Results for ARTHIST

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.

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.

This introduction to the history of architecture traces domed architecture, sacred and secular, from the 1st century BC to the 20th century AD. Themes include pre-modern cosmology and the dome as microcosm; innovations in engineering and the history of geometry; structural and painted illusionism; the dome as religious symbol, urban landmark, and national or political monument; social, religious, and political history and symbolism. Individual case studies range from Hadrian to Richard Rogers.

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. nn 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.

Open to all Stanford students. Public speaking, inquiry methods, group dynamics, theme development, and art-related vocabulary. Introduction to museum administration; art registration, preparation and installation; rights and reproduction of images; exhibition planning; and art storage, conservation, and security. Students research, prepare, and present discussions on art works of their choice.

The development of Greek art and culture from protogeometric beginnings to the Persian Wars, 1000-480 B.C.E. The genesis of a native Greek style; the orientalizing phase during which contact with the Near East and Egypt transformed Greek art; and the synthesis of East and West in the 6th century B.C.E.

The course explores the art and architecture of the Athenian Empire in the age of Pericles, and then considers the effects of civil war and plague on Greek art and society in the later 5th and early 4th centuries.

This course and its study trip to the Getty (Los Angeles) to view the new Byzantine exhibition 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

The development of modern art and visual culture in Europe and the US, beginning with Paris in the period of Haussmann, Baudelaire and Manet, and ending with Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s. Modernism in art, architecture and design (e.g., Gauguin, Picasso, Duchamp, Tatlin, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Dali) will be presented 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.

This course will take place in Washington D.C.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cultural contexts in which art served religious, political, commercial, athletic, sympotic, and erotic needs of Greek life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This course resembles an intellectual haberdashery, where students will try on different writing hats each week. They will begin as journalists, writing about the California art scene and responding to Bay Area exhibitions. They will then expand their writing skills to become scholars, critics and essayists, thinking more broadly about visual culture and the humanities. Over the course of the term, they will choose a selected group of art works from local museums (or focus on individual films) and then write an imaginary exhibition catalog centering on their choices. The writing will progress in stages, from early drafts to a publishable final product. Required course for Art History majors.WIM Course.

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.

Historiography and methodology.

May be repeated for credit.

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

The development of Greek art and culture from protogeometric beginnings to the Persian Wars, 1000-480 B.C.E. The genesis of a native Greek style; the orientalizing phase during which contact with the Near East and Egypt transformed Greek art; and the synthesis of East and West in the 6th century B.C.E.

The course explores the art and architecture of the Athenian Empire in the age of Pericles, and then considers the effects of civil war and plague on Greek art and society in the later 5th and early 4th centuries.

This course and its study trip to the Getty (Los Angeles) to view the new Byzantine exhibition 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The development of modern art and visual culture in Europe and the US, beginning with Paris in the period of Haussmann, Baudelaire and Manet, and ending with Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s. Modernism in art, architecture and design (e.g., Gauguin, Picasso, Duchamp, Tatlin, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Dali) will be presented 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).nnGraduate seminar open to advanced undergraduates with the instructor¿s approval.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Selected topics in studies of Yuan and Ming dynasty Chinese painting, print culture, and art theory: the impact of collecting on art production, interplays of print imagery and painting, and relationships between cultural and discursive geographies.

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.

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.

This course introduces graduate students to a range of interpretive methods within art history and visual culture studies. In addition to scrutinizing multiple schools of thought and critical debates within the field, the seminar pays particular attention to the style and strategies of writing taken up by individual critics and scholars. How¿and to whom--does the art historian¿s voice speak in different moments, visual contexts, and interpretive communities?

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

(Staff)

(Staff)

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

May be repeated for credit. (Staff)

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.