Art History

Visual arts courses allow students to integrate the practice and historical analysis of painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, prints, photographs, video, and other media. Art history courses provide a historical and theoretical grounding for studio courses. Studio arts courses enable students to experiment with various media, practicing echniques they learn about in both art history and the studio, and developing their own creative vision. The art history program is designed for arts majors, and also for other students who want to increase their understanding of art, culture, and history. The introductory courses develop basic skills in art analysis and critical writing and introduce concepts and images fundamental to the issues considered in the upper-level courses. The 200-level courses explore topics in greater depth, both historical and aesthetic. The 300-level courses are designed for advanced students and offer the opportunity to examine both art-historical writing and art objects.

Visual Art and Writing This course is an introduction to the practice of art historical analysis. We use several writing techniques to investigate the process of looking at art. The objects we analyze are taken from a variety of periods, cultures, and media. We focus mostly on 19th- and 20th-century modern art. This includes works by Impressionists such as Claude Monet; Post-Impressionists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin; American modernists Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, and Jackson Pollock; and postmodernist Barbara Kruger. We compare our own observations to primary sources— writings on art by artists’ contemporaries such as poets and critics, as well as the artists themselves. We think carefully about the role of language and how it can enrich our experience of art. We consider some basic questions in approaching art’s “history” including the art object’s relationship to specific historical events. The course moves toward the integration of careful looking, creative writing, original thinking, and historical grounding. Students regularly read their writing aloud for class appreciation and critique. Longer paper assignments are written on topics which students choose. No prerequisites.

Survey of Western Art: Ancient to Medieval A survey of developments in the visual arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture) from prehistory through the Gothic period, this course focuses on major works of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe. Basic skills in stylistic analysis and interpretation of subject matter are emphasized; cultural background as an aid to the appreciation and understanding of art is explored. Students may take Art History 101 and Art History 102 in sequence or independently.

Survey of Western Art: Renaissance to Postmodern This course, the second half of the Western art survey, considers developments in Western Europe from the year 1400 to the present. American art is examined from the 1930s to the present. Lectures and class discussions focus on the changing roles of art and the artist in society; on art as the expression of individual, social, political, and cultural values; on stylistic issues; and on the relationships between art and philosophy, history, and politics (both high politics and cultural politics). Students develop their critical and analytical skills while becoming familiar with a broad selection of works in relation to their cultural contexts. This course is an excellent introduction to art history for students with no previous exposure.

History of Photography This course is a chronological and thematic survey of the history of photography from the 1830s to the present mainly in England, France, and the United States. We look carefully at the subject, style, and techniques of representative photos and place them in their social and political contexts. We analyze a range of photographs including early technical experiments, motion studies, popular portraits, avant-garde photos, landscapes, and documentary photography. Some of the issues we discuss include the status of photography as popular art and fine art; photography as a medium of personal and political expression; the relationship of photos to specific historical events; and the histories of women and black photographers. This course is one of a three-semester series in the history and analysis of photography. The courses can be taken independently of each other. There are no prerequisites.

Cultural Perspectives
Global Art: Africa and the Americas This course surveys the art and architecture of three continents before and after colonization. We consider the role of material products in select examples of cultures from Africa such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Congo; from the high Pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica; and from North America considering native peoples of the Northeast, Northwest Coast, Plains, and the Southwest. We look at baskets, textiles, ceramics, costume, masks, temples, beads, totem poles, prehistoric rock art, tools, weapons, funerary statuary, and caves and other dwellings, and relate these objects to social practices. The major goal is to situate the arts in their indigenous contexts of time, space, and function, considering their role in ritual celebration; worship; enhancing the hunt, the harvest, and birthing; constructing identity; worshipping ancestors; and maintaining or resisting gender and power relations. We briefly note what these global arts are and have been for the West, in considering the discourse of the ethnographic museum, for example. The course borrows methods and information from anthropology, geography, literature, and mythology/religious studies, used to deepen an understanding of the art objects. The course also utilizes computer technologies to offer students images of ancient ruins, for example, and regular access to our library’s databases to locate recent scholarly thinking on these topics. Particular attention is given to locations where Simon’s Rock offers study abroad trips. Modules 1 and 2 may be taken separately or consecutively. Each course earns credit toward the Cultural Perspectives or Arts requirement.

Cultural Perspectives
Global Art: Middle East and Asia Envision the 40 sandstone cave sculptures of the colossal Buddha near Datong. Or the clay army of men and horses guarding the tomb of the first Qin emperor, each figure referring to a living person. Or the multicolored, intricate altars of the mandala (cosmic diagram) in Tibetan monasteries. Or the Ottoman manuscript illumination painted in breath-taking miniaturist detail. Or the foliage of the Japan Zen garden symbolizing the stages of life. Or the painted Indian images of the Hindu god of wisdom Ganesha, elephant-headed and pot-bellied. All these objects offer the opportunity to express religious tenets of Asian peoples. Meanwhile, literati landscape painting, Persian carpets, Japanese woodblock prints, the ceramic vessels of the tea ceremony, the architectural achievements of the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal, reputedly an Indian “monument to love and grief” dedicated to a wife who died in childbirth, are quasi-secular forms of art. This course surveys the art and architecture of the Middle East and Asia from a variety of historical periods. We consider the role of material products in cultures as diverse as the Maghreb (northwestern coast of Africa) and the Ottoman Empire, China, India, and Japan. We explore the role of artworks as conduits of state ideology and other registers of power, including gender and class. We look at iconography in several media and relate these objects and their motifs to social practices. Like module 1 which precedes it, this module’s major goal is to situate the arts in their indigenous contexts of time, space, and function. The course borrows methods and information from other disciplines to deepen an understanding of the art objects. The course also utilizes computer technologies to offer students images of ancient ruins, for example, and regular access to our library’s databases to locate recent scholarly thinking on these topics. Particular attention is given to locations where Simon’s Rock offers study abroad trips. Modules 1 and 2 may be taken separately or consecutively. Each course earns credit toward the Cultural Perspectives or Arts requirement.

Cultural Perspectives
Women Artists This course examines the art produced by women artists from the Renaissance to the present with particular emphasis on modern and postmodern women artists. Feminist art historians in the 1970s unearthed several past women artists. Today a younger group of scholars, benefiting from the groundbreaking work of the previous generation, are addressing newer issues: What are the risks and benefits in being named as a “woman artist”? Why does a woman’s gender matter in our responding to her art? How is “femininity” represented by “the female artist” at specific historical moments? How can our attention to a woman’s race, ethnicity, and class affect our understanding of her artwork? If “high art” has traditionally been seen as transcendental, universal, and sexless, how is that definition disrupted when women make art about mothering or the female body? How have women artists redefined women’s “craft” such as quilt-making as fine art? How have contemporary women artists used language and mass media in radical ways? Students present their original research topic to the class. No prerequisites. Students may do additional work and earn four credits for this course.

Cultural Perspectives
Japanese Woodblock Prints (Ukiyo-E) This course investigates the phenomenon of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), begun in the 17th century. We analyze their subjects—especially geishas and courtesans— but also actors, wrestlers, and landscapes, and the prints’ changing styles and techniques. We read excerpted translations from Edo literature as well as contemporary scholarship in anthropology and history, and we listen to Japanese music in order to understand the prints more fully. We situate them in the context of Japanese society, culture, and politics. This course offers credit toward either the Arts requirement or the CP requirement for the college’s AA degree.

Cultural Perspectives
Impressionism and Japonisme When Edo Japan was opened to traders in the 1850s, woodblock prints were one of several commodities imported into the West. In France and England Impressionist artists used them as a point of departure for their own art making. After investigating how the prints were imported into the West, we consider their new meanings and associations for avant-garde artists such as Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, and van Gogh, who sometimes quoted from ukiyo-e in their art and sometimes borrowed their formal or thematic qualities. Emphasis is on the differences between original and borrowed meanings, the appeal of the prints for the middle classes in each country and a range of Western attitudes toward Japanese culture implied by such borrowings. This course satisfies one half of either the Cultural Perspectives requirement or the Arts requirement.

Picasso’s Art: Politics and Sexuality This course explores the private and public worlds of Pablo Picasso and presumes that his art cannot be understood without considering both. The course begins with his early work affected by the anarchist movement in Barcelona and ends with his joining the French Communist Party in 1944. Students develop a visual familiarity with the most significant works done by Picasso starting from his youth, continuing through the Rose and Blue Periods, the highly innovative Cubist experiments, the Neoclassical phase, his Dada and Surrealism involvement, and ending with his monumental Guernica in 1937. Students are offered a method of critically analyzing his paintings, art historical writing on them, and their relationships to political and biographical events in his life: the anarchist movement in Barcelona, WWI, the Spanish Civil War, Picasso’s troubled relationships with several women. We consider how he devises political statements from erotic experience. Conversely, how are his relationships with women formulated by political and social factors, constituting a “sexual politics”? How does all this affect the meanings of his art? A major goal is to demythologize Picasso and to locate his progressive art within patriarchal culture. Thus the course interrogates the connections between Picasso’s art, politics, and sexual politics. No prerequisites.

Theories of Photography In this course we think about what theory is and what it contributes to our understanding of photography. We read some of the most interesting and influential writing about photography including the work of its classic theorists— Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag—and critical post-structuralists writing today, scholars such as Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Jonathan Crary. We correlate theory to the analyses of specific photographs taken from the last 160 years of photo history. The course is based on the premise that no photograph simply captures reality and instead that all photos, like any other form of cultural representation, are subjective constructions of experience. As such, photos are imbued with conventions and social and political ideologies of the photographer and her/his times. In the second half of the semester we read critics who have been influenced by the classic theorists and evaluate their case studies of individual photographs and broader issues in the history of photography. This course is one of a three-semester series in the history and analysis of photography; the courses can be taken independently. There are no prerequisites.

Analyzing Television The focus of of this course is perhaps the most pervasive element in the American popular cultural landscape: television. Since its inception, commercial network TV has also been considered one of the primary means for inculcating social values and ideologies. The course provides critical, historical, and multi-disciplinary perspectives on viewing network TV as ways to understand, rethink, appreciate, and resist the discourses television offers. It explores how TV contributes to the making of a “mainstream” that upholds the status quo, most evident in “the news” and commercials. We consider portrayals of gender, race, and sexualities, and we explore the topic of violence on network TV. We consider the value of “elite” tools (postmodern, feminist, and queer critical theories) to analyze an accessible and “popular” medium. No prerequisites.

Cultural Perspectives
African-American Art and Thought This course explores the experience, work, and ideas of mostly 20th-century African American artists in the United States. We seek to understand responses of African Americans to those defining moments in our national history: slavery, Emancipation, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the Civil Rights and feminist movements, and our postmodern era. African American thinkers have defined for themselves the great complexity, diversity, and contradiction in documenting these events and responding to them in art produced in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Power movement, and the present moment in which the problematic politics of multiculturalism plays a role. We foreground the voices of African American artists: painters, sculptors, photographers, and activist-writers (and occasionally musicians). Attention is given to thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, bell hooks, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. We analyze the politics of anonymous art done by slaves, including quilts; of artists’ assimilation of the influences of Paris and Africa; of folk art, which raises issues of legitimacy and authenticity; of Black mural art. No prerequisites.

Critical Issues in Contemporary Photography This course looks at the work of contemporary photographers in the context of the critical discourse that both surrounds and fuels its creation. Among the topics to be discussed are the staged tableau, still-life constructions, appropriation, the body/the self, photography and abstraction, new narratives, reinventing the landscape, and the continual blurring of boundaries between photography and other media. We will read theorists and critics who have influenced, and responded to, the changes in visual strategies used by postmodern photographers. With permission from the instructor, students with the prerequisite of Photography, Studio Art 102, may take this class at the 300 level for 4 credits and complete additional studio work as part of this course. While prior experience in the studio is not necessary, the work of students in the class who are active photographers will serve as a resource for dialogue and critique.

Cultural Perspectives
Imagining the Harem For centuries Western observers have been fascinated by the harem, based as it was in multiple wives and slavery. This course interrogates that cross-cultural fascination, as evidenced in paintings and prints of the harem made mostly in the 19th-century in England and France. We use poetry, literature, and travel accounts to understand such imagery, including poetry by Victor Hugo and Lord Byron. We consider 18th-century writers and artists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Montesquieu, and even Mozart. Some 20th-century texts are also analyzed: French photographs of North African “harem women” c. 1930 and a miniseries titled The Harem made for television in the 1990s. Commentators have repeatedly asked questions such as: is the harem a legitimate form of social organization or is it a site of sexual oppression, and personal enslavement, an institution that must be “liberated” (by the West)? The course integrates writing by theorists such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. No prerequisites.

Clothing in Art A focus on clothing in artworks of the modern era opens a new won clothing in artworks of the modern era opens a new world of inquiry, a fascinating means of entry into culture, society, history, and gender of the last two centuries. This course considers how clothing is represented in specific painted and photographic art of the West. We theorize about why “masculine” and “feminine” clothing appears in visual art after c.1830 when women become the “marked” or decorated gender. In a variety of case studies, we suggest how painted clothing indicated identity, status, and power in various cultures and eras. We trace how images of clothes can be given meanings in their own day and today using current theoretical models. Students choose their own research topics. Prerequisite: ART H 102 or another art history or theory course, or permission of instructor is required for admission to the course.

Lacan and Visual Pleasure In this course we closely read texts by Jacques Lacan, a major contributor to the reformulation of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, a mid 20th-century writer whose influence can be located in almost every discipline of the humanities and social sciences today. Selections from Lacan are read deeply and contextualized within the frameworks of intellectual and political/feminist thought of the last 30 years. We also watch film and look at visual images, and read theories influenced by Lacan about such texts. We investigate the process of looking as a place at which gender gets constructed. “The gaze” described by Lacan is a concept that registers sexual power relationships, anxieties, and fears. Given a Lacanian spin, visual texts such as painting or photographs take on a richness of interpretation that offers profound relevance to human experiences of self and other, looking and being seen, desire and lack. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor.

Victorian Art and Poetry This course is an inquiry into the relationships of English art and poetry of the Victorian era (1837–1901). Sometimes these relationships are explicit, as when William Holman Hunt paints his enormous Lady of Shalott in response to Tennyson’s poem; in other cases correlations are implied. Major emphasis is given to the Pre-Raphaelites, who worked in both media, but we also explore how to read fairy painting, landscape painting, ladies’ fashion, and images of Queen Victoria in light of poems on these subjects. We consider how the meanings of these artworks and poems might be related to issues of social power and control. Expected behaviors from women, servants, workers, children, and colonial “others” are played out in visual art and poetry. Prerequisites: ART H 102 or permission of the instructor.

Art History Tutorial Under these course numbers, juniors and seniors design tutorials to meet their particular interests and programmatic needs. A student should see the prospective tutor to define an area of mutual interest to pursue either individually or in a small group. A student may register for no more than one tutorial in any semester.