ART HIST 101-6 First-year Seminar: Art & the French Revolution, 1789-1815
The French Revolution is widely considered one of the triumphant origins of modern liberal democracy, epitomized by its famous motto: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” However, the realities are far more complex (and far less idealistic). The French Republic confronted crisis after crisis as it struggled to integrate the working classes, women, immigrants, and racial and religious minorities into the body politic. France’s colonies and the hundreds of thousands of slaves whose labor secured French wealth posed additional challenges to the Revolution’s utopian project, ultimately paving the way for the expansion of French imperialism under Napoleon Bonaparte.
This first-year seminar examines the significant roles played by art and architecture in producing French citizens and representing Revolutionary values. In addition to canonical artists and architects of the period, such as Jacques-Louis David, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and Étienne-Louis Boullée, this course also examines popular visual and material culture, including political cartoons, festivals, and costumes. Students will learn how to describe and analyze a wide range of cultural objects, and apply those skills to understand how artworks can intervene in revolutionary conditions to shape political and social realities.
What is modernism? Why did artists in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century stop making realistic images of the world and instead start experimenting with form to the point that they invented abstract art? How did artists from other parts of the world reject or transform it? Modernist art arose in the historical period we call modernity, defined by colonialism and imperial expansion; industrialization; urbanization; revolution and mass war; the rise of mass commodity culture, spectacle and technology; and the emergence of the art market as we know it today. From the late 19th C to the mid-20th C, we will examine the key modernist “isms”: Impressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Purism, Constructivism, Socialist Realism, and Abstract Expressionism, as well as how they were reworked in the art of some of the non-European cultures to which they were often indebted.
ART HIST 389/MENA 301-2-20 Special Topics: Ottoman & Qajar Photography in the Age of Orientalism, 1839-1914
From the first announcement of its invention in 1839, photography was linked with the Middle East, where it immediately became a tool of European imperialism in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran. In the nineteenth century, photography served Europe’s pictorial transformation of the Ottoman and Qajar worlds into the imaginary “Orient,” characterized by backwards spirituality, perverse sexuality, and violent tyranny (hence ripe for European intervention). At the same time, photography was also taken up by a wide array Ottoman and Qajar subjects—from sultans and shahs to artists, scholars, and the Muslim middle classes—who adapted photography’s powers to their own ends.
This course traces the impacts of Ottoman and Qajar culture, politics, and social history on photography’s development as a technology of representation in the nineteenth century. By focusing on photography’s entangled history with European colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa, this course highlights Orientalism as both a source of inspiration and a site of contestation for Ottoman and Qajar photographers (and their subjects). The course examines a wide range of photographic genres, including royal portraiture, studio photography, ethnographic photography, and archaeological photography, as well as the many fascinating processes and materials of nineteenth-century photography, from the daguerreotype to photolithography.
Writing in the mid-16th century, Francesco da Sangallo stipulated in a letter that when one spoke of sculpture, one spoke of marble. This connection between sculpture and (white) marble only strengthened over the course of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. Yet as we know, ancient Greek and Roman marble sculptures and buildings were painted in vibrant, bright colors. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, polychrome marble blocks were used to create richly patterned architectural structures. This seminar will take on and challenge the Western conception of “white marble” by revisiting its history as a foundational material in the history of Europe Art, from Antiquity to the present. Topics will include the physical qualities of marble, marble quarries, the role of color (both applied and natural), the political and aesthetic debates surrounding antique and modern polychrome sculpture, and the relationship between the aesthetics of white marble and dangerous ideas of white supremacy.
ART HIST 390/HUM 370-6-24/ENVR_POL 390-0-30 Undergraduate Seminar: Art, Ecology, and Politics
In a time of growing awareness of severe environmental crisis, how do artists (and how do we) make change while avoiding despair? This class focuses on ways artists and activists who are motivated by ecological concerns, but also by optimism about the difference they can make, have adapted artistic strategies to address environmental issues over the course of recent decades. Blurring the boundary between art and activism, or art and environmental remediation, they have taken up themes of sustainability and materiality, “collaborated” with natural processes, and addressed crises from industrial toxins to global warming. In this course we address key themes in environmental art, considering art, ecology, and politics in relation to issues that include gender, race, poverty, territory, and indigeneity. The course will unfold in conjunction with a performance and class visit by a Kaplan artist in residence and will also involve one or more field trips. Along with class participation and periodic short writing assignments, work will include group and individual final projects.
This seminar provides an introduction to art historical research methods for undergraduates, particularly those interested in writing an honors thesis. The seminar will survey the history of art history with a focus on recent debates and interventions within the field (e.g. intersectional, critical race theory, and decolonial approaches). The seminar will also provide students with concrete tools to develop, research, and write a piece of original art historical scholarship. What does it mean to ask an original art historical research question? What is historiography and how it is critical for mapping out and developing an original thesis statement and argument? How does one effectively analyze and implement primary sources? What constitutes “evidence,” and how is the dominant perception of “evidence” shaped by art history’s origins?
ART HIST 403 Mellon Objects and Material Seminar: Objects and Materials in Art History
The Chicago Objects Study Initiative (COSI), a tri-institutional collaboration between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Departments of Art History at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, was established in 2014 with funding from the Mellon Foundation. This co-taught seminar lies at its core. The course focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects in the collection of the Art Institute and the methods and questions such inquiry raises. The course is organized about major themes such as materials, properties, and afterlives. Although there are three primary instructors for this course, it relies on the contributions of a host of other Art Institute colleagues who will introduce students to the complex workings of a major public institution and the ways in which object-focused research is conducted in such a setting. The course is required for all first-year art history graduate students at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
ART HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Theories of Intention
This seminar looks broadly at theories of intention and at the place of intention--or the absence thereof--in the making and reception of art. We will read critical and theoretical texts that grapple with this question, and test them out through a series of case studies generated by students from their own interests. The seminar addresses theory and historiography from Freud and phenomenology to the New Critics and analytic philosophy of mind to the poststructuralist Death of the Author, as well as theories of collective, distributed, non-human, and networked agency. We will seek to understand why writers have questioned the place of authorial intent in the evaluation or interpretation of a work, as well as critiques and responses to this position. In wresting authority away from the producer, have we given over too much authority to the consumer? Some of our topics may include miraculous ("acheiropoietic") objects, images "made by nature" and other nonhuman actors, artworks not intended for a human audience, artwork made using the operations of chance, collaborations in which any singular intention is difficult to establish, examples in which intention is simply inaccessible to the interpreter, and examples in which it is, or seems, all too apparent. Work will include frequent mini-presentations and a final paper and presentation on a research topic, which can be drawn from participants' individual fields of research.
ART HIST 460/COMM_ST 525-0-21/ENGLISH 481-0-21 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Media Theory
How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, time and space, and social life? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century western cultures. The course will be divided roughly into two halves: one portion devoted to foundational texts (Benjamin, McLuhan, Haraway) and to key terms (media, mediation, cyborg, digital, networks, etc.); and a second portion attentive to more contemporary work. Throughout our task will be to grasp these texts on their own terms, to put them into conversation with other texts and contexts, and to trace their relation to other texts in media theory and beyond. Requirements will include a short presentation, a short paper, and a longer paper.
