DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Wracked by revolutions religious and secular, defining itself in relation to the many new worlds that became visible through colonial conquest and through microscopes, and ushering in new social and political forms with the rise in power of cities as well as absolute monarchs, early modern Europe was also a time and place within which what we now call “art” came into being. This course will consider works of art and architecture by well-known artists such as Donatello, Van Eyck, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Bernini, Borromini, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Wren within religious, political, and scientific contexts. But we will also examine popular prints, urban space, fashion, and performances in cultural centers like Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, and London.

This course is intended as an introduction both to the period/place, and to fundamental modes of art historical analysis and interpretation. There are no prerequisites for this course.  

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Griffins, sphinxes, demons, and other fabulous creatures appear frequently in the art of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Eastern Mediterranean world. They stand at the intersection of the normal and abnormal, the natural and unnatural. Why did these images become so widespread, and what cultural functions did they serve? Can we connect their invention and dissemination with key moments in human history and cross-cultural interaction? What was the role of material representations of the supernatural in preventing and healing disease and other human misfortune?

This course explores the supernatural subject in ancient art with new perspectives drawn from art history, history, anthropology, and archaeology. We will examine a wide range of objects and representations (including sculptures, figurines, seals, amulets, and other media) along with ancient texts that help us understand their meaning and function.

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This course surveys painting and sculpture, plus some architecture and urbanism, of the Baroque era (ca. 1580 to 1750) in Italy and Spain. Examining works of art in their social and cultural contexts, the course touches upon major themes of the historical period including the impact of religious reform on the visual arts; the notion of classicism as an aesthetic ideal; the intersection of art and science; and cultural exchange between Italian and Spanish places. Artistic centers such as Rome, Naples, Madrid, and Seville feature prominently, but the course will also consider artistic developments in cities such as Bologna, Milan, Valencia, Mexico City, and Cuzco. Along the way, we will study works by a range of artists including Gianlorenzo Bernini, Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Peter Paul Rubens, Jusepe Ribera, Luisa Roldán, Diego Velázquez, and Cristóbal de Villalpando.

The course will be taught remotely and synchronously. Pending developments, one class meeting will take place at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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The more than five decades from the French Revolution to the Great (Crystal Palace) Exhibition in London of 1851, marked the near complete demise of the Classical tradition in art and architecture, the rise of art for the public (as opposed to an elite of collectors and connoisseurs), and the emergence of the “avant-garde.” The period also saw the appearance of a succession of individuals who, regardless of their allegiance to the governing artistic and political institutions of the day, stood out as critical individuals, willing risk public incomprehension or even ridicule in pursuit of their singular, artistic visions. The names of the latter artists include David, Gericault, D’Angers, Soane, Goya, Blake, Turner and Courbet and they will be the chief artistic subjects of the course.

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The Kumbum of Gyantse is a landmark in the histories of Tibetan architecture, painting, and Buddhism, comparable in complexity and stature to Borobudur in Java, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul and the Sistine Chapel in Rome.  As a senior scholar of Tibetan culture remarks, the Kumbum of Gyantse and its surrounding temples “are understood both within traditional Tibetan sources and among contemporary art historians to represent the pinnacle of Tibetan artistic creation.” The course will consider the patronage, architecture, styles of painting and sculpture, iconography, and iconology of the site, as well as somatic and visual modes of experience within Tibetan Buddhist artistic production.   After exploring the systematic integration of architecture, sculpture, and painting of the 15th century Gyantse Kumbum, the course will examine the site’s afterlife in the 20th century, raising issues of contested and shifting meanings projected onto works of art.  Gyantse was the locale of a battle during the 1904 British invasion of Tibet.  Objects looted by British soldiers continue to turn up on the art market, offering opportunities to discuss colonialism and collecting.  The Chinese, who have directly administered the area since 1950, have also used Gyantse for varied purposes including promoting tourism, critiquing the pre-modern social order in Tibet, and anti-colonial propaganda in films and sculptural tableaux.  Although largely protected during the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, it still suffered damage. The course will examine these issues along with the impact of the Cultural Revolution and contemporary tourism on the site.

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How did early modern northern European images participate in and help to form a visual culture of race? Taught by a scholar of Dutch art of the seventeenth century, this seminar will explore sixteenth- and seventeenth-century northern European representations of Blacks and blackness by German and Dutch artists Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt van Rijn, and others. We will also consider ethnographic prints, printed maps, and allegories. The general focus is on interactions among German, Flemish, and Dutch Europeans and black Africans and Melanesians that resulted in images made between 1550 and 1700. How do images of Blacks operate within the artistic conventions of the time? How do they relate to conceptions of the exotic? And how did they then and how do they now contribute to the construction of race?

We will study images made in the era of Atlantic slavery and early European colonialism, and how these intertwined histories structured and benefited from forms of visual representation. In the early modern era, it was conventional to depict the youngest of the three Magi who travel to adore the Christ child as a black African. By the end of the seventeenth century, portraits of bourgeois white families often included a black servant. Throughout the era, ethnographic prints of black Africans encountered in the context of trade circulated widely. Made and admired in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, these images were also in some cases records of individual encounters between artists and the men and women they depicted. Can we square the personal with the political in the case of an art of describing blackness?

The seminar opens with readings on the invention of whiteness in the early modern colonial era in the context of the slave trade and recent research on “Black Tudors” and on relations between Elizabethan England and the Ottoman Empire. It will showcase recent research on black Africans in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and on Dutch investment in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation colonialism. We will consider specific case studies of northern European prints, paintings, drawings, sculpture, and architecture that frame constructions of blackness. Geographically, the materials we study issued from The Netherlands and Germany, but the course considers European engagement in the American colonies, Melanesia/Indonesia, and the Atlantic and Brazil.

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This course offers an introduction to methods, theory, and issues in art and visual culture. It is not a course in how to do visual analysis, but an overview of themes in art historical historiography and a discussion of the art historian’s “toolkit.” The course will review research tools, cultivate analytic and writing skills, and survey a broad spectrum of themes and issues that inform current work in art history. The course will give some attention to classic, field-defining texts, but more to recent critiques, issues pertinent to scholarship in a globally and historically broad range of subfields, and approaches drawn from feminist, queer, trans, decolonial, and critical race theory. Class will be offered primarily remotely with a small number of outdoor in-person meetings.  

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Exploring the deep histories, artistic movements, social and political context, and key players, this seminar will engage the rich archive of Black arts in Chicago over the past 80 years. The course involves readings and discussion and will be offered largely remotely but include select visits (where possible) to organizations and institutions such as the South Side Community Art Center and Stony Island Arts Bank. Final project will be a digital project: video, sound, mapping, blog, or other web-based project or essay about some aspect of the history of one of the organizations, and a significant portion of the course will be given over to a studio format with presentations and discussion of work in progress. 

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The Kumbum of Gyantse is a landmark in the histories of Tibetan architecture, painting, and Buddhism, comparable in complexity and stature to Borobudur in Java, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul and the Sistine Chapel in Rome.  As a senior scholar of Tibetan culture remarks, the Kumbum of Gyantse and its surrounding temples “are understood both within traditional Tibetan sources and among contemporary art historians to represent the pinnacle of Tibetan artistic creation.” The course will consider the patronage, architecture, styles of painting and sculpture, iconography, and iconology of the site, as well as somatic and visual modes of experience within Tibetan Buddhist artistic production.   After exploring the systematic integration of architecture, sculpture, and painting of the 15th century Gyantse Kumbum, the course will examine the site’s afterlife in the 20th century, raising issues of contested and shifting meanings projected onto works of art.  Gyantse was the locale of a battle during the 1904 British invasion of Tibet.  Objects looted by British soldiers continue to turn up on the art market, offering opportunities to discuss colonialism and collecting.  The Chinese, who have directly administered the area since 1950, have also used Gyantse for varied purposes including promoting tourism, critiquing the pre-modern social order in Tibet, and anti-colonial propaganda in films and sculptural tableaux.  Although largely protected during the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, it still suffered damage. The course will examine these issues along with the impact of the Cultural Revolution and contemporary tourism on the site.

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