ARTHIST 230B: Image and Text in the Arts in China (ARTHIST 430B, CHINA 230, CHINA 430)
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.]
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 20 units total)
ARTHIST 231: Leonardo's World: Science, Technology, and Art (ARTHIST 431, HISTORY 231, HISTORY 331, ITALIAN 231, ITALIAN 331)
Leonardo da Vinci is emblematic of creativity and innovation. His art is iconic, his inventions legendary. His understanding of nature, the human body, and machines made him a scientist and engineer as well as an artist. His fascination with drawing buildings made him an architect, at least on paper. This class explores the historical Leonardo, considering his interests and accomplishments as a product of the society of Renaissance Italy. Why did this world produce a Leonardo? Special attention will be given to interdisciplinary connections between religion, art, science, and technology.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ARTHIST 232D: Construction: The Writing of Architecture (CEE 32D)
This seminar focuses on the construction of architectural writing. The class will analyze this idea through four topics: formal analysis, manifesto, translation, and preservation. The seminar is divided into two-week modules with each of these four concepts functioning as organizing principles. The first week of each module will involve familiarizing the seminar with both the terms and rhetorical tactics of the given theme by reading and analyzing specific texts and completing a short written analysis (1-2 pages). The second week will expand upon this foundation and involve further analysis in addition to each student writing a short paper (3-4 pages) drawing on the examples discussed and their own experiences in the discipline. The goal of the seminar is for each student to be able to analyze how an architectural writing is constructed and to develop his/her skills in the construction of his/her own writing.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Beischer, T. (PI)
ARTHIST 233: Censorship in American Art (ARTHIST 433, CSRE 233)
This seminar examines the art history of censorship in the United States. Paying special attention to the suppression of queer, Black, and Latinx visual and performance art, including efforts to vandalize works and defund institutions, students will explore a variety of writing such as news articles, manifestos, letters, protest signs, scholarly texts, and court proceedings. The course approaches censorship as an act to restrict freedom of expression and, however unwittingly, as a mode of provocation and publicity.
Last offered: Winter 2024
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 237: The Crusades: A Cultural History (ARTHIST 437)
This seminar follows the trajectory of the Crusades in Europe and the Middle East from the late eleventh to the fifteenth century. The first crusade, started at the initiative of pope Urban II in 1095, brought Jerusalem under Christian rule for the first time since the early seventh century. This event was perceived as crucial in both Muslim and Christian sources, and the transformation of the architecture of the city soon began, with mosques being converted to churches, some of them thus returning to their initial function. Other buildings, such as the Dome of the Rock, built as an Islamic sacred space, were given new meaning. The direct contact between Christians and Muslims also had an effect on Europe, which now increasingly heard first-hand reports from the Holy Lands, and received objects such as glass, metalwork, and textiles produced in Syria or Egypt for its church treasuries.
Last offered: Autumn 2024
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 238C: Art and the Market (FRENCH 238)
This course examines the relationship between art and the market, from Renaissance artisans to struggling Impressionist painters to the globalized commercial world of contemporary art and NFTs. Using examples drawn from France, this course explores the relationship between artists and patrons, the changing status of artists in society, patterns of shifting taste, and the effects of museums on making and collecting art. Students will read a mixture of historical texts about art and artists, fictional works depicting the process of artistic creation, and theoretical analyses of the politics embedded in artworks. They will examine individual artworks, as well as the market structures in which such artworks were produced and bought. The course will be taught in English, with the option of readings in French for departmental majors.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Pesic, A. (PI)
;
Tantillo, D. (TA)
ARTHIST 242A: Art History in the First Person (ARTHIST 442)
This seminar considers the use of the first person voice in a wide range of writings about art, film, and performance from fiction to criticism to scholarship. Insofar as graduate students have typically been discouraged from using the first person voice in their scholarly work, we will question the benefits and drawbacks of doing so in particular cases. To what ends have different writers put the first person voice and how do they integrate it with others strategies of written expression? How might we distinguish among different forms of speaking from the position of "I"? What kind of "I" is at stake - personal, professional, intellectual, imaginary, or otherwise?
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 243: Black Divinities: Race, God, and Nation in the Photography of Deana Lawson (AFRICAAM 143)
In recent years the Brooklyn-based photographer Deana Lawson (born 1979) has become rightly famous for her rapturous yet grounded large-sized photographs of everyday black people--those she meets in her neighborhood, as well as on her travels to Brazil, Jamaica, and the Congo. In this seminar we will look closely at Lawson's photographs, considering how she gains her subjects' trust, how she uses props and locations, how she explores her own feelings and the legacies and possibilities of being black.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 243N: Beyond Words: Early Books and the Design of the Reading Experience
Copiously drawing from the Stanford Archives, this seminar will study the revolutionary design of the first printed books to ask questions about the nature of reading and the commodification of culture. Besides being trained in typography and printing techniques, the students will explore early modern books as multi-layered objects in which texts, images, cutouts, colors, and a multitude of materials constructed new frameworks for attention and fantasies while contributing to the globalization of media.
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 245: Art, Business & the Law (SIW 245)
This course examines art at the intersection of business and the law from a number of different angles, focusing on how the issues raised by particular case studies, whether legal, ethical and/or financial, impact our understanding of how works of art circulate, are received, evaluated and acquire different meanings in given social contexts. Topics include the design, construction and contested signification of selected war memorials; the rights involved in the display and desecration of the American flag; censorship of sexually charged images; how the value of art is appraised; institutional critique and the art museum, among others.
Last offered: Summer 2021
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
