and hands on experience to create work, if interested. No prior experience required. Sophomore College Course: Application required, due noon, April 5, 2016. Apply at http://soco.stanford.edu
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
ARTHIST 80N:
The Portrait: Identities in Question
Most of us hold libraries of hundreds or thousands of ¿portraits¿ ¿ more or less instantly available posed images of ourselves and others. For most of human history, before the development of portable and digital cameras, portraiture was a much rarer and more deliberate social act and cultural practice, involving special materials and techniques, encounters with expert portraitists or photographers, and established settings for display. What almost all portraits, of whatever time or cultural place, have in common are presentations of social identities, roles, or persona, as well as a potential fascination and power that may be based in our neurological capacities for facial recognition and ¿mind-reading¿ through facial expressions. n This introductory seminar will explore many aspects of this basically simple category of thing ¿ images of particular persons. Our point of departure will be from the history of art, focusing on portrait sculptures, paintings, and photographs from many eras and cultures, some of which are among the most studied and discussed of all artistic monuments. We will consider techniques and approaches of portrait making, including the conventions that underlie seemingly realistic portraits, posing, the portrait situation, and portrait genres. Our primary focus will be on the multiple purposes of portraiture, from commemoration, political glorification, and self-fashioning to making claims of social status, cultural role, and personal identity. We will also discuss the changing status of portraiture under modern states of social dislocation, technological change, and psychoanalytic interrogation, and in postmodern conditions of multi-mediated realities and distributed subjectivities. Along the way, we will see that our understandings of portraiture benefits from the approaches and insights of many fields ¿ political and social history, anthropology, neuroscience, and literary studies among others.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 90:
Indigenous Cultural Heritage: Protection, Practice, Repatriation (ARTHIST 490A)
This new interdisciplinary seminar explores challenges and avenues for furthering protection of the cultural heritage rights enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Using an innovative combination of in-class lectures and videos of interviews with renowned experts, including Indigenous leaders, scholars, artists and performers and museum professionals from around the world, this seminar will analyze current and potential tribal, domestic and international legal and ethical frameworks for indigenous cultural heritage protection and repatriation. Among other subjects, we will discuss and problematize: the impact of colonialism, urbanization and other political, legal, economic, religious and cultural forces on understandings and definitions of "indigenous" and "cultural heritage"; the development of international law relating to Indigenous peoples¿ cultural rights; tribal and domestic heritage protection and repatriation laws/initiatives including the 1990 US Indian Arts and Crafts Act and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; past and present Western museum practices relating to display, preservation, provenance research and repatriation of Indigenous peoples' cultural material; the meaning of repatriation to Indigenous peoples and other stakeholders; and resolving repatriation disputes, including by alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes. While case studies will relate primarily to Indigenous peoples of North America, including the Arizona Hopi and Northwest Coast First Nations, comparisons will be drawn with the situation of Indigenous peoples in other regions, such as Oceania and Russia. The overall seminar experience will involve discussions of lectures and video content, assigned readings, a class visit to the Cantor Center Native Americas collection, and visits to our classroom by renowned experts, including Dr. Morten Rasmussen, who participated in the recent DNA analysis of Kennewick Man/The Ancient One. Students who have taken this course are eligible to join a guided weekend trip to Hopi territory tentatively planned for Spring Quarter 2016. Elements used in grading: class participation, attendance and a final project (one-day take-home exam; or research paper or film project with instructor's consent). Registration: Students may seek the instructor's consent via email (sjdenant@stanford.edu).
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 99A:
Student Guides at the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts
This course prepares students to lead interactive public tours in the galleries of the Cantor Arts Center. Engaging directly with works of art, students will develop their personal responses to art, think critically about tour-leading methods, develop public speaking and research skills, and practice leading informative and engaging group discussions in the galleries. Guest presentations by museum staff will introduce students to a range of professional practices and standards in the art museum including curatorship, art conservation, and collections management.
Terms: Win
| Units: 2
ARTHIST 100N:
The Artist in Ancient Greek Society (CLASSICS 18N)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 101:
Introduction to Greek Art I: The Archaic Period (CLASSICS 161)
In the decades 480-460, just before work began on the Parthenon, the sculptor Myron, creator of the Discus-Thrower, was even more celebrated for his bronze cow. Ancient authors describe an image so palpably alive that shepherds threw stones at her, thinking that she had strayed from the herd, and bulls vied for her attention. A century later, the quest for mimesis prompted a contest between two artists. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes seductive enough to attract hungry birds; Parrhasios then added a linen curtain, which Zeuxis asked to be removed from his painting. Zeuxis conceded defeat since he had fooled only birds, whereas Parrhasios had deceived an artist. nnThis course explores the art and culture of the ancestors of these men. The Greeks of the archaic period (1000-480) would have understood the painters¿ competitive zeal, but only toward the end of the period would they have recognized naturalism as an artistic aim. nnEarlier Greek art is more abstract than life-like, closer to Calder than Michelangelo. In the eighth century Homer¿s descriptions of the rippling muscles (and egos) of his heroes, and the grief of Achilles¿ horses, evoke living men and sentient animals, but his fellow sculptors and painters prefer abstraction.nnThis changes in the seventh century as a result of commercial contacts with the Near East and Egypt. Imported bronzes, ivories and other Near Eastern exotica alerted Greek artists to a wider range of subjects, techniques and intentions, including naturalism. Later in the century, Greek expatriates learned the art of carving hard stone from Egyptian masters and soon marble sculpture and architecture spread throughout Greece. nnIn the course of the sixth and early fifth centuries Greek artists assimilate what they had borrowed, compete with one another, obey and disobey their teachers, test the tolerance of the gods and eventually produce works of art that speak with a Greek accent. When the Persians invaded the Acropolis in 480 and 479, they encountered artifacts with little trace of alien influence or imprint and, at Salamis and Plataea, fought decisive battles in which the Greeks prevailed. In the aftermath of the war, as the Greeks rebuilt their cities and their lives, Myron¿s cow reminded them of their debts to other cultures and their resolve to remain true to their own.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 102:
Introduction to Greek Art II: The Classical Period (CLASSICS 162)
The class begins with the art, architecture and political ideals of Periclean Athens, from the emergence of the city as the political and cultural center of Greece in 450 to its defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404. It then considers how Athens and the rest of Greece proceed in the fourth century to rebuild their lives and the monuments that define them. Earlier artistic traditions endure, with subtle changes, in the work of sculptors such as Kephisodotos. Less subtle are the outlook and output of his son Praxiteles. In collaboration with Phryne, his muse and mistress, Praxiteles challenged the canons and constraints of the past with the first female nude in the history of Greek sculpture. His gender-bending depictions of gods and men were equally audacious, their shiny surfaces reflecting Plato¿s discussion of Eros and androgyny. Scopas was also a man of his time but pursued different interests. Drawn to the inner lives of men and woman, his tormented Trojan War heroes and victims are still scarred by memories of the Peloponnesian War, and a world away from the serene faces of the Parthenon. His famous Maenad, a devotee of Dionysos who has left this world for another, belongs to the same years as Euripides' Bacchae and, at the same time, anticipates the torsion and turbulence of Bernini and the Italian Baroque. In the work of these and other fourth century personalities, the stage is set for Alexander the Great and his conquest of a kingdom extending from Greece to the Indus River. (Formerly CLASSART 102)
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 105:
Art & Architecture in the Medieval Mediterranean (ARTHIST 305, CLASSICS 172)
Chronological survey of Byzantine, Islamic, and Western Medieval art and architecture from the early Christian period to the Gothic age. Broad art-historical developments and more detailed examinations of individual monuments and works of art. Topics include devotional art, court and monastic culture, relics and the cult of saints, pilgrimage and crusades, and the rise of cities and cathedrals.
Last offered: Autumn 2012
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 105B:
Medieval Journeys: Tales of Devotion and Discovery (DLCL 123)
This course explores the experience and imagination of medieval journeys through interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and skills-based approaches. As a foundations class, this survey of medieval culture engages with an array of written texts from the period. Narratives of medieval journeys are studied across a wide range of categories, including pilgrimages, crusades, quests, and sagas. The journey as metaphor, along with the resulting and very real cultural interactions, will provide a main focus for examining this rich tradition of literature. Students will have the opportunity to produce a creative project that brings medieval ideas about travel into dialogue with modern conceptions. The course will satisfy the Ways-Creative Expression requirement as well as one of the following two: Ways-Analytical Interpretive or Ways-Engaging Difference.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 106:
Byzantine Art and Architecture, 300-1453 C.E. (ARTHIST 306, CLASSICS 171)
(Formerly CLASSART 106/206.) This course explores the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Thessaloniki, and Palermo, 4th-15th centuries. Applying an innovative approach, we will probe questions of phenomenology and aesthetics, focusing our discussion on the performance and appearance of spaces and objects in the changing diurnal light, in the glitter of mosaics and in the mirror reflection and translucency of marble.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 106B:
What Do Medieval Images Want? Theories of the Image in Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West (ARTHIST 306B)
What is an image? The medieval response was tied to religious identity. At the core of the debate was whether the image was just a mimetic representation or a living entity: matter imbued with divine spirit. Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West each developed their own positions and used it as a platform for political legitimacy. We will study the development of the medieval image theories by focusing on specific monuments and objects and by reading both primary sources in translation and current scholarly interpretations.
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 107A:
St. Petersburg, a Cultural Biography: Architecture, Urban Planning, the Arts
The most premeditated city in the whole world, according to Dostoevsky; created in 1703 by Peter the Great as a counterpoise to Moscow and old Russian culture; planned as a rational, west-European-appearing capital city of the Russian Empire. St. Petersburg's history through works of its artists, architects, urban planners, writers, and composers.
Last offered: Spring 2012
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 108:
Virginity and Power: Mary in the Middle Ages (ARTHIST 308)
The most influential female figure in Christianity whose state cult was connected with the idea of empire. The production and control of images and relics of the Virgin and the development of urban processions and court ceremonies though which political power was legitimized in papal Rome, Byzantium, Carolingian and Ottonian Germany, Tuscany, Gothic France, and Russia.
Last offered: Spring 2006
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 109:
The Book in the Medieval World (ARTHIST 309)
Studying the design and function of books in medieval society from the 7th to the 15th century, and the ways in which manuscripts are designed to meet (and shape) the cultural and intellectual demands of their readers. Major themes are the relationships between text and image, and between manuscripts and other media; the audience and production context of manuscripts; and changing ideas about pictorial space, figural style, page design, and progression through the book. Final project may be either a research paper or an original artist's book.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 109D:
Means, Media and Mode: An Introduction to Western Medieval Art (ARTHIST 309D)
The course is an introduction to western medieval art approached primarily through distinctions of materials and media. We work with a combination of medieval and later sources, often engaging with the modern objects and spaces available for study on campus in order to create new perspectives on the historical material. Medieval case studies are chosen that raise particularly complex issues of materiality, mixed-media form, and cross-media citation.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 111:
Introduction to Italian Renaissance, 1420-1580 (ARTHIST 311)
New techniques of pictorial illusionism and the influence of the humanist revival of antiquity in the reformulation of the pictorial arts in 15th-century Italy. How different Italian regions developed characteristic artistic cultures through mutual interaction and competition.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 112:
EARLY EUR ART
| Units: 0-60
ARTHIST 114:
Mystical Naturalism: Van Eyck, Dürer, and the Northern Renaissance (ARTHIST 314)
A survey of the major innovations in Northern European painting ca. 1400-1600, in light of the social status of the artist between city and court. In the early fifteenth century painters began to render an idealized world down to its smallest details in ways that engaged new devotional practices. Later Hieronymus Bosch would identify the painter's imagination with the bizarre and grotesque. In response to Renaissance humanism, some painters introduced classical mythology and allegorical subjects in their works, and many traveled south to absorb Italianate pictorial styles. We will be visiting art museums in San Francisco and Stanford. May be repeat for credit.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 8 units total)
ARTHIST 117:
Picturing the Papacy, 1300-1850 (ARTHIST 317)
Popes deployed art and architecture to glorify their dual spiritual and temporal authority, being both Christ's vicars on earth and rulers of state. After the return of the papacy from Avignon, Rome underwent numerous campaigns of renovation that staged a continuity between the pontiffs and the ancient Roman emperors. Patronage of art and architecture became important tools in the fight against Protestantism. Artists include Botticelli, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Bernini.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 8 units total)
ARTHIST 118:
Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (ARTHIST 318)
The course addresses the ways in which Venetian painters of the sixteenth century redefined paradigms of color, design, and invention. Themes to be examined include civic piety, new kinds of mythological painting, the intersection between naturalism and eroticism, and the relationship between art and rituals of church and statecraft.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 118N:
Pagan Mythology and the Making of Modern Europe
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 120:
Living in a Material World: Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Painting (ARTHIST 320)
Painting and graphic arts by artists in Flanders and Holland from 1600 to 1680, a period of political and religious strife. Historical context; their relationship to developments in the rest of Europe and contributions to the problem of representation. Preferences for particular genres such as portraits, landscapes, and scenes of everyday life; the general problem of realism as manifested in the works studied.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 121:
18th-Century Art in Europe, ca 1660-1780 (ARTHIST 321)
Major developments in painting across Europe including the High Baroque illusionism of Bernini, the founding of the French Academy, and the revival of antiquity during the 1760s, with parallel developments in Venice, Naples, Madrid, Bavaria, and London. Shifts in themes and styles amidst the emergence of new viewing publics. Artists: the Tiepolos, Giordano, Batoni, and Mengs; Ricci, Pellegrini, and Thornhill; Watteau and Boucher; Chardin and Longhi; Reynolds and West; Hogarth and Greuze; Vien, Fragonard, and the first works by David. Additional discussion for graduate students.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 122:
The Age of Revolution: Painting in Europe 1780-1830 (ARTHIST 322)
Survey of European painting bracketed by the French Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic conquest. Against this background of social upheavel, the visual arts were profoundly affected by shifts in patronage, public, and ideas about the social utility of image making. Lectures and readings align ruptures in the tradition of representation with the unfolding historical situation, and trace the first manifestations of a "romantic" alternative to the classicism that was the cultural legacy of pre-Revolutionary Europe.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 123N:
Thinking about Visual Attention : from Balzac to Facebook
Writing in 1829, the French author Honoré de Balzac celebrated the acute visual attention of the flâneur, a character he closely associates with modern life: "To flâne is to take pleasure, to collect flashes of wit, to admire sublime scenes of unhappiness, of love, of joy as well as graceful or grotesque portraits, to thrust one's attention into the depths of a thousand lives." In July 2012 the Huffington Report pointed to a fact of modern life: "On city streets, in suburban parking lots and in shopping centers, there is usually someone strolling while talking on a phone, texting with his head down, listening to music, or playing a video game. The problem isn't as widely discussed as distracted driving, but the danger is real." These two very different ways of circulating in urban space suggest that a major shift in how we humans relate to our environment has occurred over the course of nearly two centuries--especially in the densely populated spaces of modern cities. Where the great spectacle of urban life was a marvel of the nineteenth century, today's inhabitants want mainly to block it out by insulating themselves in a cocoon of favorite music or personal conversation, whether by voice or text, that they risk stepping into traffic, colliding with lightposts, or bumping into others similarly self-absorbed. This seminar proposes to think about the hows and whys of that important shift from the unique perspective of art history, a field of study especially attuned to the limits and exigencies of visual acuity. We will explore the topic across a range of media, from daguerreotypes to stereoscopes, from paintings to films, from television screen to the hand-held displays of our smartphones.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 124:
The Age of Naturalism, Painting in Europe1830-1874 (ARTHIST 324)
Survey of European painting from the heyday of Romanticism to the first Impressionist exhibition. Lectures and readings focus on the tensions between traditional forms and ambitions of history painting and the challenge of "modern" subjects drawn from contemporary life. Attention to the impact of painting in the open-air, and the effect of new imaging technologies- notably lithography and photography - to provide "popular" alternatives to the hand-wrought character and elitist appeal of "high art" cultural forms.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 126:
Post-Naturalist Painting (ARTHIST 326)
How conceptual models from language, literature, new technologies, and scientific theory affected picture making following the collapse of the radical naturalism of the 1860s and 1870s. Bracketed in France by the first Impressionist exhibition (1874) and the first public acclamation of major canvases by Matisse and Picasso (1905), the related developments in England, Germany, Belgium, and Austria. Additional weekly discussion for graduate students. Recommended: some prior experience with 19th-century art.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 127A:
African Art and Politics, c. 1900 - Present (AFRICAST 127)
This course explores the relationship between art and politics in twentieth century Africa. Artistic production and consumption is considered in the context of various major political shifts, from the experience of colonialism to the struggle against Apartheid. Each week we will look closely at different works of art and examine how artists and designers responded to such challenges as independence, modernization and globalization. We will look at painting, sculpture, religious art, public and performance art, photography and film. How western perceptions and understanding of African art have shifted, and how museums have framed African art throughout the twentieth century will remain important points of discussion throughout the course.
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 132:
American Art and Culture, 1528-1910 (AMSTUD 132, ARTHIST 332)
The visual arts and literature of the U.S. from the beginnings of European exploration to the Civil War. Focus is on questions of power and its relation to culture from early Spanish exploration to the rise of the middle classes. Cabeza de Vaca, Benjamin Franklin, John Singleton Copley, Phillis Wheatley, Charles Willson Peale, Emerson, Hudson River School, American Genre painters, Melville, Hawthorne and others.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 140N:
Couture Culture: Fashion, Art & Modernism from Manet to Mondrian
This course examines the ways in which fashion has figured in the construction of modern experience and how it has been represented in the visual arts, primarily in Europe and the United States between about 1850 and 1965. Alongside the emergence of haute couture, the rise of the ready-to-wear industry during this period coincided with the consolidation of the department store; these institutions contributed to the development of a culture of consumption and display that continues to shape our lives today. Manet, Degas and other Impressionist painters were sensitive the nuances of fashion, which they, like Baudelaire, saw as an aspect of modernity indispensable to their art. Clothing was no less significant in the context of the Russian revolution, when Alexander Rodchenko, for example, outfitted himself in a home-made version of workers' overalls in order to reinforce his identification with factory laborers and thereby to suggest the breaking down of class distinctions. The course also explores the significance of fashion for an abstract painter like Piet Mondrian, but, more to the point, we look at how Mondrian's work was appropriated to the world of fashion by Yves Saint-Laurent, who assured that Mondrian's signature geometric style would become instantly recognizable and eventually function as a hugely popular brand. The circuits through which we can trace the historical trajectory of fashion will illuminate its importance for understanding many facets of modern culture.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 3-4
ARTHIST 142:
Architecture Since 1900 (CEE 32G)
Art 142 is an introduction to the history of architecture since 1900 and how it has shaped and been shaped by its cultural contexts. The class also investigates the essential relationship between built form and theory during this period.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 142A:
Home Alone: Houses that Artists and Thinkers Design for Themselves (ARTHIST 342A)
This course investigates houses, hideaways, and studios that artists and thinkers have designed for themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from subconscious images of the self to knowing stages for the contemplative life. Case studies range from antiquity to the present, from the studio-house of Peter Paul Rubens to that of Kurt Schwitters; from the house-museum of Sir John Soane to the Vittoriale of Gabriele D'Annunzio; from the philosophical dwelling of the Emperor Hadrian to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 143A:
American Architecture (AMSTUD 143A, ARTHIST 343A, CEE 32R)
A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How these ideas are being transformed in today's globalized world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 144:
On Looking: Art, Obscenity, and the Ethics of Spectatorship
This course considers the ethics of looking at art, photography, and other forms of visual representation that have been declared obscene or indecent, whether by religious authorities, government officials, community representatives, or legal opinions. What are the ethical stakes of looking at such materials? And what are the ethical implications of looking away and insisting that others do so as well? nnThe creation of vanguard art since the late 19th-century has often been linked to the concept of transgression. Is it, we will ask, the modern artist's responsibility to challenge accepted standards of representation and the protocols of looking? If so, how are we, as viewers and students of art, to distinguish between legitimate art and unfit obscenity?
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER
ARTHIST 145:
Culture Wars: Art and Social Conflict in the USA, 1890-1950 (AMSTUD 145M, ARTHIST 345, FEMGEN 145)
This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 146X:
What is Contemporary Art, and Where Did it Come From?
"Contemporary art challenges us to question our assumptions," wrote philanthropist and collector Eli Broad. "It asks us to think beyond the limits of conventional wisdom." This course aims to introduce both the difficulties and the great rewards presented by Contemporary Art (1970 to the present). Examining the historical foundations of Contemporary Art in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, we will learn about the century's most game-changing art practices and movements such as cubism, abstract expressionism, conceptual art, and performance art. Working from the assumption that art in its moment of production was always contemporary, the course will organize content through various thematic lenses such as "portraiture and vision", "the photographic", and "the hand and the mind." Lectures occur both as traditional classroom sessions as well as on-site sessions at Stanford University's public sculpture collection, the Cantor Art Center, and the Anderson Collection, emphasizing close and direct engagement with artworks. Drawing on these experiences and on close readings of key texts, assignments will range from short essays to online curation to gallery talks. Students will develop and enhance their critical visual literacy and ability to grapple with the unknown through skills of creative synthesis, identifying patterns across time and space, and exercising conceptual and visual analysis. Broadly, the goals of the class are to understand the present through the past, to demystify the often confusing nature of contemporary art, and to question why art matters and how.
Last offered: Summer 2014
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 147:
MODERNISM AND MODERNITY (ARTHIST 347)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 148:
Art and the First Amendment: Testing the Limits of Expression (SIW 148)
This course will take place in Washington D.C.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 149S:
Art After the A-bomb: American and European Art, 1945-1989
This course surveys the major movements, figures, and themes in American and European art during the Cold War, from the drop of the A-bomb in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It examines the formative relationship between art and politics in this explosive period. We will consider the changed role of the avant-garde after the catastrophes of World War II; the use and abuse of modern art as propaganda; spectacular postwar affluence and the rise of the culture industry; multimedia, intermedia, and the invention of new communications technologies; the burgeoning military-industrial complex and the Vietnam War; the revolutionary efforts of second-wave feminism, sexual liberation, and the counterculture; and the charged debates of the ¿culture wars¿ and the crisis of representation in the 1980s. What was art¿s social, cultural, and political function in the recent past¿and how is this role instructive in the present? Topics include Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Neo-Dada, Pop, Op, Fluxus, Happenings, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance, Institutional Critique, Process Art, Systems Art, Earth Art, Video Art, and theories of modernism and postmodernism. We will visit the Cantor Arts Center to view original works.
Last offered: Summer 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 152:
The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ARTHIST 154:
The American Civil War: A Visual History (AMSTUD 154X, ARTHIST 354)
A painting of men charging across a field, a photograph of dead bodies in a ditch, a fragment of metal, a sliver of bone, and a brass button: how do we make sense of the visual record of the American Civil War (1861-65)? From the Capitol Dome to a skeleton dug up in a highway project a hundred years after the last battle, the course will consider the strange and scattered remnants of a famous era. Drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, the paintings of Winslow Homer, the photographs of Alexander Gardner, and the oratory of Abraham Lincoln, the course will examine what cannot be portrayed: the trauma of war.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 154B:
Who We Be: Art, Images & Race in Post-Civil Rights America (AFRICAAM 188, CSRE 88)
Over the past half-century, the U.S. has seen profound demographic and cultural change. But racial progress still seems distant. After the faith of the civil rights movement, the fervor of multiculturalism, and even the brief euphoria of a post-racial moment, we remain a nation divided. Resegregation is the norm. The culture wars flare as hot as ever.nnThis course takes a close examination of visual culture¿particularly images, works, and ideas in the contemporary arts, justice movements, and popular culture¿to discuss North American demographic and cultural change and cultural politics over the past half-century. From the Watts uprising to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, from multiculturalism through hip-hop to post-identity art, we will deeply explore the questions: How do Americans see race now? Do we see each other any more clearly than before?
Terms: Spr
| Units: 2-4
ARTHIST 155C:
Abstract Expressionism: Painting/Modern/America (AMSTUD 155C)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 156:
American and European Art, 1945-1968 (ARTHIST 356)
Examines the pivotal figures, movements, themes and practices of art in the United States and Europe, from the conclusion of World War 2 to the end of the 1960s. Emphasis is on the changed nature of the avant-garde after the catastrophic events of midcentury. Topics include: modern art, ideology and the Cold War; the rise of consumer society and the "Society of the Spectacle"; concepts of medium specificity; the impact of new media and technologies on postwar art making; the role of the artist as worker and activist. Movements include: Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Pop, minimalism, process, performance conceptual art. An introductory art history course is recommended.
Last offered: Winter 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 156N:
Art and the Power of Place: Site, Location, Environment
Many iconic works in the history of art draw their power and significance from the place in which they are sited or installed. The cave paintings of Altamira, Spain; Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and the monumental "earthworks" made in the deserts of the American Southwest during the 1960s are just a few examples showcasing the important relationship between art and place. In this seminar we will explore how works of art throughout history create a sense of place; and how place, in turn, changes the interpretation of works of art. We will learn how to analyze works of art in terms of their immediate contexts and surroundings, whether temples, museums, spaces of the city or unexpected environments, charting the historical meanings of place in the process. We will look at a range of examples throughout time, from prehistory to the present day. A critical feature of the seminar will be to consider works of art outside the classroom, on both the Stanford campus and beyond. Possible field trips include visits to Alcatraz Prison (where the famous Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, will install a new work in the fall of 2014)
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 157A:
Histories of Photography (ARTHIST 357A)
This course investigates multiple histories of photography. It begins in early nineteenth-century Europe with the origins of the medium and ends in the United States on September 11, 2001, a day that demonstrated the limits of photographic seeing. Rather than stabilizing any single trajectory of technological iterations, the course is more interested in considering the ¿work¿ performed by photography. Through historical case studies, it considers how `to photograph¿ is to order and to construct the world; to incite action and to persuade; to describe and to document; to record and to censor; to wound; to heal.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 157B:
Picture This: A History of Photography from the Civil War to the Selfie
TBA
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 158S:
Iconography to Instagram: A History of Images and Information
This class will survey how artists, designers and cultures have historically used images as a means to organize and communicate information. How do representations convey meaning in a manner different from language? What do visual conventions reveal about the cultures and technologies that shape them? How and why might artists and viewers subvert the legibility of images? To address these questions, this course proceeds by way of close visual analysis of key works, while exploring their historical, technological, social and artistic contexts. nn Topics to be explored include: iconography and interpretation; the relationship between maps and painting; the importance of printmaking to the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution; the visual culture of the newspaper as reflected in (and satirized by) Cubist and Dadaist art; the political impact of photography (illustrated by a visit to an exhibition of Lewis Hine¿s photographs at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts); the rhetorical conventions of television news and advertising. Later weeks will address representational norms which have emerged in the wake of digital technology: multi-screen displays, Powerpoint and interactive infographics, concluding with a discussion around the data-gathering functions of social media platforms such as Instagram. Ultimately, students will learn the fundamentals of visual communication across media and history, but will also reflect on art¿s enduring ability to transcend and resist a purely informational role in culture.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 159:
American Photographs, 1839-1971: A Cultural History (AMSTUD 159X, ARTHIST 359)
This course concentrates on many important American photographers, from the era of daguerreotypes to near the end of the pre-digital era. We study photographs of the Civil War, western exploration, artistic subjects, urban and rural poverty, skyscrapers, crime, fashion, national parks, and social protest, among other topics. Among the photographers we study: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Emphasis on developing students' abilities to discuss and write about photography; to see it.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 160:
Intro to Contemporary Art
Introduction to major themes, figures, movements and ideas in contemporary art, beginning with the question of art and politics in the 1960s. Topics: Postmodernism and the rise of consumer and spectacle culture; the "death" of painting, the impact of technology, cybernetics and the rise of new media; art at the end of the Cold War; globalization and the new global art world. An intro art history course is recommended.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 160N:
The Sisters: Poetry & Painting (ENGLISH 51N)
Poetry and painting have often been called the "sister arts". Why? Sometimes a poem or a painting stands out to us, asking that we stay with it, that we remember it, although we cannot exactly say why. Poems have a way of making pictures in the mind, and paintings turn "rhymes" amid the people, places, and things they portray. Each is a concentrated world, inviting an exhilarating closeness of response: why does this line come first? Why does the artist include that detail? Who knows but that as we write and talk about these poems and pictures we will be doing what John Keats said a painter does: that is, arriving at a "trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty." Each week explore the kinship between a different pair of painter and poet and also focuses on a particular problem or method of interpretation. Some of the artist/poet combinations we will consider: Shakespeare and Caravaggio; Jorie Graham and (the photographer) Henri Cartier-Bresson; Alexander Pope and Thomas Gainsborough; William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich; Christina Rossetti and Mary Cassatt; Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins; Thomas Hardy and Edward Hopper.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 162:
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Art (ARTHIST 362)
This course focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in American art and criticism from 1972 to the present. How have the terms of racial identity and sexual difference shaped the production and reception of contemporary art across the last four decades? What status has the body--and more specifically, the body of the artist--been accorded within recent work on identity and difference? Throughout the course of the semester, we will be particularly attentive to issues of racial and sexual stereotype. What critical or subversive uses have contemporary artists found for pictorial stereotype? How have stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality been recycled in order to be mocked or deconstructed?
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 162B:
Art and Social Criticism (AMSTUD 102, CSRE 102A)
Contemporary visual artists have long been in the forefront of social criticism in America and their key works have become anchors for discourses on racism, sexism, economic inequality, and immigrant rights. We will consider political art by artists such as ACT-UP, Judy Chicago, Fred Wilson, Guerilla Girls, Ai Weiwei and many others that raises social awareness, inspires social change and galvanizes activism. What makes their art enduring social criticism? How have they contributed to our understanding of American history?
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 163:
Queer America (AMSTUD 163, FEMGEN 163)
This class explores queer art, photography and politics in the United States since 1930. Our approach will be grounded in close attention to the history and visual representation of sexual minorities in particular historical moments and social contexts. We will consider the cultural and political effects of World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, psychedelics, hippie culture and sexual liberation, lesbian separatism, the AIDS crisis, and marriage equality.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul
ARTHIST 164A:
Technology and the Visual Imagination (ARTHIST 364A, FILMSTUD 164A, FILMSTUD 364A)
An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world. The course examines technologies from the Renaissance through the present day, from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors, that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities as well as shaped how we imagine the world. We also consider how these technologies influenced and inspired the work of artists. Special attention is paid to how different technologies such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and computer screens translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with conceptions of time and space.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 165A:
Fashion Shows: From Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga (ARTHIST 365A, FILMSTUD 165A, FILMSTUD 365A)
The complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the 20th century; the place of prints, photography, and the Internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 165B:
American Style and the Rhetoric of Fashion (AMSTUD 127, FILMSTUD 165B)
Focus on the visual culture of fashion, especially in an American context. Topics include: the representation of fashion in different visual media (prints, photographs, films, window displays, and digital images); the relationship of fashion to its historical context and American culture; the interplay between fashion and other modes of discourse, in particular art, but also performance, music, economics; and the use of fashion as an expression of social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 166:
Representing Fashion
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 167:
Beyond the Fuzzy-Techie Divide: Art, Science, Technology (ARTHIST 367, FILMSTUD 167B, FILMSTUD 367B)
Although art and science are often characterized as "two cultures" with limited common interests or language, they share an endeavor: gaining insight into our world. They even rely on common tools to make discoveries and visually represent their conclusions. To clarify and interrogate points of similarity and difference, each week¿s theme (time, earth, cosmos, body) explores the efforts of artists and scientists to understand and represent it and the role of technology in these efforts. Focus on contemporary examples.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 171:
Baudelaire to Bardot: Art, Fashion, and Film in Modern France
This course primarily concerns how French artists, writers, and filmmakers have explored the intersecting themes of fashion and modernity in various media ¿ including painting, sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts, poetry, novels, film, dance, and mass advertising. Using modern France as a case study, we will think critically about how the fashion, design, and luxury industries have influenced the production and reception of modern art - and vice versa. While the course is organized thematically, we will move chronologically from the late-18th century to the 1950s, conducting a survey of some of the major developments in French visual culture along the way. Finally, we will consider the ways that fashion-minded artists, designers, and entrepreneurs have helped to create, reflect, and critique modern French identities.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 173:
Issues in Contemporary Art (ARTHIST 373)
Major figures, themes, and movements of contemporary art from the 80s to the present. Readings on the neo-avant garde; postmodernism; art and identity politics; new media and technology; globalization and participatory aesthetics. Prerequisite: ARTHIST 155, or equivalent with consent of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2009
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 176:
Feminism and Contemporary Art (ARTHIST 376)
(Same as ARTHIST 176) The impact of second wave feminism on art making and art historical practice in the 70s, and its reiteration and transformation in contemporary feminist work. Topics: sexism and art history, feminist studio programs in the 70s, essentialism and self-representation, themes of domesticity, the body in feminist art making, bad girls, the exclusion of women of color and lesbians from the art historical mainstream, notions of performativity.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender
ARTHIST 178:
Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (AMSTUD 178, ARTHIST 378)
The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.
Last offered: Spring 2004
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 182B:
Cultures in Competition: Arts of Song-Era China (ARTHIST 382B)
The Song dynasty (mid-10th to late 13th c.) was a period of extraordinary diversity and technical accomplishment in Chinese painting, ceramics, calligraphy, architecture and sculpture. Artistic developments emerged within a context of economic dynamism, urban growth, and competition in dynastic, political, cultural and social arenas ¿ as between Chinese and formerly nomadic neighboring regimes, or between reformers and conservatives. This course will consider major themes and topics in Song art history, including innovations in architectural and ceramic technologies; developments in landscape painting and theory; the rise of educated artists; official arts and ideologies of Song, Liao and Jin court regimes; new roles for women as patrons and cultural participants; and Chan and popular Buddhist imagery.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 183N:
Making Paradises on the Silk Road: Buddhist Arts of the Dunhuang Grottoes
The cave temples of Dunhuang in far northwest China are the greatest repository of Chinese and Central Asian Buddhist arts from the medieval period of 5th to 14th centuries. This seminar will focus on caves that will be exhibited as full-scale replicas as part of the Getty Malibu Museum's International Dunhuang exhibition, which we will visit in a seminar field trip to Los Angeles. We will explore the spatial arrangement of sculptures and wall paintings, the imagery of Pure Land paradise scenes and narrative story cycles, and the embodied experience of movement around the caves. Through readings, discussions, VR simulation viewings, and exhibition visits we will also explore varied approaches to understanding the patronage, artistic styles, production techniques, devotional practices, and significance of these sacred spaces.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 184:
Aristocrats, Warriors, Sex Workers, and Barbarians: Lived Life in Early Modern Japanese Painting (ARTHIST 384, JAPANGEN 184, JAPANGEN 384)
Changes marking the transition from medieval to early modern Japanese society that generated a revolution in visual culture, as exemplified in subjects deemed fit for representation; how commoners joined elites in pictorializing their world, catalyzed by interactions with the Dutch.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 186:
Theme and Style in Japanese Art (ARTHIST 386, JAPANGEN 186, JAPANGEN 286)
A mixture of lecture and discussion, this course presents a chronological introduction to some of the defining monuments in the history of Japanese visual culture from prehistory to the mid-19th century. This introductory class presumes no prior knowledge of art history or of Japan. We will emphasize certain overarching themes like religious life; notions of decorum appropriate to various classes (court, warrior, and commoner); the relationship between and among the arts, such as the visual and the verbal, or the symphonic assemblage arts as seen in the tea ceremony; pervasive cultural tropes like nostalgia, seasonality, or the sense of place; and broader issues such as censorship, patronage, gender issues, and the encounters between Japanese and foreign cultures.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 187:
Arts of War and Peace: Late Medieval and Early Modern Japan, 1500-1868 (ARTHIST 387, JAPANGEN 185)
Narratives of conflict, pacification, orthodoxy, nostalgia, and novelty through visual culture during the change of episteme from late medieval to early modern, 16th through early 19th centuries. The rhetorical messages of castles, teahouses, gardens, ceramics, paintings, and prints; the influence of Dutch and Chinese visuality; transformation in the roles of art and artist; tensions between the old and the new leading to the modernization of Japan.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom
ARTHIST 188A:
The History of Modern and Contemporary Japanese and Chinese Architecture and Urbanism (ARTHIST 388A)
The recent rapid urbanization and architectural transformation of Asia; focus is on the architecture of Japan and China since the mid-19th century. History of forms, theories, and styles that serve as the foundation for today's buildings and cityscapes. How Eastern and Western ideas of modernism have merged or diverged and how these forces continue to shape the future of Japanese and Chinese architecture and urban form.
Last offered: Spring 2011
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 188B:
From Shanghai Modern to Global Contemporary: Frontiers of Modern Chinese Art
Chinese artistic engagements with international arenas and with the cultural politics of modernity, from the late 19th century to the present. Topics will include Shanghai modernity and public media; artistic reform and political activism at the end of empire; competition between national style painting and international modernisms; politicized arts of resistance and revolution; post-Mao era experimental and avant-garde movements; transnational careers and exhibition circuits.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 189C:
Global Currents: Early Modern Art Enterprises, Economies, and Imaginaries (ARTHIST 389C)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 192B:
Art of the African Diaspora
This introduction to the art of the African Diaspora uses art and visual culture as means to explore the history and impact of the global spread of African peoples from slavery until the present day. Lectures and discussions will examine a range of artistic practices from street festivals and Afro-Caribbean religious traditions to the work of studio-trained artists of international repute.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 200M:
The Artist in Ancient Greek Society (ARTHIST 400M)
An exploration of the low status of artists in a culture that valued their work but not the men themselves. Potters were especially scorned but even sculptors of gold and ivory statues were seen as "mechanics" (Herodotus), with soft bodies and soft minds (Xenophon), "indifferent to higher things" (Plutarch). Topics include case studies of individual artists, their importance to the polis, their workshops, wages and occupational hazards and the impact of social isolation on the quality of their work.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 203:
Greek Art In and Out of Context (CLASSICS 163)
The seminar considers Greek artifacts in the context of Greek life (including the life of the workshop), and the endless ways in which craftsmen served the needs of Greek society. Their foundries, factories and ceramic studios produced the material goods that defined Greek life: temples, statues and other offerings for the gods; arms and armor for warriors; sporting equipment and prizes for athletes; houses, clothing and crockery for the family; ships and sailcloth, wagons and ploughs, wine and oil-presses for a thriving domestic and overseas economy; gravestones and funeral vases for the dead. (Formerly CLASSART 109.) nMost of the antiquities exhibited in museums, or purchased by private collectors from galleries and auction houses, survive because they were buried with people who used and cherished them. The Greeks¿ belief that the artifacts they valued in life would serve them in the afterlife informs the second part of the seminar, which is devoted to the recent history of tomb looting and the illicit trafficking in antiquities.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 205:
Cairo and Istanbul: Urban Space, Memory, Protest
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the city of Cairo has become a theater of social and political upheaval. In Istanbul, the Gezi protests in spring and summer 2013 drew attention to the contested public space. These events are the result of longstanding developments in the urban and social fabric. This seminar introduces students to the architectural and urban history of Istanbul and Cairo, with the current transformations as a central point of reference. Readings will focus on the tension between historical center and recent urban development, the social problems arising from the segregation, and reactions of scholars, architects, and artists to these issues.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 205A:
Islamic Painting: Landscape, Body, Power
This seminar focuses on the production of paintings, mostly but not exclusively miniatures in books, in the Islamic world. A particular focus lies on the Muslim Empires of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, namely the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal realms, together stretching from the Balkans to India. During this period, illustrated books were popular objects of high-level patronage, and numerous examples have survived that allow a detailed study of the implications of these images. Themes discussed include: figural representation in Islam, patronage and court culture; gender and the body; illustrations of literature and history; images of Sufis ceremonies; portraiture; images of animals and nature; the impact of European prints and paintings; space and landscape. A field-trip to the Museum of Asian Art in San Francisco to view Mughal paintings from India is planned.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 206H:
Women and the Book: Scribes, Artists, and Readers from Late Antiquity through the Fourteenth Century (FEMGEN 216, HISTORY 216, HISTORY 316)
This course examines the cultural worlds of medieval women through particular attention to the books that they owned, commissioned, and created. Beginning with the earliest Christian centuries, the course proceeds chronologically, charting women¿s book ownership, scribal and artistic activity, and patronage from Late Antiquity through the fourteenth century. In addition to examining specific manuscripts (in facsimile, or digitally), we will consider ancillary questions to do with women¿s authorship, education and literacy, reading patterns, devotional practices, and visual traditions and representation.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 207C:
Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Medieval Art (ARTHIST 407C)
This course explores the phenomenal aspects of the medieval image and space such as glitter, shadow, smoke, reverberation and how these presence effects were conceptualized in medieval culture as animation. Focus is on a select group of monuments as well as engagement with medieval objects at the Cantor Art Museum and the facsimiles of medieval manuscripts kept at the Art Library and Special Collections. Among the monuments we will study are the Alhambra in Spain, the Apocalypse MSS, the Cantigas of Alfonso X, the Byzantine Joshua Roll, the Homiles of the Monk Kokkinobaphos, the Ashburnhamensis Pentateuch, and the Rossano Gospels.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 208:
Hagia Sophia (ARTHIST 408, CLASSICS 173, CLASSICS 273)
By employing a methodology based in psychoacoustics, semiotics, and phenomenology, this course explores the relationship among sound, water, marble, meaning, and religious experience in the sixth-century church of HagianSophia built by emperor Justinian in Constantinople. We will read medieval sources describing the interior and ritual, make short movies exploring the shimmer of marble in buildings on campus, and study the acoustics of domed buildings through computer auralization done at Stanford's CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics)
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 208B:
The Art of Medieval Spain: Muslims, Christians, Jews
The seminar and its study trip explore the hybrid character of the art of Medieval Spain between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries. Rather than strictly chronological, our exploration of the artistic production of Muslims, Jews, and Christians is structured around major topics such as imperial power, pilgrimage, word and image. The readings juxtapose historical studies of specifically Spanish sites and objects with theoretical approaches tied to the broader themes.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 208C:
Architecture, Acoustics and Ritual in Byzantium (ARTHIST 408C, CLASSICS 175, MUSIC 208C, MUSIC 408C, REES 208C, REES 408C, RELIGST 208C, RELIGST 308C)
Onassis Seminar "Icons of Sound: Architecture, Acoustics and Ritual in Byzantium". This year-long seminar explores the creation and operations of sacred space in Byzantium by focusing on the intersection of architecture, acoustics, music, and ritual. Through the support of the Onassis Foundation (USA), nine leading scholars in the field share their research and conduct the discussion of their pre-circulated papers. The goal is to develop a new interpretive framework for the study of religious experience and assemble the research tools needed for work in this interdisciplinary field.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 1-3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 9 units total)
ARTHIST 209:
Art and Religious Experience in Byzantium and Islam (ARTHIST 309, CLASSICS 174)
This course presents a comparative study of Christian and Islamic paradigms (sixth to the thirteenth centuries) in the construction of religious experience through the material fabric of the building, the interior decor, objects, and rituals. We will read medieval ekphrastic texts and poetry, which stirred the viewer/participant to experience the building/object as animate. Among the sites we will study are: Hagia Sophia, the Ka'ba, the Dome of teh Rock, the Mosque at Damascus and at Cordoba. We will read Byzantine and Arabic writers such as Paul the Silentiary, Patriarch Germanos, Maximus Confessor, Shahrawardi, and Ibn Arabi.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 209C:
Iconoclasm (ARTHIST 409, CLASSICS 158, CLASSICS 258, REES 409)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 210:
Giotto (ARTHIST 410B)
Often hailed as ¿the father of western painting,¿ Giotto was seen as a revolutionary figure even in his own day. We will begin with Giotto¿s critical reception, his artistic predecessors and contemporaries, and his work for patrons ranging from the Franciscan order to the king of Naples. We will most closely examine Giotto¿s masterpiece, the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua, and consider topics including Giotto¿s figural realism, the layered readings of the program, its use of visual rhetoric, and issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 212:
Renaissance Florence, 1440-1540
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 213:
Renaissance Print Culture: Art in the Cantor Arts Center
The seminar takes place in the Cantor Arts Center and provides a unique opportunity to study original works of art from the museum's storage. Beginning in the fifteenth century new techniques of reproduction changed the pictorial culture of Europe. Some engravings called attention to the engraver's virtuosity, and the private nature of the medium was explored for erotic imagery. By the sixteenth century printed images were used for political and religious propaganda during the societal upheavals.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ARTHIST 214:
From the Pantheon to the Capitol: Architecture, Cosmology, Mathematics and Illusion (SIW 214)
This course traces the history of the dome over two millenia, from temples to the gods to Temples of the State, and from cosmic archetype to architectural fetish. The narrative interweaves the themes of the dome as image of the Cosmos, religious icon, national landmark, and political monument. It examines the dome not only as a venue for structural innovation, but also metaphysical geometry and transcendent illusionism.nIndividual case studies will familiarise you with major architects from Hadrian to Richard Rogers and historical milestones from the Dome of the Rock to the Capitol in Washington DC. May be repeat for credit.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
for credit
ARTHIST 217B:
The Classical Theory of Architecture from Antiquity to the French Revolution (ARTHIST 417B)
This seminar focuses on themes and theories in architectural design from antiquity until the early twentieth century. Modern and contemporary architecture has often claimed its modernity through the incorporation of theory, but this seminar examines selections from key texts that have also moulded architectural and urbanistic thought in the ancient, medieval, and early modern eras in combination with analytical comparisons of built architecture.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 225:
Cezanne
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 229D:
Topophilia: Place in Japanese Visual Culture through 19th Century (JAPANGEN 229)
Attachments to "place" and "home" are hard-wired into the biology of humans and animals alike, although such attachments vary according to specific times, cultures, and states of mind. Can we speak of a "Japanese sense of place" and if so, what is distinctive about it? Seminar explores religious visions and ritual fields; narratives of itinerancy; cityscapes; topographic taxonomies. Knowledge of Japanese culture is beneficial but not mandatory.
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 243C:
The Art of Travel
This undergraduate seminar explores a variety of objects upon which we see the marks of makers smitten and/or stymied by new technologies of transportation ¿ objects about the steamship, the railroad, the automobile, the airplane, the space shuttle, the internet. Among many types of material culture, the course considers scrimshaw, album quilts, maps, paintings, photographs, city plans, hood ornaments, and advertisements from the early Republic to the present. How do objects mark geographic movement, and the social relationships forged in the process? What do these marks tell us about how we, as contemporary viewers, experience the world?
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 244:
The Visual Culture of the American Home Front, 1941-1945 (AMSTUD 244)
How does home front of WWII look now? What sort of meanings appear with the vantage of more than sixty years' distance? Examining Hollywood films from those years -films made during the war but mostly not directly about the war - the seminar focuses on developing students' abilities to write emotion-based criticism and history. Weekly short papers, each one in response to a film screening, are required. Among the films screened: Shadow of a Doubt, Gaslight, I Walked with a Zombie, The Best Years of Our Lives.
Last offered: Winter 2013
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 245:
Art, Business & the Law
This course examines the intersection of art, business, and the law from a number of different angles, focusing on issues that impact our understanding of works of art and their circulation in the modern and contemporary periods. Topics range from individual case studies (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci; Richard Serra) to the consolidation of the art market, and include cultural heritage issues, problems of censorship, and conceptions of authorship and intellectual property.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 246A:
California Dreaming: West Coast Art and Visual Culture, 1848 - present
This seminar examines art, photography, and other forms of cultural production (e.g. film, advertisements, postcards) in and about California from the middle of the 19th century to the present. It approaches California as a contested political, historical and geographical site and as a series of images and alternative "lifestyles." How have artists pictured the state's diverse landscapes, both natural and commercial, as well as its complex history of labor, immigration, ethnicity, tourism, and social division?
Last offered: Winter 2013
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 246B:
Pop Art (AMSTUD 246B)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 248B:
Architecture, Urbanism, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Rome
This seminar investigates architecture in Rome, from Michelangelo to Piranesi. It examines the origins of modern urbanism; the piazza as ceremonial theater; the water network and fountain displays; palace design inside and out; religious institutions, from convents to confraternities; church design inside and out; the devotional and illusionistic space of the family chapel; festival architecture; light symbolism and geometry; the use of new materials and technologies; the relationship of early modern architecture to painting and sculpture; and the question of a unity of the arts.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 252:
Transatlantic American Art
This is an American art history course from a transatlantic perspective, considering the ties between the United States and England from the colonial era to World War I, a period in which both nations underwent a similar trajectory of industrialization, urbanization, democratization, and expansionism/imperialism. We will explore the ways in which American attitudes towards England oscillated between anxious emulation and proud repudiation, as the ideas of ¿British culture¿ and ¿Englishness¿ became catalysts for national self-definition and touchstones for gendered and racialized metaphors of national vigor or decline. We will also examine how American artists received aesthetic conventions and artistic genres from Britain, and how the geography of the American landscape and questions of national character and taste challenged these traditions.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 255:
Hidden Histories: Art and Misrepresentation
What happens when art functions as a decoy, taking us away from stories that it refuses to tell? We will explore three modern artists who grapple, in unpredictable ways, with the historical events that have shaped them: Philip Guston and the Holocaust; Martin Puryear and the Civil Rights movement; and South African artist William Kentridge and apartheid. When appropriate, we will look at objects at the Cantor Art Center (Stanford) as well as museums in the Bay Area. The course will provide the foundation for an exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center and the Yale University Art Gallery in 2016.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 262:
Office of Metropolitan Architecture: Workshop of the New (CEE 132Q)
This seminar investigates all aspects of the work of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and its leader Rem Koolhaas. Topics for class research and inquiry include but are not be limited to: Koolhaas's early work at the Architectural Association and the founding of OMA, the publications of OMA and their style of presentation and theoretical foundations, the importance of AMO, and the architects who have left OMA and founded their own practices and how these differ from OMA. Each student completes an in-depth research paper and an in-class presentation.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 263B:
The View through the Windshield: Cars and the American Landscape
Both cars and the landscape are fundamental to American identity. This seminar will consider the relationship between them: how they have shaped each other, how one mediates the experience of the other, and how American artists such as Ansel Adams, Edward Hopper, and Ed Ruscha have represented both. We will discuss the relationship between nature and technology; the aesthetics of highways and parkways; the phenomenology of driving and road trips; maps and way finding; and the future of cars, mapping, and the landscape.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 264A:
Picturing the Cosmos
This seminar explores the place of images in how we understand and imagine the universe. The course draws on art, science, and popular culture, and pays particular attention to the ways they inform each other. Examples include: star maps, science fiction films, appropriated astronomical images, and telescopic views of stars, planets, and nebulae. Using these representations as well as accompanying readings we will discuss the importance of aesthetics for conceptions of the cosmos; the influence of technology on representations; strategies for representing concepts that exceed the limits of human vision; and the ways that views of the universe reflect and shape their cultural context. Open to undergraduates and graduates.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 264B:
Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination (AMSTUD 143X, FILMSTUD 264B)
Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 273:
Visual Culture of the Arctic (FILMSTUD 273)
In what ways does contemporary art address the slowly unfolding catastrophes of melting ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic due to climate change? How might contemporary art and experimental cinema help us come to grips with the emotional disturbance of living amidst the deep-seated changes that are happening in our environment? These are the key questions this course attempts to answer.nThe first part of the class attempts to outline the complex history of Arctic visual and cultural representations through an interdisciplinary lens. The second part focuses on the more recent artistic and cinematic responses to climate change in the arctic. For their final projects, students will be able to combine analytical writing with creative projects that could take the form of photography, installation art, web-based art, fiction, video or poetry.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 278:
Curating Africa: Anatomy of an Exhibition
Gain hands-on curatorial experience redesigning the African galleries at the Cantor Arts Center. Explore and debate strategies for presenting diverse art forms, including a mummy from Ancient Egypt, early twentieth-century masks, and contemporary photography. Conduct research, prepare wall texts and labels, and participate in designing a new exhibition space in collaboration with fellow students, faculty, and community members.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 284B:
Museum Cultures: Material Representation in the Past and Present (AMSTUD 134, ARCHLGY 134, ARCHLGY 234, CSRE 134, EDUC 214, NATIVEAM 134)
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.n3 credits (no final project) or 5 credits (final project). May be repeat for credit
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 15 units total)
ARTHIST 287:
Pictures of the Floating World: Images from Japanese Popular Culture (ARTHIST 487X, JAPANLIT 287)
Printed objects produced during the Edo period (1600-1868), including the Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) and lesser-studied genres such as printed books (ehon) and popular broadsheets (kawaraban). How a society constructs itself through images. The borders of the acceptable and censorship; theatricality, spectacle, and slippage; the construction of play, set in conflict against the dominant neo-Confucian ideology of fixed social roles.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 287A:
The Japanese Tea Ceremony: The History, Aesthetics, and Politics Behind a National Pastime (JAPANGEN 287A)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 288B:
The Enduring Passion for Ink: Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting
Contemporary Chinese ink painters are exploring new ground. They push the limits of the medium, creating installations and performances, mixing ink with other media, and advancing age-tested brushstrokes and compositions. The recent flurry of exhibitions attests to contemporary ink painting¿s increasing importance. nnThis seminar introduces major figures (Xu Bing, Liu Dan, Zheng Chongbin, Li Huasheng, etc.) and movements in contemporary Chinese ink art. Emphasis is placed on improving writing abilities and on in-class reports and discussion. Topics for discussion include readings, individual works of art, and broad issues in contemporary art. Prerequisite: courses in Art History and/or Studio Art OR permission of instructor. open to undergraduates and graduates.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 289A:
Making the Masterpiece in Song Dynasty China (ARTHIST 489A)
Studies of canon formation involving Song Dynasty (10-13th c.) Chinese works of painting, calligraphy, ceramics, and architecture. The roles of early art writing and criticism; collecting histories; art historical theory; / copying, imitation, and reproductive practices; period and regional taste; and modern museological and art historical discourses in identifying and constructing a canon of Song masterworks.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 294:
Writing and the Visual (WIM): Pre-Modern Perceptions of Materiality
The course examines how various forms of writing and description--from wall labels to scholarly texts' shape the history and perception of visual objects. Through concrete examples, we will analyze the limits of language in describing visual images and consider how those limits might be expanded or redrawn. Required course for Art History majors. WIM Course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ARTHIST 295:
Visual Arts Internship
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.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 15 units total)
ARTHIST 296:
Junior Seminar: Methods & Historiography of Art History
Historiography and methodology. Through a series of case studies, this course introduces a range of influential critical perspectives in art history as a discipline and a practice. The goal is to stimulate thinking about what it means to explore the history of art today, to expose and examine our assumptions, expectations and predilections as we undertake to learn and write about works of art, their meanings and their status in the world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 297:
Honors Thesis Writing
May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 15 units total)
ARTHIST 298:
Individual Work: Art History
For approved independent research with individual faculty members. Letter grades only. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-15
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI);
de Wit, W. (PI)
ARTHIST 305:
Art & Architecture in the Medieval Mediterranean (ARTHIST 105, CLASSICS 172)
Chronological survey of Byzantine, Islamic, and Western Medieval art and architecture from the early Christian period to the Gothic age. Broad art-historical developments and more detailed examinations of individual monuments and works of art. Topics include devotional art, court and monastic culture, relics and the cult of saints, pilgrimage and crusades, and the rise of cities and cathedrals.
Last offered: Autumn 2012
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 306:
Byzantine Art and Architecture, 300-1453 C.E. (ARTHIST 106, CLASSICS 171)
(Formerly CLASSART 106/206.) This course explores the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Thessaloniki, and Palermo, 4th-15th centuries. Applying an innovative approach, we will probe questions of phenomenology and aesthetics, focusing our discussion on the performance and appearance of spaces and objects in the changing diurnal light, in the glitter of mosaics and in the mirror reflection and translucency of marble.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 306B:
What Do Medieval Images Want? Theories of the Image in Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West (ARTHIST 106B)
What is an image? The medieval response was tied to religious identity. At the core of the debate was whether the image was just a mimetic representation or a living entity: matter imbued with divine spirit. Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West each developed their own positions and used it as a platform for political legitimacy. We will study the development of the medieval image theories by focusing on specific monuments and objects and by reading both primary sources in translation and current scholarly interpretations.
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 308:
Virginity and Power: Mary in the Middle Ages (ARTHIST 108)
The most influential female figure in Christianity whose state cult was connected with the idea of empire. The production and control of images and relics of the Virgin and the development of urban processions and court ceremonies though which political power was legitimized in papal Rome, Byzantium, Carolingian and Ottonian Germany, Tuscany, Gothic France, and Russia.
Last offered: Spring 2006
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 309:
The Book in the Medieval World (ARTHIST 109)
Studying the design and function of books in medieval society from the 7th to the 15th century, and the ways in which manuscripts are designed to meet (and shape) the cultural and intellectual demands of their readers. Major themes are the relationships between text and image, and between manuscripts and other media; the audience and production context of manuscripts; and changing ideas about pictorial space, figural style, page design, and progression through the book. Final project may be either a research paper or an original artist's book.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 309:
Art and Religious Experience in Byzantium and Islam (ARTHIST 209, CLASSICS 174)
This course presents a comparative study of Christian and Islamic paradigms (sixth to the thirteenth centuries) in the construction of religious experience through the material fabric of the building, the interior decor, objects, and rituals. We will read medieval ekphrastic texts and poetry, which stirred the viewer/participant to experience the building/object as animate. Among the sites we will study are: Hagia Sophia, the Ka'ba, the Dome of teh Rock, the Mosque at Damascus and at Cordoba. We will read Byzantine and Arabic writers such as Paul the Silentiary, Patriarch Germanos, Maximus Confessor, Shahrawardi, and Ibn Arabi.
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 309D:
Means, Media and Mode: An Introduction to Western Medieval Art (ARTHIST 109D)
The course is an introduction to western medieval art approached primarily through distinctions of materials and media. We work with a combination of medieval and later sources, often engaging with the modern objects and spaces available for study on campus in order to create new perspectives on the historical material. Medieval case studies are chosen that raise particularly complex issues of materiality, mixed-media form, and cross-media citation.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 311:
Introduction to Italian Renaissance, 1420-1580 (ARTHIST 111)
New techniques of pictorial illusionism and the influence of the humanist revival of antiquity in the reformulation of the pictorial arts in 15th-century Italy. How different Italian regions developed characteristic artistic cultures through mutual interaction and competition.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 314:
Mystical Naturalism: Van Eyck, Dürer, and the Northern Renaissance (ARTHIST 114)
A survey of the major innovations in Northern European painting ca. 1400-1600, in light of the social status of the artist between city and court. In the early fifteenth century painters began to render an idealized world down to its smallest details in ways that engaged new devotional practices. Later Hieronymus Bosch would identify the painter's imagination with the bizarre and grotesque. In response to Renaissance humanism, some painters introduced classical mythology and allegorical subjects in their works, and many traveled south to absorb Italianate pictorial styles. We will be visiting art museums in San Francisco and Stanford. May be repeat for credit.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 4
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 8 units total)
ARTHIST 317:
Picturing the Papacy, 1300-1850 (ARTHIST 117)
Popes deployed art and architecture to glorify their dual spiritual and temporal authority, being both Christ's vicars on earth and rulers of state. After the return of the papacy from Avignon, Rome underwent numerous campaigns of renovation that staged a continuity between the pontiffs and the ancient Roman emperors. Patronage of art and architecture became important tools in the fight against Protestantism. Artists include Botticelli, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Bernini.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 8 units total)
ARTHIST 318:
Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (ARTHIST 118)
The course addresses the ways in which Venetian painters of the sixteenth century redefined paradigms of color, design, and invention. Themes to be examined include civic piety, new kinds of mythological painting, the intersection between naturalism and eroticism, and the relationship between art and rituals of church and statecraft.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 320:
Living in a Material World: Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Painting (ARTHIST 120)
Painting and graphic arts by artists in Flanders and Holland from 1600 to 1680, a period of political and religious strife. Historical context; their relationship to developments in the rest of Europe and contributions to the problem of representation. Preferences for particular genres such as portraits, landscapes, and scenes of everyday life; the general problem of realism as manifested in the works studied.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 321:
18th-Century Art in Europe, ca 1660-1780 (ARTHIST 121)
Major developments in painting across Europe including the High Baroque illusionism of Bernini, the founding of the French Academy, and the revival of antiquity during the 1760s, with parallel developments in Venice, Naples, Madrid, Bavaria, and London. Shifts in themes and styles amidst the emergence of new viewing publics. Artists: the Tiepolos, Giordano, Batoni, and Mengs; Ricci, Pellegrini, and Thornhill; Watteau and Boucher; Chardin and Longhi; Reynolds and West; Hogarth and Greuze; Vien, Fragonard, and the first works by David. Additional discussion for graduate students.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 322:
The Age of Revolution: Painting in Europe 1780-1830 (ARTHIST 122)
Survey of European painting bracketed by the French Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic conquest. Against this background of social upheavel, the visual arts were profoundly affected by shifts in patronage, public, and ideas about the social utility of image making. Lectures and readings align ruptures in the tradition of representation with the unfolding historical situation, and trace the first manifestations of a "romantic" alternative to the classicism that was the cultural legacy of pre-Revolutionary Europe.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 324:
The Age of Naturalism, Painting in Europe1830-1874 (ARTHIST 124)
Survey of European painting from the heyday of Romanticism to the first Impressionist exhibition. Lectures and readings focus on the tensions between traditional forms and ambitions of history painting and the challenge of "modern" subjects drawn from contemporary life. Attention to the impact of painting in the open-air, and the effect of new imaging technologies- notably lithography and photography - to provide "popular" alternatives to the hand-wrought character and elitist appeal of "high art" cultural forms.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 326:
Post-Naturalist Painting (ARTHIST 126)
How conceptual models from language, literature, new technologies, and scientific theory affected picture making following the collapse of the radical naturalism of the 1860s and 1870s. Bracketed in France by the first Impressionist exhibition (1874) and the first public acclamation of major canvases by Matisse and Picasso (1905), the related developments in England, Germany, Belgium, and Austria. Additional weekly discussion for graduate students. Recommended: some prior experience with 19th-century art.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 332:
American Art and Culture, 1528-1910 (AMSTUD 132, ARTHIST 132)
The visual arts and literature of the U.S. from the beginnings of European exploration to the Civil War. Focus is on questions of power and its relation to culture from early Spanish exploration to the rise of the middle classes. Cabeza de Vaca, Benjamin Franklin, John Singleton Copley, Phillis Wheatley, Charles Willson Peale, Emerson, Hudson River School, American Genre painters, Melville, Hawthorne and others.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 342A:
Home Alone: Houses that Artists and Thinkers Design for Themselves (ARTHIST 142A)
This course investigates houses, hideaways, and studios that artists and thinkers have designed for themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from subconscious images of the self to knowing stages for the contemplative life. Case studies range from antiquity to the present, from the studio-house of Peter Paul Rubens to that of Kurt Schwitters; from the house-museum of Sir John Soane to the Vittoriale of Gabriele D'Annunzio; from the philosophical dwelling of the Emperor Hadrian to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 343A:
American Architecture (AMSTUD 143A, ARTHIST 143A, CEE 32R)
A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How these ideas are being transformed in today's globalized world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 345:
Culture Wars: Art and Social Conflict in the USA, 1890-1950 (AMSTUD 145M, ARTHIST 145, FEMGEN 145)
This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 347:
MODERNISM AND MODERNITY (ARTHIST 147)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 354:
The American Civil War: A Visual History (AMSTUD 154X, ARTHIST 154)
A painting of men charging across a field, a photograph of dead bodies in a ditch, a fragment of metal, a sliver of bone, and a brass button: how do we make sense of the visual record of the American Civil War (1861-65)? From the Capitol Dome to a skeleton dug up in a highway project a hundred years after the last battle, the course will consider the strange and scattered remnants of a famous era. Drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, the paintings of Winslow Homer, the photographs of Alexander Gardner, and the oratory of Abraham Lincoln, the course will examine what cannot be portrayed: the trauma of war.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 356:
American and European Art, 1945-1968 (ARTHIST 156)
Examines the pivotal figures, movements, themes and practices of art in the United States and Europe, from the conclusion of World War 2 to the end of the 1960s. Emphasis is on the changed nature of the avant-garde after the catastrophic events of midcentury. Topics include: modern art, ideology and the Cold War; the rise of consumer society and the "Society of the Spectacle"; concepts of medium specificity; the impact of new media and technologies on postwar art making; the role of the artist as worker and activist. Movements include: Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Pop, minimalism, process, performance conceptual art. An introductory art history course is recommended.
Last offered: Winter 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 357A:
Histories of Photography (ARTHIST 157A)
This course investigates multiple histories of photography. It begins in early nineteenth-century Europe with the origins of the medium and ends in the United States on September 11, 2001, a day that demonstrated the limits of photographic seeing. Rather than stabilizing any single trajectory of technological iterations, the course is more interested in considering the ¿work¿ performed by photography. Through historical case studies, it considers how `to photograph¿ is to order and to construct the world; to incite action and to persuade; to describe and to document; to record and to censor; to wound; to heal.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 359:
American Photographs, 1839-1971: A Cultural History (AMSTUD 159X, ARTHIST 159)
This course concentrates on many important American photographers, from the era of daguerreotypes to near the end of the pre-digital era. We study photographs of the Civil War, western exploration, artistic subjects, urban and rural poverty, skyscrapers, crime, fashion, national parks, and social protest, among other topics. Among the photographers we study: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Emphasis on developing students' abilities to discuss and write about photography; to see it.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 362:
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Art (ARTHIST 162)
This course focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in American art and criticism from 1972 to the present. How have the terms of racial identity and sexual difference shaped the production and reception of contemporary art across the last four decades? What status has the body--and more specifically, the body of the artist--been accorded within recent work on identity and difference? Throughout the course of the semester, we will be particularly attentive to issues of racial and sexual stereotype. What critical or subversive uses have contemporary artists found for pictorial stereotype? How have stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality been recycled in order to be mocked or deconstructed?
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 364A:
Technology and the Visual Imagination (ARTHIST 164A, FILMSTUD 164A, FILMSTUD 364A)
An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world. The course examines technologies from the Renaissance through the present day, from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors, that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities as well as shaped how we imagine the world. We also consider how these technologies influenced and inspired the work of artists. Special attention is paid to how different technologies such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and computer screens translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with conceptions of time and space.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 365A:
Fashion Shows: From Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga (ARTHIST 165A, FILMSTUD 165A, FILMSTUD 365A)
The complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the 20th century; the place of prints, photography, and the Internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 367:
Beyond the Fuzzy-Techie Divide: Art, Science, Technology (ARTHIST 167, FILMSTUD 167B, FILMSTUD 367B)
Although art and science are often characterized as "two cultures" with limited common interests or language, they share an endeavor: gaining insight into our world. They even rely on common tools to make discoveries and visually represent their conclusions. To clarify and interrogate points of similarity and difference, each week¿s theme (time, earth, cosmos, body) explores the efforts of artists and scientists to understand and represent it and the role of technology in these efforts. Focus on contemporary examples.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 373:
Issues in Contemporary Art (ARTHIST 173)
Major figures, themes, and movements of contemporary art from the 80s to the present. Readings on the neo-avant garde; postmodernism; art and identity politics; new media and technology; globalization and participatory aesthetics. Prerequisite: ARTHIST 155, or equivalent with consent of instructor.
Last offered: Spring 2009
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 376:
Feminism and Contemporary Art (ARTHIST 176)
(Same as ARTHIST 176) The impact of second wave feminism on art making and art historical practice in the 70s, and its reiteration and transformation in contemporary feminist work. Topics: sexism and art history, feminist studio programs in the 70s, essentialism and self-representation, themes of domesticity, the body in feminist art making, bad girls, the exclusion of women of color and lesbians from the art historical mainstream, notions of performativity.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 378:
Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (AMSTUD 178, ARTHIST 178)
The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.
Last offered: Spring 2004
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 382B:
Cultures in Competition: Arts of Song-Era China (ARTHIST 182B)
The Song dynasty (mid-10th to late 13th c.) was a period of extraordinary diversity and technical accomplishment in Chinese painting, ceramics, calligraphy, architecture and sculpture. Artistic developments emerged within a context of economic dynamism, urban growth, and competition in dynastic, political, cultural and social arenas ¿ as between Chinese and formerly nomadic neighboring regimes, or between reformers and conservatives. This course will consider major themes and topics in Song art history, including innovations in architectural and ceramic technologies; developments in landscape painting and theory; the rise of educated artists; official arts and ideologies of Song, Liao and Jin court regimes; new roles for women as patrons and cultural participants; and Chan and popular Buddhist imagery.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 384:
Aristocrats, Warriors, Sex Workers, and Barbarians: Lived Life in Early Modern Japanese Painting (ARTHIST 184, JAPANGEN 184, JAPANGEN 384)
Changes marking the transition from medieval to early modern Japanese society that generated a revolution in visual culture, as exemplified in subjects deemed fit for representation; how commoners joined elites in pictorializing their world, catalyzed by interactions with the Dutch.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 386:
Theme and Style in Japanese Art (ARTHIST 186, JAPANGEN 186, JAPANGEN 286)
A mixture of lecture and discussion, this course presents a chronological introduction to some of the defining monuments in the history of Japanese visual culture from prehistory to the mid-19th century. This introductory class presumes no prior knowledge of art history or of Japan. We will emphasize certain overarching themes like religious life; notions of decorum appropriate to various classes (court, warrior, and commoner); the relationship between and among the arts, such as the visual and the verbal, or the symphonic assemblage arts as seen in the tea ceremony; pervasive cultural tropes like nostalgia, seasonality, or the sense of place; and broader issues such as censorship, patronage, gender issues, and the encounters between Japanese and foreign cultures.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 387:
Arts of War and Peace: Late Medieval and Early Modern Japan, 1500-1868 (ARTHIST 187, JAPANGEN 185)
Narratives of conflict, pacification, orthodoxy, nostalgia, and novelty through visual culture during the change of episteme from late medieval to early modern, 16th through early 19th centuries. The rhetorical messages of castles, teahouses, gardens, ceramics, paintings, and prints; the influence of Dutch and Chinese visuality; transformation in the roles of art and artist; tensions between the old and the new leading to the modernization of Japan.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 388A:
The History of Modern and Contemporary Japanese and Chinese Architecture and Urbanism (ARTHIST 188A)
The recent rapid urbanization and architectural transformation of Asia; focus is on the architecture of Japan and China since the mid-19th century. History of forms, theories, and styles that serve as the foundation for today's buildings and cityscapes. How Eastern and Western ideas of modernism have merged or diverged and how these forces continue to shape the future of Japanese and Chinese architecture and urban form.
Last offered: Spring 2011
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 389C:
Global Currents: Early Modern Art Enterprises, Economies, and Imaginaries (ARTHIST 189C)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 400M:
The Artist in Ancient Greek Society (ARTHIST 200M)
An exploration of the low status of artists in a culture that valued their work but not the men themselves. Potters were especially scorned but even sculptors of gold and ivory statues were seen as "mechanics" (Herodotus), with soft bodies and soft minds (Xenophon), "indifferent to higher things" (Plutarch). Topics include case studies of individual artists, their importance to the polis, their workshops, wages and occupational hazards and the impact of social isolation on the quality of their work.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 405:
Art, Ekphrasis, and Music in Byzantium and Islam (CLASSICS 376)
Focus is on the interrelation of art, architecture, verbal description, poetry, and music, including the singing of psalms and recitation of the Qur'an. How ekphrasis, the style of writing vividly intended to transform the listeners into spectators, structures the perception of and response to artistic production be it an art object, building, or a musical performance. The role of ekphrasis in animating the inanimate and the importance of breath and spirit, which become manifest in visual, acoustic, olfactory, and gustatory terms. Religious and courtly settings: Hagia Sophia, the Great Palace of Constantinople, the Dome of the Rock, the palaces of Baghdad and Samarra, the mosque at Cordoba, Medinat al-Zahra and the Alhambra. Greek and Arabic writers on ekphrasis in translation, juxtaposing the medieval material to the ancient theories of ekphrasis and modern scholarship.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 405A:
Graduate Pedagogy Course
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 2
ARTHIST 407:
The Resurrected Body: Animacy in Medieval Art
This course explores the relationship of spirit and matter in medieval art and architecture, more specifically how the changing appearance of objects and spaces evokes the presence of the metaphysical as glitter, reverberation, and shadow. We will engage objects and monuments across the Mediterranean, studying the way they were staged in order to produce the perception of liveliness. The phenomenology of liveliness will be tied to the development of the theology of resurrection of the body.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 407C:
Phenomenology and Aesthetics in Medieval Art (ARTHIST 207C)
This course explores the phenomenal aspects of the medieval image and space such as glitter, shadow, smoke, reverberation and how these presence effects were conceptualized in medieval culture as animation. Focus is on a select group of monuments as well as engagement with medieval objects at the Cantor Art Museum and the facsimiles of medieval manuscripts kept at the Art Library and Special Collections. Among the monuments we will study are the Alhambra in Spain, the Apocalypse MSS, the Cantigas of Alfonso X, the Byzantine Joshua Roll, the Homiles of the Monk Kokkinobaphos, the Ashburnhamensis Pentateuch, and the Rossano Gospels.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 408:
Hagia Sophia (ARTHIST 208, CLASSICS 173, CLASSICS 273)
By employing a methodology based in psychoacoustics, semiotics, and phenomenology, this course explores the relationship among sound, water, marble, meaning, and religious experience in the sixth-century church of HagianSophia built by emperor Justinian in Constantinople. We will read medieval sources describing the interior and ritual, make short movies exploring the shimmer of marble in buildings on campus, and study the acoustics of domed buildings through computer auralization done at Stanford's CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics)
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 408C:
Architecture, Acoustics and Ritual in Byzantium (ARTHIST 208C, CLASSICS 175, MUSIC 208C, MUSIC 408C, REES 208C, REES 408C, RELIGST 208C, RELIGST 308C)
Onassis Seminar "Icons of Sound: Architecture, Acoustics and Ritual in Byzantium". This year-long seminar explores the creation and operations of sacred space in Byzantium by focusing on the intersection of architecture, acoustics, music, and ritual. Through the support of the Onassis Foundation (USA), nine leading scholars in the field share their research and conduct the discussion of their pre-circulated papers. The goal is to develop a new interpretive framework for the study of religious experience and assemble the research tools needed for work in this interdisciplinary field.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 1-3
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 9 units total)
ARTHIST 409:
Iconoclasm (ARTHIST 209C, CLASSICS 158, CLASSICS 258, REES 409)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 410B:
Giotto (ARTHIST 210)
Often hailed as ¿the father of western painting,¿ Giotto was seen as a revolutionary figure even in his own day. We will begin with Giotto¿s critical reception, his artistic predecessors and contemporaries, and his work for patrons ranging from the Franciscan order to the king of Naples. We will most closely examine Giotto¿s masterpiece, the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua, and consider topics including Giotto¿s figural realism, the layered readings of the program, its use of visual rhetoric, and issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 411:
Animation, Performance, Presence in Medieval Art (CLASSICS 377)
(Formerly CLASSART 311.) This course will explore concepts of animacy, performance, and presence in the art of Byzantium, focusing on the concept of image understood as the living bodies of the saints, the space of Hagia Sophia and its Eucharist ritual, the polymorphism of the mixed-media icon, and the interaction with these objects in prayer and recitation of epigrams.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ARTHIST 413:
Michelangelo
Michelangelo's long career in light of recent scholarship. Topics include the status of the cult image, the paragon between poetry and the pictorial arts, painting and questions of literary genre, and Counter Reformation reactions to his art.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 415:
Baroque: 1900-2000
The seminar, which is largely methodological and historiographic, problematizes issues of periodization. The course examines different approaches to the question of "what is baroque," from Alois Riegl and Erwin Panofsky to Michel Foucault, Svetlana Alpers and Giovanni Careri.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 416:
Bernini and Baroque Rome
This seminar examines the career of Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), sculptor, architect, painter, stage designer and playwright, the premier artist of the popes. It will examine his cultural, political and religious milieu and lay particular emphasis on the theoretical relations between the arts that his oeuvre is seen to embody. In the process it will also review the genre of artistic biography, the historiography of the baroque and the myths of dynamism, theatricality, eroticism (and others) always associated with the period, and Bernini's work in particular. Limited to PhD students in Art History and Film Studies, and advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 417B:
The Classical Theory of Architecture from Antiquity to the French Revolution (ARTHIST 217B)
This seminar focuses on themes and theories in architectural design from antiquity until the early twentieth century. Modern and contemporary architecture has often claimed its modernity through the incorporation of theory, but this seminar examines selections from key texts that have also moulded architectural and urbanistic thought in the ancient, medieval, and early modern eras in combination with analytical comparisons of built architecture.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 422:
Reception and Literacy in Roman Art (CLASSICS 373)
(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.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 423:
The Material Imagination
This seminar deals with the materials that artists have chosen in art and construction from antiquity to the early modern era. The particular focus is upon pre-modern perceptions of the inherent properties of materials, from amber and ivory to marble and granite, as well as the diverse ways in which societies have associated particular substances with social and cultural values. Particular emphasis is laid upon the architectural use of materials.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 426:
NARRATIVE THEORY & VISUAL FORM
The theoretical terrain of narrative studies in literary criticism and historiography. The critical implications of narrative analysis for the writing of history in general. Readings integrated with students' current research projects.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 429:
Vienna and Hamburg : Readings in the Science of Art History
The place of art history in a university curriculum was established in Europe only during the course of the nineteenth century, and only after demonstrating that its methods are rigorous and that its goals have little to do with subjective connoisseurship or personal taste. The ambition was to develop a properly ¿scientific¿ [wissenschaftlich] practice able to claim legitimacy among the traditional disciplines of university study and research. Two German-speaking centers were critical to this development : the Institute for Austrian Historical Research in Vienna and the Warburg Library for the Science of Culture at the University of Hamburg. The best-known author of the first is Alois Riegl, while the second counts Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Cassirer among its members. Recent books on both centers, and the availability of texts in English by others of each group now make it possible to revisit their debates about ¿scientific¿ art history that shaped the field as we know it today. This seminar will read closely a selection of these texts with the aim of understanding more fully our own intellectual history and its impact upon discussions concerning the place of our discipline within the humanities today.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 432:
Rethinking American Art
A re-examination of American art of the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on works in the collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco. The class will meet weekly at the de Young, where we will be joined by Professor Margaretta Lovell and students from the University of California, Berkeley. Each student will pursue an in-depth study of a single work in the Museum's superb American collections, using documents of social and cultural history. We will pay particular attention to recent scholarship, questions of genre (landscape, portrait, still life and images of everyday life), and the "biography of objects" (the way works of art shift in context and interpretation over time).nGraduate seminar open to advanced undergraduates with the instructor¿s approval.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 440A:
The Art Market
This seminar is designed to examine aspects of the art market in the current moment and since the mid 19th century. Participants will have an opportunity to engage with problems and perspectives that, until recently, have generally been overlooked or marginalized in narratives of the history of art. Each week, students will write a response to the readings to be shared in advance of the class meeting, and each week, discussion will be initiated by a different student. In individual research projects culminating in a seminar paper, students will be encouraged to focus on how the art market may have impacted the production, reception, and/or circulation of a work or works by a particular artist.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 442:
Looking at Violence
Violence in the media and its effects upon viewers, especially thennyoung, is an issue of national concern that has produced legislationnnfor the ratings of movies, television shows, and computer/video games. Parental control software makes it possible to program cable boxes andnncomputers to censor what broadcasts or websites are accessible tonnchildren. These are political and technical fixes to a perceivednnsocial problem. They do not ask why one is drawn to watch violence innnthe first place, nor why certain kinds of violent imagery is compelling. Debates about how such measures should be implemented usually proceed from the given that images of violence are subjectspecific, with little or no consideration of their formal qualities or visual protocols. This seminar assumes that the tools and categories of visual analysis specific to the History of Art might enrich our thinking about the attraction and impact of violence across media andnnacross time. The seminar proposes to situate its topic at the intersection of social, philosophic, and visual traditions so as to allow productive points of view to emerge. Readings will include texts from the history of aesthetics, psychology, and moral philosophy. Research projects will encourage analysis of all forms of visual media: painting, sculpture, prints, photographs, film, video, and computer graphics.
Last offered: Autumn 2011
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 445:
What's not American about American Art?
This seminar focuses on American art as a history of migration (of people but also of visual objects) across national and continental boundaries. We examine trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific dialogues and consider how anxieties about foreigners, immigrants, and political dissidents shaped American art and culture at particular moments in the 20th century. In the second half of the course, we consider a series of museum exhibitions that repositioned American art as a history of social conflict and exclusion.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 452:
Ghosts
Is history a form of ghost story? Historians summon the past--making it live in the present. Even the most empirical history is a kind of necromancy: the historian conjures the past, making it appear before our eyes. Tables and figures and other statistical data, no less than other other objective information, flutter in front of the reader like other sorts of ectoplasm in the crystal ball. In this course we will consider ghost stories and ghost paintings for what they reveal about the historian's occult craft. We will devote special attention to Stanford's campus as a haunted place, and students will write their final papers on some ghostly aspect of the university.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 453:
Reading Walter Benjamin
Few cultural critics are so often cited by scholars in the humanities as Walter Benjamin. The impact of his writings has been decisive to some of the most influential art historians of recent memory, although usually based on a small number of texts (the Kunstwerk essay, the writings on photography, the flâneur, and cinema). Literary historians have turned to somewhat different studies with great profit, notably his writings on Baudelaire, translation, and German tragic drama. The publication of Benjamin¿s entire oeuvre in English has made his work more accessible to a broad range of scholars with diverse interests; one direction emerging from this familiarity is a deeper awareness of his commitment to materialist history. With the palpable collapse of ¿social art history¿ amongst younger art historians, dispersed ambitions of where ¿visual studies¿ might lead, and the return to aesthetic meditations derived from protracted analyses of single works, it may be the time to re-read Benjamin with an eye towards understanding his ambitions for a ¿materialist history.¿ That is the objective of this seminar : we will read deeply in Benjamin¿s writings, configure some ideas of what history meant to him, and attempt to export some of those practices to our current art-historical projects.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 454:
The Image in Question : French theory after Foucault
TBD
Last offered: Spring 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 457:
Abstract Expressionism
Coinciding with the opening of the Anderson Collection in the fall of 2014, this seminar considers the expanded field of Abstract Expressionism relative to both domestic and international cultural politics. Topics: Modernism and existentialism; transnational avant-gardes; interdisciplinary approaches to the visual image at mid-century; the ideologies of formalism and autonomous art; cold war aesthetics. Pollock. de Kooning, Guston, Newman, Rothko, Still, Gorky others. Close readings of Greenberg, Rosenberg and critics associated with Partisan Review and little magazines. Enrollment limited by application only; Phd students only with preference to Art History.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 458:
Warhol and After
This seminar focuses on the wide-ranging career of Andy Warhol as a means to consider the broader history of American art and culture since 1950. It examines little-studied aspects of Warhol¿s visual production (e.g. his career as a commercial artist in the 1950s, his everyday photographs of the 1970s and 1980s) as well as now-canonical Pop paintings of the early-to-mid 1960s. Warhol¿s critical and scholarly reception will be scrutinized in detail, as will published interviews of and writings by the artist. Finally, we will consider Warhol¿s legacy and influence on American art in the decades since his death in 1987.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 461:
The American Civil War: An Experiential History
Can one write a history of lived experience, of ephemeral states that never were represented? Can one look at representations of paintings, photographs, and literature to see where these ephemeral states might be trapped, or might otherwise be pictured? Feeling that the real war did not get in the books (for the most part), the course examines those books and other representations and so many things that never attained so exalted a form to look at the war anew. Methodological readings as well as readings about the Civil War.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 462:
The Sense of Place in American Art
The course will focus on places in American art, literature, and material culture--how places are imagined; how they are conceived in opposition to the pure flow of forgettable experience; how what happens in a place somehow remains.
Last offered: Autumn 2014
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 463:
Grad Seminar: American - Ekphrasis
Description is a prime skill for an art historian. How to make a reader (or listener) see a work, whether it is illustrated or not, is arguably the most fundamental and important task and pleasure in this discipline. How to make a world--both for oneself and for one's audience--is the larger purpose of such imagistic writing. Considering historical and more recent examples of ekphrasis, the course will concentrate on works of art in the Cantor Arts Center, requiring each student to select a work that will become the basis for a quarter-long writing project.
Last offered: Autumn 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 465:
Media Technology Theory (COMM 384)
This course surveys major theoretical approaches to the study of media technologies, including Frankfurt School critical theory, media archaeology, actor network theory, science and technology studies, platform studies and theories of critical making. By the end of the course, students should have a rich familiarity with the literature in this area, as well as with exemplary empirical studies conducted within each tradition. Preference to Ph.D. students in Communication and Art and Art History. Consent of instructor required for non-PhD students.
Last offered: Winter 2014
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 470:
Globalization and Contemporary Art
Enrollment restricted to graduate students. Globalization as the most important paradigm for the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary art since the 1990s. The expanding terrain of the art world; biennial culture; new economies of scale and the art market along with its critique in the discourses of empire and multitudes. Debates on the thematics of hybridity; post-Fordism; the flat world and capital flows; exteriority and site specificity; and new models of collectivism in recent art.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 472:
Mellon Curating Course
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 475:
Media Cultures of the Cold War (COMM 386)
The intersection of politics, aesthetics, and new media technologies in the U.S. between the end of WW II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Topics include the aesthetics of thinking the unthinkable in the wake of the atom bomb; abstract expressionism and 'modern man' discourse; game theory, cybernetics, and new models of art making; the rise of television, intermedia, and the counterculture; and the continuing influence of the early cold war on contemporary media aesthetics. Readings from primary and secondary sources in art history, communication, and critical theory.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 478:
Problems in the History of Collecting, Circulation and Display
This graduate seminar involves intensive study of art collecting, circulation and display through the lens of one of the principal institutions of art history: the museum. It will include a site visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to gain a comprehensive view of this complex institution as a basis for seminar-related research and writing. Limited to PhD students in Art History and Film Studies, or by permission of the instructor.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 482A:
Approaching Dunhuang: Methods and Debates
This seminar will explore recent scholarly approaches to the visual arts of the Buddhist cave shrine complex at Dunhuang in northwest China between the 5th and 9th c. CE. Topics will include real and virtual spatiality of the cave shrines; questions of function (ritual, memorial, meditative, visualization); textual and doctrinal relationships of images and spaces; patronage and political contexts; production techniques; narrative and paradise iconographies; icons and illustrations. The seminar group will visit the concurrent major Dunhuang exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and focus especially on banner paintings, sculptures, and replica cave shrines (275, 285, 320) represented in the exhibition.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 485:
The Situation of the Artist in Traditional Japan (JAPANGEN 220)
Topics may include: workshop production such as that of the Kano and Tosa families; the meaning of the signature on objects including ceramics and tea wares; the folk arts movement; craft guilds; ghost painters in China; individualism versus product standardization; and the role of lineage. How works of art were commissioned; institutions supporting artists; how makers purveyed their goods; how artists were recognized by society; the relationship between patrons¿ desires and artists¿ modes of production.
Last offered: Spring 2008
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 485A:
Exhibiting East Asian Art
This seminar will explore the history, conceptual approaches, design, and practicalities of museum-based exhibitions of East Asian art. Through readings, field trips, and site-based exercises the seminar will look to inform the planned reinstallation of the Cantor Center's East Asian galleries. Open to graduate and undergraduate students with interests in art history, museology, design, and cultural representation. Permission of the instructor required.
Last offered: Spring 2014
| Units: 1-5
ARTHIST 487X:
Pictures of the Floating World: Images from Japanese Popular Culture (ARTHIST 287, JAPANLIT 287)
Printed objects produced during the Edo period (1600-1868), including the Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) and lesser-studied genres such as printed books (ehon) and popular broadsheets (kawaraban). How a society constructs itself through images. The borders of the acceptable and censorship; theatricality, spectacle, and slippage; the construction of play, set in conflict against the dominant neo-Confucian ideology of fixed social roles.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 489:
Connoisseurship Studies of Chinese Painting, Calligraphy, and Seals
This course focuses on taking connoisseurship out of the classroom and into the collecting world. With many classes being held at the Asian Art Museum and private collections in the Bay Area, students will learn not only what the role connoisseurship plays in the current art landscape, but how a museum works. Combines case studies in the field, reading material, eyes-on experience, and discussion, this class will address the topics of utilizing resources, conducting research, cultivating collectors, building collections, and curating exhibitions through the lens of connoisseurship.
Last offered: Spring 2013
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 489A:
Making the Masterpiece in Song Dynasty China (ARTHIST 289A)
Studies of canon formation involving Song Dynasty (10-13th c.) Chinese works of painting, calligraphy, ceramics, and architecture. The roles of early art writing and criticism; collecting histories; art historical theory; / copying, imitation, and reproductive practices; period and regional taste; and modern museological and art historical discourses in identifying and constructing a canon of Song masterworks.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 490:
Curatorial Activism in the Arts of Africa
Enrollment restricted to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. What is contemporary in African art and how does one curate the contemporary in and through African art? The course examines curatorial practices and activist projects. Topics include redefining museum exhibitions and collections of African art at the Cantor Arts Center and museums around the world; breaking away from stereotypical representations of the arts and cultures of Africa; controversial issues and dilemmas; curatorial activities directed toward cultural, social, and political activism; strategic modes of display and design; subjectivity vs. objectivity; and fostering critical dialogues about the arts and cultures of Africa.
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 490A:
Indigenous Cultural Heritage: Protection, Practice, Repatriation (ARTHIST 90)
This new interdisciplinary seminar explores challenges and avenues for furthering protection of the cultural heritage rights enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Using an innovative combination of in-class lectures and videos of interviews with renowned experts, including Indigenous leaders, scholars, artists and performers and museum professionals from around the world, this seminar will analyze current and potential tribal, domestic and international legal and ethical frameworks for indigenous cultural heritage protection and repatriation. Among other subjects, we will discuss and problematize: the impact of colonialism, urbanization and other political, legal, economic, religious and cultural forces on understandings and definitions of "indigenous" and "cultural heritage"; the development of international law relating to Indigenous peoples¿ cultural rights; tribal and domestic heritage protection and repatriation laws/initiatives including the 1990 US Indian Arts and Crafts Act and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; past and present Western museum practices relating to display, preservation, provenance research and repatriation of Indigenous peoples' cultural material; the meaning of repatriation to Indigenous peoples and other stakeholders; and resolving repatriation disputes, including by alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes. While case studies will relate primarily to Indigenous peoples of North America, including the Arizona Hopi and Northwest Coast First Nations, comparisons will be drawn with the situation of Indigenous peoples in other regions, such as Oceania and Russia. The overall seminar experience will involve discussions of lectures and video content, assigned readings, a class visit to the Cantor Center Native Americas collection, and visits to our classroom by renowned experts, including Dr. Morten Rasmussen, who participated in the recent DNA analysis of Kennewick Man/The Ancient One. Students who have taken this course are eligible to join a guided weekend trip to Hopi territory tentatively planned for Spring Quarter 2016. Elements used in grading: class participation, attendance and a final project (one-day take-home exam; or research paper or film project with instructor's consent). Registration: Students may seek the instructor's consent via email (sjdenant@stanford.edu).
Terms: Aut
| Units: 2
ARTHIST 502:
Methods and Issues in Visual Studies
This course introduces grad students to a range of interpretive methods in the study of art, visual culture, and media. Required for incoming PhD students in Art History.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 600:
Art History Bibliography and Library Methods
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1
ARTHIST 610:
Teaching Praxis
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI)
ARTHIST 620:
Area Core Examination Preparation
For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 24 units total)
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Beischer, T. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Samuelson, K. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI)
ARTHIST 640:
Dissertation Proposal Preparation
(Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Samuelson, K. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI)
ARTHIST 650:
Dissertation Research
(Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 24 units total)
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Samuelson, K. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI)
ARTHIST 660:
Independent Study
For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-15
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Kessler, E. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI)
ARTHIST 660E:
Extended Seminar
May be repeated for credit. (Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 4
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI)
ARTHIST 670:
Dissertation Seminar
For graduate students writing and researching dissertations and dissertation proposals. How to define research projects, write grant proposals, and organize book-length projects.
Last offered: Spring 2006
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 680:
Curricular Practical Training
CPT course required for international students completing degree. Prerequisite: Art History Ph.D. candidate.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-3
| Repeatable
for credit
ARTHIST 802:
TGR Dissertation
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Hansen, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI);
Wolf, B. (PI)
