The Graduate School and University Center
of The City University of New York
Ph.D. Program in Art History
FALL 2004 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
N.B. Lecture classes are limited to 20 students, Methods of Research is limited to 15 and seminar classes are limited to 12 students. Three overtallies are allowed in each class but written permission from the instructor and from the Executive Officer and/or the Deputy Executive Officer is required.
ART 70000 - Methods of Research
GC: Wed., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Batchen, Rm. 3421, [47500]
This seminar aims to introduce its participants to art historical study at the graduate level. The class will examine a variety of interpretive methods associated with the practice of art history, particularly those developed over the past forty years, such as Marxism, social history, feminism, semiotics, deconstruction, visual culture, postcolonial theory, and so on. It will concentrate in particular on developing some necessary skills in research, writing, and argumentation, three of the basic components of academic art history. However, it will also take account of other common art historical practices, such as those encountered in the studio, in museums, and in galleries. In brief, the motivating principle of the class will be a single crucial question: "what is the purpose of art history?" No auditors allowed.
ART 70300 - Topics in Non-Western Art: Mesoamerican Art
GC: Wed., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Quiñones-Keber, Rm. 3421, [47501]
This course provides an overview of the diverse arts of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (Mexico and the Maya areas of Central America) from the earliest peoples to the Aztecs of the contact-period. For over two millennia a succession of cultures in this area produced a wide range of works, including astronomically oriented cities and architecture, sculpture both monumental and miniature, and painted manuscripts, murals and ceramics. Lectures will focus on how these diverse artworks, while in many ways unique to certain regions, cities, and social groups, also created an overall Mesoamerican cultural and artistic tradition. Requirements: readings (in English) and a final examination. Auditors are permitted, but they will be expected to attend regularly, do all readings, and participate in discussions.
ART 72000 - Topics in Northern Renaissance Art: Sacred and Profane in Early Netherlandish Painting
GC: Mon., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Lane, Rm. 3421, [47502]
An investigation of the current controversy over the meanings and purposes of early Netherlandish religious paintings. Lectures will examine recent challenges to traditional interpretations of major works by Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling, and will involve students in the debate over the concept of “disguised symbolism.” Problems of sources, attribution, chronology, and technique will also be considered. Five (5) auditors permitted.
FALL 2004 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ART 73100 – Topics in 19th Century Art: Impressionism
This course is designed as an in-depth examination of a short-lived but enduringly popular art movement. It will chart Impressionism’s roots, development, exhibition strategies, critical reception, and eventual modification. The individual careers of Bazille, Degas, Caillebotte, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro and Renoir will be closely analyzed, as will Impressionist approaches to urban and suburban vistas and vignettes and Impressionist contributions to the corpus of distinctly “modern” portraits. Auditors permitted.
ART 75500 – Topics in Modern Art: German Modernism and Nationalism 1898-1938
To counter the predominantly Francocentric interpretation of modernism, this course will focus on the visual manifestations that emerged in Germany toward the end of the Wilhelmine Empire and continued in a variety of guises during the Weimar Republic. We will examine how the polarizing tensions of industrialization and political instability contributed to the bifurcated reception artistic experimentation received during this period. Essays by contemporary critics such as Wilhelm Worringer, Carl Vinnen, Gustav Hartlaub, Ernst Bloch, and Georg
Lukacs will help to explain how modernism became the antithesis of nationalism in Germany. We will look at artists' groups such as the Brücke, the Blaue Reiter, and the Dresden Secession; institutions such as the Werkbund and the Bauhaus; and exhibitions such as the International Dada Fair, Neue Sachlichkeit, Film und Foto, and the Degenerate Art series. Although women artists were not placed on an equal level with men at this time, we will explore the works of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Hannah Höch and Lucia Moholy, along with their male colleagues - E.L. Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy (and others) to find a more accurate picture of the artistic experimentation that emerged out of the conflicting demands of a society in crisis. A final exam and a short oral report will be required. Auditors permitted.
ART 75600 - Topics in Modern Architecture: Art Nouveau
GC: Tues, 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Bletter, Rm. 3421, [47505]
This course will address the self-proclaimed modernity and break with the past of Art Nouveau (Modernismo, Jugendstil, Secession, etc.), and investigate its darker side. Was it a tense response to a general turn-of-the-century anxiety or a meaningful anti-rationalist reaction against the industrial age? Also explored will be its grounding in late nineteenth-century aesthetic theory and arts and crafts reform. The belief in a unifying interior design and architecture is fraught with conflict: it derives in part from William Morris’ social reform and revival of pre-industrial methods, but the organic unity that was envisioned was also a response to Richard Wagner’s transformative notion of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as an attempt to recreate the aristocratic Rococo style. Bourgeois and aristocratic concepts, aesthetic and economic ideas, as well as empathy theory (Lipps) and abstraction (Reigl, Worringer) coexist uneasily and affect avant-garde design into the period of Modernism in the twenties. The internationalism of Art Nouveau will be examined to discover whether, for instance, Spanish Modernismo is comparable in intent to French, Belgian, English, American, or Central European Art Nouveau, and how to place the somewhat later, “rationalized” styles of the Viennese Secession or the Glasgow group around Mackintosh. Some of the major figures included are: Beardsley, Dresser, Godwin, Ashbee, Gallé, Majorelle, Giumard, Horta, Van de Velde, Tiffany, Sullivan, Ohr, Gaudí, Doménech, Piug, Endell, Pankok, Riemerschmid, Bugatti, Mackintosh, Knox, Olbrich, Hoffman, Klimt, Moser, Mucha, and Saarinen. Auditors permitted.
FALL 2004 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ART 76000 - Topics in Contemporary Art: Art from 1985
GC: Mon., 11:45 A.M. -1:45 PM, 3 credits, Prof. Siegel, Rm. 3421, [47506]
In this class, we will study art made since (roughly) 1975. Taking this date as the cut-off point for “contemporary art” is somewhat arbitrary, although it corresponds to the lifespans of many people taking the class. It also corresponds with a shift in late modern art towards postmodernism, theory, and the academy itself. We will be discussing thematic categories of interest, such as “politics” and “the public,” but despite the recentness of the art we will look at, I don’t want to drop chronology or history entirely. If you think about the fact that the art and ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-- from Baudelaire to Benjamin-- are still discussed as though they were relevant to our own historical moment, the question becomes what happened to the ideas of twenty or even ten years ago? What became
of the theoretical and ideological precepts that seemed so apparently true, so vital in the 1980s and early 90s? Certainly most of the critics and artists who advocated for postmodernism, identity, semiotic theory, etc. are still practicing today. Are their ideas and images still around, and if so, what form do they take? How did they affect the art world of today, including the younger artists and critics occupying that art world? And what are the ideas and artists that tempered or even supplanted them? We will look at a wide range of artists and writers over the course of the semester, coordinated at least in part with the museum and gallery exhibitions on view in New York during the fall semester. Auditors by permission of instructor on first day of class.
ART 77100 – Topics in American Art: American Landscape Painting
GC: Wed., 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Webster, Rm. 3421, [47507], Cross-listed with ASCP 82000
This course will begin with a discussion of colonial landskips, maps and topographical views and their importance for the construction of the American landscape tradition. Following which there will be a review of the aesthetics and ideology of the Hudson River School, the contested history of luminism, the role of survey photographs in the defining of the American West, the influence of the Barbizon School and French Impressionism after the Civil War, and the emergence of tonalism and the aesthetic of George Inness at the end of the century.
There will be a final exam and weekly required review essays of contemporary and modern literature beginning with Thomas Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), Asher B. Durand’s “Letters on Landscape Painting” (1855), and George Inness’ “A Painter on Painting” (1878), along with more recent studies by Barbara Novak, Alan Wallach, Albert Boime, William Truettner, Angela Miller, John Davis, Rebecca Bedell, and others. Auditors permitted.
ART 79000 – History of Photography: Twentieth-Century Photography
GC: Thurs., 11:45 A.M.-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Batchen, Rm. 3421, [47509]
After inhabiting our culture for more than 150 years, photography has become one of those things that just is. It's everywhere; it knows no borders and recognizes no limits. Indeed photography's very ubiquity is what makes it such an elusive historical object. Can there even be a singular history of photography? Or is the story of photography
better told through a collection of histories of the various institutions and contexts in which photographs have been put to work? This course aims to examine this question through a close study of the history of photography in the twentieth century as it develops within a number of specific thematics, from the advent of the First World War through to the present. The class's structure will allow for individual sessions to combine a formal, illustrated presentation with a detailed discussion of particular images and texts. Taken as a whole, the class will look at photography as a cultural phenomenon as much as an art form, critically studying the various discursive arenas which this medium has helped to foster and redefine over the past century. Auditors permitted after consultation with instructor.
FALL 2004 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ART 79500 - History of the Motion Picture: History of Film I
GC: Mon., 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Liebman, Rm. C-419, [47510], [Cross-listed with Theatre 71400 and MALS 77100]
This course introduces students to graduate-level film analysis by acquainting them with basic film techniques, strategies, and styles. Central topics to be studied include narrative and nonnarrative forms, mise-en scène, composition, camera movement, editing, sound and music, genre, and spectatorship. In addition, students will become familiar with a variety of critical perspectives on film as well as the essential bibliographical sources and fundamentals of research in the field. No auditors, non-matrics, or permits allowed.
ART 80100 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Non-Western Art: Masking in North America, Africa, and the Pacific Islands
GC: Thurs., 9:30-11:30 A.M., 3 credits, Prof. Corbin, Rm. 3421, [47512]
The seminar will study masking as an art form in North America, Africa, and the Pacific. All students are expected to attend class regularly, to read class assignments and be able to discuss them in class. In addition, each student will present an in-class seminar report (1 hour in length) with slides that will focus on an in-depth study of masks from one of these three regions. The mask(s) should be on display in the Galleries of the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, and/or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A Final Research Paper- ca. 12-15 pages of double-spaced text with additional footnotes, bibliography, and illustrations- will be required of each student in class. No auditors allowed.
ART 80100 – Seminar: Selected Topics in Art History: Prints from Broadsheets to Comic Strips
This seminar will focus on the history of prints, high and low, in all media, and will encompass the spectrum of print possibilities from popular prints to artists’ prints, from the fifteenth century to the present. The first half of the course will consist of lectures and field trips to print exhibitions and collections, after which there will be a brief exam on basic print history and terminology. In the second half of the course, each student will present a project report. Reports could focus on artists, media, periods, audiences and markets or any other aspect of print history. A paper of approximately 15-20 pages, based on the project report, will be due at the end of the semester. This seminar is being given in conjunction with an unprecedented number of major print exhibitions in New York City: before the semester begins, students should see The Unfinished Print at the Frick Museum (June 2-August 15) (www.frick.org/html/newsf.htm) which includes prints from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. During the semester there will be American Impressions 1865-1925: Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Collection (June 8-Sept. 5), and German Drawings and Prints from the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) (July 2-October 3), both exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org/special/se_upcoming.asp), and the work of the great English caricaturist James Gillray (1756-1815) at the New York Public Library (October 15-January 15) (www.nypl.org/research/calendar/uelist.cfm). Auditors permitted.
FALL 2004 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ART 81500 - Seminar: Selected Topics In European Art and Architecture, 1300-1750: Baroque Rome: Capital of World Art
GC: Tues., 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Saslow, Rm. 3421, [47519]
Rome by 1600 was the headquarters of a Catholic Church at the zenith of its religious influence and artistic prestige; for the first time since antiquity, the Eternal City was again the epicenter of an international cultural network, now fully global. This seminar will examine major monuments produced in Rome, or under Roman influence, across Europe and, increasingly, Asia and the Americas. Lectures and readings will emphasize themes of 17th-century patronage, cross-cultural interchange, relation with the city’s past, and connections between characteristic Baroque aesthetic forms and prevailing spiritual or scientific ideals and socio-economic structures. Media include painting and sculpture (Roman artists like Bernini and Artemisia Gentileschi at home and abroad, long-term foreign residents like Poussin, and visitors like Velazquez and Rubens); architecture and urbanism (expansion of the city: Borromini, women patrons); and theater (both as a visual art and a pervasive Baroque metaphor). Requirements: First 8 weeks: weekly reading, including a short oral report on one of the assignments. Last 6 weeks: illustrated class presentation on a topic to be determined with the instructor, 30-40 minutes. Auditors permitted.
ART 85500 - Seminar: Selected Topics in Modern Art: Art and Spectacle during the 1930s
GC: Wed., 4:15-6:15 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Golan, Rm. 3421, [47521]
This seminar will examine the way in which both totalitarian and non-totalitarian regimes of the 1930s deployed what we may call art-as-spectacle in the 1930s. Instrumental to what Antonio Gramsci called the “politics of consent,” this approach was key to image production in Italy, Germany, France, the USSR, and Spain. Installations of mural-sized paintings (fake frescoes), photomontages (photomurals), and mosaic proclaimed the crisis of nomadic, commodified, easel painting. We will consider these issues in light of what Walter Benjamin defined in his famous essay of 1936, aura vs. exhibitionality, what Alois Riegl called “age value,” and Siegfried Kracaur called “mass ornament.” We will also be reading essays by artists like Léger, Sironi, Klutsis, Le Corbusier, and secondary sources by B. Buchloh, J. Schnapp, E. Braun, B. Groys, etc. No auditors allowed.
Please make sure to go to see the Gustav Klutsis exhibition currently at the International Center for Photography at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue (closes end of May)!!!
ART 85600 – Seminar: Selected Topics in the History of Criticism: The Museum as Social and Cultural Artifact
GC: Thurs, 2:00-4:00 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Bletter, Rm. 3421, [47522]
The course will deal with the rise of the museum as a separate architectural and cultural entity in the nineteenth century, its mirroring of changing concepts of history, its role as a didactic instrument in public education and cultural manipulation, as well as with concepts of the museum as an empty vessel, or as a producer of culture.
It will also cover the rapid proliferation of the art museum in the late twentieth century in contrast to other museum types; the place of the museum in its generally urban context, the centrality of commercial forces in recent museum design; the process and meaning of exhibition design and its evaluation; and the political organization of museums and related social questions. Requirement: seminar report and term paper based on this. Five (5) auditors permitted.
FALL 2004 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Art 87100 - Seminar: Selected Topics in American Art: Mestizo Modern
GC: Thurs, 6:30-8:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, Rm. 3421, [47523]
This seminar focuses on the cross-cultural process and the art created by women and men from mixed ethnic backgrounds. Together seminar members explore the multiple ways in which modern visual artists negotiate shifting identities and borders. The title’s use of Spanish and English suggests an emphasis on Latino art, and indeed our work emphasizes that Anglo and Latino traditions have historically been intertwined in the Americas. Since our conceptual emphasis on mechanisms of cultural exchange applies to a variety of mixed backgrounds, however, students working on African-, Asian-, Native-American art (or other fusions) are also welcome. The seminar opens with instructor’s presentations and group discussion of readings; later classes are devoted to presentations of student projects.
Requirements: responses to readings, participation in discussions, and an original research paper. Five (5) auditors permitted.
SEE ALSO
Theatre
81500 Professions, Power, and Portraits
GC: Tues, 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Caws, Rm. C-419, [47404], [Cross-listed with ENGL 87300, ASCP 81500 & WSCP 81000]
A study of the ways in which various professions and the worlds they represent are portrayed, with the kinds of power that work within their realm, and the types of personalities within them, in film, with a few sallies into a television series. The broadly or finely etched portraits and the actors who present them are of especial interest, as are the ways in which certain professions seem to summon certain kinds of beings, and how they change - or not. What kind of development can arise and be powerful in itself. If it is a question of series (Rocky I, II, etc.) or The West Wing, the issue of development will be a thorny one, or less so, depending on the creators. A few biographies, if there is time, or scenes from them (The Young Mr. Lincoln, etc.) Among the films and the careers represented in whatever order will seem to work best - this is only a sampling, clearly, for there are many more possibilities, depending on the epoch. Whenever the “straight representation” and then a parody are available, we will think of both. Readings from John Berger, Krakauer, Roland Barthes, Eisenstein, Tom Gunning, the Mast and Cohen reader, James Monaco, Bordwell, Bluestone, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and the French cubist Blaise Cendrars, the surrealist Robert Desnos, etc. No auditors, non-matrics, or permit students allowed.
Theatre
81500 American Silent Stars: The Other “System”
GC: Mon., 11:45 A.M-1:45 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Dolan, Rm. C-419, [47405], [Cross-listed with ASCP 82000]
This course explores the ways in which the stars of American silent film constructed their own “system” for making movies that in many ways subverted the narrative and stylistic strictures of contemporary studio production. Central importance will be given, of course, to the formation of United Artists, the avenue through which many star-produced features of the late silent era reached the public. Attention will also be given, however, to the relationships stars developed--even within the studio system--with preferred scenarists, directors, designers, co-stars, and even cinematographers. Weekly screenings and discussions will include the films of the United Artists group (Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith), the Keystone comedians (Mack Sennett, Mable Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chase), “star directors” (Lois Weber, Erich von Stroheim), and star performers of the silent era (Clara Bow, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino), as well as the films of
FALL 2004 - COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Theatre
81500 American Silent Stars: The Other “System” - Cont’d
figures like Greta Garbo and Allan Dwan who were able to find a place within both the star-dominated films of the silent era and the sound-era studio products that superseded them. The class will read Jeanine Basinger’s Silent Stars and Richard Koszarski’s An Evening’s Entertainment in common. Individual students will read supplemental texts on specific figures from the silent era in preparation for in-class presentations. No auditors, non-matrics, or permit students allowed.
81500 Performance and Race in Cinema, 1895 through the 1930’s
GC. Thurs., 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Wallace, Rm. C-419, [47406], [Cross-listed with WSCP 81000, THEA 81500 - Professions, Power, Portraits]
In this course we will consider the presentation of people of color in silent cinema, and in early features, musicals and musical shorts of the 1930s. At the turn-of-the-century, around the same time in which cinematic technology became a permanent fixture in the popular and visual cultures of the West, an increasing interest in the appearance and the cultures of people of color also became more and more obvious in some fraction of silent film production as yet to be determined. Since most silent films didn’t survive, it is difficult to postulate relative proportions of output but it seems clear nonetheless that cultural and racial differences were among the early preoccupations pursued in films. We know that among the earliest silent films there were 1) performers in black face; 2) performers in “yellow” or “red” face; 2) black vaudeville performers, usually dancing; 3) people of color, or indigenous peoples (Native Americans) performing their cultural difference either in world’s fairs or in other kinds of public displays, also usually dancing; 4) as well as “actualities” in which blacks may be employed in a variety of settings. We will conclude this course with a consideration of early efforts to capture African American performers on sound film, including the work of Bessie Smith (in St. Louis Blues), Duke Ellington (Black and Tan Fantasy), Louis Armstrong (Rhapsody in Black and Blue), and Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake (Lee De Forest, 1922) and in a series of other musical shorts. If we find the time, we may also include comparisons of King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929), Shanghai Express (1932), John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934), and Josephine Baker in Zou Zou (1933). My choices will be guided by the directions of recent publications on these and related subjects. No auditors, non-matrics, or permit students allowed.
Theatre
81500 The American Film Industry and Global Culture
GC: Wed, 6:30-9:30 P.M., 3 credits, Prof. Wasser, Rm. C-419, [47407]
The course should cover such events as the early development of the film industry, particularly in France and the USA, the rise of the feature film and the demise of the MPPC, vertical integration and the creation of Hollywood as a global center, the history of UFA, the national and international impact of sound, the relation between film and theater such as relative decline of the theatrical road show, the State Department and Hollywood, the 1948 consent decree, film and broadcasting, wide screen and other technical developments, the Euro-American film, the first wave of conglomeratization, the indies, New Hollywood, High Concept, the mini-majors and Goldcrest, Carolco, and Dino DeLaurentiis, HBO, video distribution, Universal v. Sony, the second wave of conglomeratization, television sans frontières policy, NAFTA and GATT compromises, Hong Kong and Bollywood, digital cinema. No auditors, non-matrics, or permit students allowed.