181 - 190 of 239 results for: ARTHIST

This course takes clothing seriously. It examines fashion both as a concept and as a global industry that grew massively during the early modern period (15th-18th centuries), contributing to making the world what it is. Taught by an ex-Vogue journalist, this seminar explores how clothes communicate and subvert ideas of distinction while also examining why many people have overlooked this power over time. In particular, the course focuses on the understudied relationship between fashion, wars, and other geopolitical catastrophes since only disasters provide the necessary ground zero for narratives of change that are fundamental for fashion's constant regeneration.

Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti's extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475-1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintings, drawings, and architectural designs, but also an abundantly rich and heterogeneous collection of artifacts, including direct and indirect correspondence (approximately 1400 letters), an eclectic assortment of personal notes, documents and contracts, and 302 poems and 41 poetic fragments. This course will explore the life and production of Michelangelo in relation to those of his contemporaries. Using the biography of the artist as a thread, this interdisciplinary course will draw on a range of critical methodologies and approaches to investigate the civilization and culture of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Course themes will follow key tensions that defined the period and that found expression in Michelangelo: physical-spiritual, classical-Christian, tradition-innovation, individual-collective.

In Fall 2026, acclaimed artist Patty Chang will open an exhibition at the Anderson Collection. Among other things, this exhibition will engage the history of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, located on the edge of Monterey Bay, which was until 1906 the site of the Point Alones Chinese Fishing Village. Taking Chang's exhibition as a starting point, this graduate seminar will explore the Pacific Ocean as a site, an environment, and an ancestor. Topics of study will include ocean and land art; ocean poetics; feminist and Marxist approaches to scientific labor; sea creatures; and transpacific methodologies. The course will include a mandatory day-long field trip to Hopkins Marine Station. This course is only open to graduate students.

This course explores how new image technologies transformed culture and society in the 19th century, from the invention of lithography in the 1790s, to the development of photography in the 1830s, to the birth of cinema in the 1890s. We will consider how these and other new media and the makers who wielded them shaped art, politics, science, and entertainment in the period, with a focus on French and British contexts. The course will address themes of reproduction, originality, expression, documentation, realism, and seriality, among others, and will engage closely with the print and photography holdings of the Cantor Arts Center.

An exploration of new forms of landscape art in China's contemporary era, 1980s-present. Studies of new media platforms for landscape related imagery, imagined landscapes, and expanded concepts of landscape in an era of heightened ecological consciousness.

This seminar addresses Europe's aesthetic encounter with South Asia in the age of mercantile imperialism and colonial expansion in the long 18th century. It unravels how artists operated within a complex network of Enlightenment-era exploration, maritime commerce, and the growing military dominance of trading corporations such as the British and French East India Companies. The seminar examines how images underpinned Europe's paternalistic quest for knowing India, fostering a teleology of decline of the Mughal State through the lens of cultural and geographic determinism. It will further unpack the ways in which local artists resisted and reframed these prerogatives. Landscape views, natural history drawings, and genre portraits depicting castes and occupations will be assessed not only as documentary accounts of Indian life and landscape, its history, laws, and religions - but as indices of commerce, collecting, fashion, dispossession, and violence. Topics will cover the dialogue of aesthetic theories between Europe and India through the idea of Company Painting - a postcolonial term that sits squarely within the nexus of commerce and colonialism in India's 18th century.

This seminar will explore the dynamic history of contemporary Chinese art exhibitions and curatorial culture from the 1980s to the present. Through case studies of pivotal exhibitions held in China and internationally, seminar participants will examine curatorial positions and strategies, associated writing modes and art historiography, and critical and public reception of contemporary Chinese art and artists during an era of experimentation and global emergence.

This graduate seminar explores the relationship between cinema and ideology from a variety of methodological perspectives. Psychoanalytically inflected film theory (suture, apparatus, the gaze) and critique of ideology, as well as a range of historical and contemporary practices of political filmmaking, will be studied. Particular emphasis will be placed on formal analysis and close reading of selected films and written texts.

An examination of many types of interactions between images and texts in Chinese painting. These include poetic lines inscribed on paintings (as response or as a theme given to the artist to paint), paintings that emulate or transform ancient poetic couplets, or illustrate poetic and literary narratives, and calligraphic inscriptions. Attention will be given both to comparative perspectives and to the special aesthetic and intellectual consequences that the conjunction of the literary and visual modes give to Chinese artistic expression. [Undergraduate enrollment with consent of one of the instructors.]