Spring 2013 Undergraduate Courses

Updated on January 17, 2013.

Lectures

AHIS BC1002 Introduction to Art History II
A. Higonnet
M/W 2:40pm-3:55pm, 304 Barnard Hall
Introduction to the art of the past with an emphasis on the variety of perspectives from which it may be studied. Artworks from different period cultures will be selected for discussion in depth. Members of art history faculty and other invited speakers lecture in their fields of specialization. Renaissance to Modern art will be covered. Discussion Section Required.

AHIS BC3626 In and Around Abstract Expressionism
A. Alberro
T/R 4:10-5:25, 504 Diana Center
This course focuses on the history of the artistic phenomenon of abstract expressionism in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Japan. To place abstract expressionism within its proper historical context, we will explore the modern, anti-modern, avant-garde, and neo-avant-garde artistic practices that have been elaborated in various ways in different locations from the 1920s to the 1960s, and the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts during these years.

AHIS BC3675 Feminism and Postmodernism
R. Deutsche
T/R 1:10-2:25, 504 Diana Center
Examines art and criticism of the 1970s and 1980s that were informed by feminist and postmodern ideas about visual representation. Explores postmodernism as (1) a critique of modernism, (2) a critique of representation, and (3) what Gayatri Spivak called "a radical acceptance of vulnerability." Studies art informed by feminist ideas about vision and subjectivity. Places this art in relation to other aesthetic phenomena, such as modernism, minimalism, institution-critical art, and earlier feminist interventions in art.

AHIS W3205 Introduction to Japanese Painting
M. McKelway
T/R 10:10-11:25pm, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
A survey of the multifaceted forms of Japanese painting from antiquity through the early modern period. major themes to be considered include: painting as an expression of faith; the interplay indigenous and imported pictorial paradigms; narrative and decorative traditions; the emergence of individual artistic agency; the rise of woodblock prints and their impact on European painting in the nineteenth century.

AHIS W3234 Medieval Art II: Romanesque and Gothic
S. Murray
T/R 2:40-3:55, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
This lecture course is intended for students with little or no background in medieval art. It provides an introduction to a period of one thousand years (fourth to fourteenth centuries) employing a dialectical interaction between memories of the imperial past and the dynamic, forward-moving force of "Gothic." We will survey all aspects of artistic production, with especial emphasis upon architecture and monumental sculpture. In the last part of the term we will turn to some of the principal themes of medieval art, focusing upon objects accessible to the students in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters.

AHUM V3340 Arts of China, Japan and Korea
D. Delbanco
M/W 10:10-11:25, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea—their similarities and differences—through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia.

AHUM V3342 Masterpieces of Indian Art and Architecutre
K. Kasdorf
M/W 2:40-3:55, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
Introduction to 2000 years of art on the Indian subcontinent. The course covers the early art of Buddhism, rock-cut architecture of the Buddhists and Hindus, the development of the Hindu temple, Mughal and Rajput painting and architecture, art of the colonial period, and the emergence of the Modern.

AHIS W3645 20th Century Architecture/City Planning
R. Anderson
T/R 1:10-2:25, 614 Schermerhorn Hall
This undergraduate lecture course is an introduction to the crucial and peculiar topics in the history of modern (western) architecture of the twentieth century. The course does not systematically cover all the major events, ideas, protagonists, and buildings of the period. It is organized around thematic and sometimes monographic lectures, which are intended to represent the very essential character of modern architecture from its beginnings around 1900 until some more recent developments at the end of the century.

AHIS W3650 20th Century Art
R. Krauss
T/R 2:40-3:55, 501 Schermerhorn Hall
The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art-from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond-situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century's ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses. Discussion Section Required.

AHIS G4085 Andean Art and Architecture
E. Pasztory
M 2:10-4:00, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Survey of the art of the Andes from earliest times until the Spanish conquest. Emphasis on the nature of Andean tradition and the relationship between art and society. Global Core.

AHIS W4110 Modern Japanese Architecture
J. Reynolds
M/W 1:10-2:25, 103/4 Diana Center LL
(Description to come)

AHIS G4385 Renaissance Architecture, History & Theory
F. Benelli
T 10:10-12:00, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
A survey of Renaissance Architecture in Italy through its buildings and its theory, from Brunelleschi to Palladio and the influence to other European country.

AHIS W4480 Art in the Age of Reformation
K. Moxey
T/R 10:10-11:25, 504 Diana Center
Artistic production in Germany and the Netherlands in the 16th century and the transformation of the social function of art as a consequence of the development of reformed theories of art and the introduction of humanist culture: Albrecht Dðrer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Altdorfer, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden, Jan Gossaert, Jan van Hemessen, and Pieter Aertsen.

AHIS W4601 Origins of Modern Visual Culture
J. Crary
M/W 10:10-11:25, 501 Schermerhorn Hall
Major developments in the emergence of modern visual culture in Europe and North America 1750-1900. Topics include the panorama, diorama, museums, photography, world expositions, and early cinema; issues in technology, urbanization, and consumer society. Attention to texts by Debord, Agamben, Bakhtin, Elias, Lefebvre, Caillois, Kluge, Gunning, Foucault, and others. This is a no laptop, no e-device course.

AHIS W4626 Tourism and the North American Landscape
E. Hutchinson
T/R 4:10-5:25, 103/4 Diana Center LL
Examines the relationship between 19th-century landscapes (paintings, photographs and illustrations) and tourism in North America. The semiotics of tourism, the tourist industry as patron, the tourist as audience, and the visual implications of new forms of travel explored via the work of Cole, Moran, Jackson, and others.

Seminars and Colloquium

AHIS W3895 Major's Colloquium: Introduction to the Literature and Methods of Art History
Z. Bahrani
M 4:10-6, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Prerequisites: the department's permission. Students must sign-up in 826 Schermerhorn. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

AHIS W3895 Major's Colloquium: Introduction to the Literature and Methods of Art History
J. Crary
T 10:10-12:00, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Prerequisites: the department's permission. Students must sign-up in 826 Schermerhorn. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

AHIS BC3031 Imagery and Form in the Arts
L. Hewitt
M 2:10-4:00, 501 Diana Center
Please attend the first day of class if interested. No application required. J. Snitzer, L. Hewitt. The operation of imagery and form in dance, music, theatre, visual arts, and writing; students are expected to do original work in one of these arts. Concepts in contemporary art will be explored.

AHIS W3814 The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints, 1750-1850
C. Grewe
F 12:10-2:00, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints 1770 – 1850 will open in Philadelphia in late 2013 and travel to several venues. Drawn entirely from Philadelphia Museum of Art's uniquely rich holdings of more than 8,000 prints by 800 German School painters and printmakers of this period, the exhibition will feature 125 works by leading Austrian, German, and Swiss artists working at home and abroad, including Josef Danhauser, Caspar David Friedrich, Ludwig Emil Grimm, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Ferdinand Olivier, Johann Christian Reinhart, Ludwig Richter, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Philipp Otto Runge, and Adrian Zingg.
Spanning eight decades, from the first stirrings of a Romantic sensibility among German-speaking writers and artists in the 1770s to the pan-European uprisings of 1848/49, the selected works mirror many of the sweeping social and political changes that occurred during these turbulent times, reflecting such significant new trends in the arts as the growing appreciation of late Gothic and early Renaissance art – especially Dürer and Raphael – and the widespread enthusiasm for recently rediscovered medieval sagas, age-old fairy tales, popular ballads, and folk songs. The prints of the period document important shifts in taste in contemporary art circles, including the rise to prominence of landscape, informal portraiture, and scenes of everyday life alongside the more highly-ranked academic art categories of history and religion. The exhibition and catalogue will also treat a number of important printmaking innovations, among them the introduction of new technology (lithography and steel engraving) and new methods of print distribution (print albums, illustrated books and almanacs, annual print club editions), all of which served a rapidly expanding world of print collectors made up of a newly flourishing segment of the population, the cultivated citizenry known as the Lesepublikum, or reading public.

AHIS W3816 Mapping Gothic England
S. Murray
R 10:10-12:00, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
In this seminar we will apply the notion of "mapping," or spatial databasing to a corpus of English Gothic churches and cathedrals. We will, in addition, explore the notion of "Englishness" in architectural production of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.

AHIS W3889 Approaches to Contemporary Art
B. Joseph
T 2:10-4:00, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This course examines the critical approaches to contemporary art from the 1970s to the present. It will address a range of historical and theoretical issues around the notion of "the contemporary" (e.g. globalization, participation, relational art, ambivalence, immaterial labor) as it has developed in the era after the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s.

AHIS W3904 Aztec Art and Sacrifice
E. Pazstory
W 2:10-4, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar explores the issues of art and sacrfice in the Aztec empire from the points of view of the 16th century and modern times.SEAS Interdisciplinary Course.

AHIS BC3938 Modern Native American Art in the South West (Travel Seminar)
E. Hutchinson
M 2:10-4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Traces the impact of new mediums, new audiences and new institutions of production on artists of Pueblo, Navajo and Apache background over the past century and explores how modernity and postmodernity intersect with indigeneity in a contemporary artist's work. Course includes visits with artists and curators and examination of objects.

AHIS W3967 Sacred Love in Renaissance Italy
R. Compton
W 11:00-12:50, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
What is the nature of sacred love? How is it different from love experienced within romance, marriage, and friendship? How does one love God? What role does art play in conceptualizing divine love? How does it stimulate desire in the viewer's soul, mind, and body? Such questions structure this course's investigation of sacred love in Italian Renaissance art. The course examines religious art created between 1250-1550 within the cities of Florence, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Mantua, while simultaneously exploring the changing theological notions of love from the late medieval period through the Counter-Reformation. Topics covered within the course include the adoration of Jesus' body in the altarpiece; devotion in the context of Madonna and Child paintings; ecstatic transcendence in portrayals of saints like St. Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine of Siena; holy matrimony within the convent and monastery; as well as charity in the art of confraternities dedicated to amor dei and amor proximi.

AHIS BC3968 Art Critism II
N. Guagnini
T 11:00-12:50, 501 Diana Center
Contemporary art and its criticism written by artists ( rather than by art historians or journalistic reviewers). Texts by Victor Burgin, Judith Barry, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Yvone Rainer, Juan Downey, Maria Eichorn, Jeff Wall, Mike Kelley, Falkie Pisano, and Melanie Gilligan. We will consider theoretical and practical implications of each artist's oeuvre. Also, considers the art and writing of each artist together.

AHIS BC3971 Rococo and Its Revivals
A. Higonnet
W 9:00-10:50, 501 Diana Center
This seminar studies the sumptuous decorative arts of the French eighteenth-century Rococo. Thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation, participants will be able to study actual examples of this art in the world-class collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. New scholarship on these collections by museum curators, as well as a new wave of academic scholarship on rococo interiors, makes this an exceptional moment to re-think the rococo, especially as it has been collected and displayed in New York City. Several of the most important scholars of the Rococo will be participating in events at Columbia University and at the 2013 meeting of the College Art Association during the spring semester, making it possible for seminar participants to learn about the latest work on Rococo from a variety of authorities.

AHIS C3997 Senior Thesis
C. Hunter
M 6:10-8, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Required for all senior thesis writers.