141 - 150 of 239 results for: ARTHIST

How come that, even if you have never set foot in Italy, you have heard of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael? What made them so incredibly famous, back then as well as today? This course examines the shooting of those, and other, artists to fame. It provides in-depth analyses of their innovative drawing practices and the making of masterpieces, taking you through a virtual journey across some of the greatest European and American collections. At the same time, this course also offers a study of the mechanics of success, how opportunities are created and reputations managed, and what role art plays in the construction of class and in today's national politics.

Why do dating sites rely on photographs? Why do we believe that love is above all a visual force? How is pleasure, even erotic pleasure, achieved through looking? While the psychology of impressions offers some answers, this course uncovers the ways poets, songwriters, and especially artists have explored myths and promoted ideas about the coupling of love and seeing. Week by week, we will be reflecting on love as political critique, social disruption, and magical force. And we will do so by examining some of the most iconic works of art, from Dante's writings on lovesickness to Caravaggio's Narcissus, studying the ways that objects have shifted from keepsakes to targets of our cares. While exploring the visual roots and evolutions of what has become one of life's fundamental drives, this course offers a passionate survey of European art from Giotto's kiss to Fragonard's swing that elicits stimulating questions about the sensorial nature of desire and the human struggle to control emotions.

With their fantastic powers, mutable bodies, multiple identities, complicated histories, and visual dynamism, the American superhero has been a rich vehicle for fantasies (and anxieties) for 80+ years across multiple media: comics, film, animation, TV, games, toys, apparel. This course centers upon the body of the superhero as it incarnates allegories of race, queerness, hybridity, sexuality, gendered stereotypes/fluidity, politics, vigilantism, masculinity, and monstrosity. They also embody a technological history that encompasses industrial, atomic, electronic, bio-genetic, and digital.

This course surveys modern African art across the colonial, independence, and post-independence eras. Modern artistic practices developed in Sub-Saharan Africa as early as the 1920s and '30s among scattered independent practitioners, and in workshops run by colonial educators. Following World War II, a new generation of artists and critics rose to prominence in conjunction with the pan-Africanist Negritude movement. By the 1960s and '70s, modernist movements flourished in some African cities with support from new national governments, while socialist cultural policies often sought to modernize and nationalize local art practices, even as alarms began to sound over new patterns of authoritarianism, state collapse, and foreign intervention. Because classificatory orders in Africa were never so commanding as they tend to be in the West, modernism stands to be studied in this context through a cross-genre and multi-media lens that examines drawing, painting, and sculpture alongside performance, photography, and film, recognizing how distinctions between 'high' and 'popular' forms often blurred or were nonexistent.

This course offers a sweeping view of contemporary fashion, dissecting not only the meaning of style but the intricate process of creation, and the ambitions and disquiet that define a global industry - one whose brilliance is too often overshadowed by its environmental toll. Led by a former Vogue journalist, students will engage with industry luminaries, gaining insight into the delicate balance of innovation, commerce, and sustainability that shapes the ever-evolving world of fashion.

This course explores major developments in modern art around the world, including historical avant-garde movements in Europe and their points of intersection with movements and practices from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. While making no claim to comprising a totality, the course offers an introduction to modernism - mainly in painting, sculpture, photography, and critical writing - as a global phenomenon. While looking closely at a range of individual artists, artworks, and movements, the course contends with ways of conceptualizing modernism and modernity from the late 19th century through the mid 20th century in global terms, considering issues of periodization and temporal disjuncture, power asymmetry and decolonization, provincialism and cosmopolitanism, cultural particularity and comparison, international relations and exhibition politics.

This course explores how Chinese Buddhist art adapts to changes in the religious visions, imagination, and practices of Buddhism in China. It focuses primarily on Buddhist paintings but will occasionally include other types of artistic devices, such as space for display, architectural design, and sculpture, to reach a better understanding of the viewing and the religious experiences. Striving beyond the discussion of style and iconography, we will broaden our pursuits by incorporating various issues such as the domestication of a foreign religion, the relationship between Buddhist literature and images, fusion with popular literature, social connections among eminent monks, scholars and artists, and political use of Buddhist images.

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.

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.