World Art History 4219-AW020
Session 1: Impressionism
Terms and proper names: Barbizon School, Eduard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, plein-airism, divisionism, Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Mary Cassatt
Session 2: Post-impressionism
Terms and proper names: aestheticism, symbolism, Odilon Redon, James Whistler, pointillism, Georges Seurat, syntheticism, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Les Nabis, Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Felix Vallaton, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Cézanne
Reading:
Paul Gauguin, Letter to Fontainas
Paul Cézanne, Letters to Emile Bernard
Session 3: Fauvism, Expressionism
Terms and proper names: Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Valminck, Georges Rouault, Edvard Munch, James Ensor, Emil Nolde, Die Brücke, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kees van Dongen, Oskar Kokoschka, Der Sturm, Blaue Reiter,Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke
Reading:
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Programme of Die Brücke
Reference: 1900b, 1903, 1906, 1908, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 4: Cubism
Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Guillaume Apollinaire, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Alexander Archipienko, Juan Gris, Orphisme, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka
Reading:
Guillaume Apollinaire, from The Cubist Painters
Reference: 1907, 1911, 1912, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 5: Futurism
Terms and proper names: Filippo Tommaso Mariinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, David Burlyuk, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova
Reading:
Umberto Boccioni et al., Futurist Painitng: Technical Manifesto
Reference: 1909, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 6: Suprematism, Constructivism
Terms and proper names: Kazimir Malevich, suprematism, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodczenko, productivism, Lyubov Popova, Gustav Klucis, photomontage, Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner
Reading:
Kasimir Malevich, Non-Objective art and Supremtism
Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists
Osip Brik, Photography versus Painting
1915, 1921, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 7: Constuctivism continued, Bauhaus
Terms and proper names: László Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesbug, De Stilj, Piet Mondrian, Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, Ben Nicholson, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer
Reading:
Theo Van Doesburg, from Principles of Neo-plastic Art
Piet Mondrian, Dialogue on the New Plastic
Reference: 1917, 1923, 1928, 1944, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 8: Dada and Surrealism
Terms and proper names: Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate, Merzbau, Max Ernst, Theodor Baargeld, Andre Breton
Reference: 1914, 1916a, 1918, 1920, 1926, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 9: Surrealism continued
Terms and proper names: Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, André Masson, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, Hans Bellmer, Antonin Artaud
Reading:
Andre Breton, Surrealism and Painting
Reference: 1924, 1927a, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 10: Abstract Expressionism
Terms and proper names: Hans Hofman, Arshile Gorky, Action Painting, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Colour Field Painting, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell
Reading:
Harold Rosenberg, from The American Action Painters
Jackson Pollock, Answers to a questionnaire
Reference: 1947b, 1949, 1951, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 11: Minimalism and its aftermath
Terms and proper names: Tony Smith, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, specific object, Robert Morris, unitary object, Sol LeWitt, Conceptual art, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, site specific
Reading:
Donald Judd, Specific Objects
Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art
Lawrence Weiner, Statements
Reference: 1965, 1968b, 1969, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Session 12: Pop Art
Terms and proper names: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Neo-Dada, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter
Reading:
Andy Warhol, Interview with Gene Swenson
Richard Hamilton, For the Finest Art Try Pop
Reference: 1958, 1965b, in Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Type of course
Learning outcomes
The participants of the course will acquire essential knowledge in the development of modernist art since the mid-19th century. They will be able to identify facts and ideas and to associate them with most important movements in modern art.
The aim of the course is to facilitate the students’ understanding of the artistic phenomena under discussion, so that they will be able to compare, interpret and describe them in their own words.
Having completed the course, the students will be able to apply their knowledge in a number of extra-artistic contexts, to demonstrate affinities between artistic practices and related phenomena which manifested themselves in the domains of modernist literature, music, theatre and dance.
In-depth analysis of the material under discussion will prompt the students to discriminate between the nuances of artistic attitudes, endowing them, in consequence, with the capability to generalize, to associate the artistic facts and ideas with more general categories, and – finally – to assess the quality of artworks in terms of their significance for the development of Western art.
Assessment criteria
Final grade depending on the following criteria:
presence and active participation – 10% of the final grade
two short tests written on the 4th and 7th sessions – 20%
final (in-class) exam – 70%
Bibliography
Belinda Thompson, Impressionism: Origins, Practice, Reception, W W Norton & Co Inc., London 2011.
Bernard Denvir, Post-impressionism, W W Norton & Co Inc., London 1992.
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London 2004.
Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940. Strategies of Being, Harry N. Abrams, New York 1995.
Michael Archer, Art Since 1960, Thames and Hudson, London 1997.
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-1990, Blackwell, London 1998.
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1815-1900, Blackwell, London 1992.
Frances Spalding, British Art Since 1900, Thames and Hudson, London 1986.
Hal Foster, Mark Francis, eds., Pop Art, Phaidon Press, London 2005.