Prof. Sean RobertsSpring 2011

Tuesday and Thursday 12:30 to 1:50pmSeeley G. Mudd Building, Room 123

AHIS 121g: Art and Society, Renaissance to Modern

Eduoard Manet, A Bar at the Folies Bergere, 1881-1882 (Detail)

This course explores the place of art and material culture within the societies of Europe and the Americas from roughly 1450 to the present day. Through a close examination of a variety of works in media ranging from painting and printmaking to architecture and photography we will interrogate the social roles that art has played for diverse publics. We will ask why such works were made, who benefited from their production, and why they look the way they do. Careful reading ofhistoricaltextsand more recent scholarly essays will serve to guide our looking. Through these investigations we will come to understand the power that visual culture holds over us in the present and the intentional and unintentional ways that art of the past is appropriated to support this power.

AHIS 121g fulfills General Education Category I. Cultures and Civilizations I.

Required Texts: Fred S. Kleiner, Gardener’s Art Through The Ages: The Western Perspective, Volume 2 (13th edition).

This book provides useful background information on many of the artists and works we will be studying in this course.

All other required readings are included in the course pack, available at Magic Machine (University Graphics) in the University Village on Hoover. You must complete all weekly readings and be prepared to discuss them in your section each week. Additionally, the exam questions will make explicit reference to readings from this course pack.

Requirements and Grading:

Attendance and Participation in Discussion Section: 20%

Unannounced Quizzes: 5%

Two Paper Assignments: 30%

Midterm Exam: 20%

Final Exam: 25%

This is an introductory course and no previous knowledge of art history is expected. Sheets will be distributed for each lecture and available on blackboard listing the most important works that we will be discussing. Exams will take the form of slide comparisons accompanied by essay questions, as well as a series of short answer questions. You will be provided with the artist, title and the date of the works but will be asked to answer these questions in an organized and thoughtful essay drawing on the material presented in lecture, your section discussions and the course pack readings. The final exam is not cumulative and will only cover material after the midterm. You will also be required to visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on your own at least once during the semester.

Sections

You are required to be enrolled in a discussion section to receive credit for this course. Your grade for discussion accounts for 20% of your overall grade. These sections are not a review of lecture material but are intended to introduce in depth discussion of readings on topics pertinent to the course as a whole.

Office Hours and Contact Information:

I will hold office hours from 2:15 to 3:15pm on Tuesdaysthroughout the semester and by appointment. Office hours will be held at LiteraTea, the cafe attached to Doheny Library.

The best way to get in touch with me is through email, which I check regularly. My address is . I can also be reached by phone at 310-779-0348.

Schedule of Class Meetings

Jan. 11Introduction: Art and its Publics

Jan. 13No Class

No Sections first week of class

Jan. 18The Demands of Patronage: Early Renaissance Art in Italy

Jan. 20Naturalism, Belief and Identity: Art in the Renaissance North

Section Assignment: The Renaissance Artist

1. Michael Baxandall, “Conditions of Trade,”from Painting and Experience in

RenaissanceItaly (1977).

2. Millard Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings,” (1945).

Jan. 25 Artists and Art Historians in Sixteenth-Century Europe

Jan. 27 Art as Performance in Sixteenth-Century Florence

Section Assignment: Art and Autonomy in Renaissance Italy

3. William E. Wallace, “A Week in the Life of Michelangelo” from (1998).

4. Giorgio Vasari, “The Life of Michelangelo, “ from his Lives of the Artists (1550 and 1568).

Feb. 1 Painting as Poetry in Venice: Giorgione and Titian

Feb. 3 Belief and Virtuosity in Rome: Bernini, Caravaggio and Artemesia

Section Assignment: Printing and Censorship

5. “Veronese and the Inquisition” from A Documentary History of Art, vol. 2.

6. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture,

(1999), pp. 2-19 and 71-84. [On Blackboard]

Feb. 8Painting Everyday Life in the Dutch Republic

Feb. 10Art, Market and Court: Rembrandt and Velazquez

FIRSTPAPER ASSIGNMENT DUE in Class Feb. 10

Section Assignment: Women Artists

7. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,”(1971).

8. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses (1991) selection.

Feb. 15Building Magnificence at Romeand Versailles

Feb. 17Guilty Pleasures: Marie Antoinette and the Rococo in France

Section Assignment: Midterm Review

Feb. 22Midterm Exam

Feb. 24 The Classical Past and the Revolutionary Future

Section Assignment: The Power of Portraiture

9. Mary Sherrif, “The Portrait of the Queen,”from The Exceptional Woman (1996).

Mar. 1 Tradition, Innovation, and the Salon

Mar. 3 Romanticism and the Sublime

Section Assignment: Romanticism

10. Henri Zerner, “Romanticism: The Permanent Revolution” from Romanticism and Realism (1984).

Mar. 8 The Painting of Modern Life: Courbet and Manet

Mar. 10 Avant-Garde and Commodity: Impressionism in France

Section Assignment: Gendering Realism and Impressionism

11, T.J. Clark,The Painting of Modern Life (1985), selections.

12. Linda Nochlin,“Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in

Impressionist Painting,”(1989).

Mar. 15 and 17 Spring Break

Mar. 22The Photograph as Document and Art

Mar. 24 A Machine for Living: The Modern Building

Section Assignment: Photography and Modernism

13. Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” from On Photography(1977).

14. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”(1936).

Mar. 29Abstraction and the Search for the Universal

Mar. 31Primitivism: Modernism and Anti-Modernism

Secion Assignment: Primitivisms

15. Abigail Solomon Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,”(1989).

16. Robin Reisenfeld, “Cultural Nationalism, Brücke and the German Woodcut,” (1997).

Apr. 5Art and the Unconscious: Dada and Surrealism

Apr. 7Cubism and the Language of Modern Art

Section Assignment: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism

17. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939) and “Modernist Painting,” (1960).

Apr. 12Resistance and Celebration: The Harlem Renaissance and

Mexican Mural Painting

Apr. 14Cultural Constructions of Totalitarianism

Reading Assignment: Style and Message: Totalitarian Art

18. Roger J. Crum, “Shaping the Fascist ‘New Man’: Donatello’s St. George and Mussolini’s Appropriated Renaissance of the Italian Nation,” from Donatello Among the Black Shirts (2004).

SECOND PAPER ASSIGNMENT DUE in class Apr. 14

Apr. 19 Abstract Expressionism, the Cold War and the American Dream

Apr. 21 Pop Art and Consumer Culture

Section Assignment: Style and Message: Democratic Art

19. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), selection.

20. Anne M. Wagner, “Lee Krasner as L.K,” (1989).

Apr. 26Los Angeles and the Institutions of Art

Apr. 28Final Review

Section Assignment: The Institutional Evolution of Art

21. Tony Bennet, The Birth of the Museum, (1994) “The Exhibitionary Complex.”

Final Exam, Wednesday May 11, 2-4 pm, Seeley G. Mudd Building, Room 123