Art History Course Descriptions

ARH 382 Roman Imperial Funerary Monuments:

This seminar will focus on the funerary monuments of the Roman emperors from the early Empire to Late Antiquity. These monuments include many of the landmarks of Roman art, such as the Arch of Titus and Trajan’s Column. The monuments will be considered in terms of both sculptural and architectural form, with a view to determining political and ritual motivation behind their design. Issues of interest will include viewer manipulation through form and topographical relationships, as well as iconographical studies.

ARH 383 Assisi, Rome, Florence:

Problems in Italian Painting ca.1300: In December of 1999, the upper chapel at Assisi reopened after a two-year closure during which the damage of the earthquake of September 1997 was repaired. The damage, the restoration, and the reopening have been accompanied by a spate of new publications, including websites that continue the long-standing popular and scholarly interest in the painted decoration at the burial site of St. Francis. Turning away from the Giotto/non-Giotto problems that had dominated in earlier works, recent scholarship has addressed such issues as the fundamental paradox of this rich building's erection for a mendicant order, the questions of patronage and papal support, and the issue of audience. By extending our gaze outside the walls of the hilltop town to the artistic metropoli of Rome and Florence, we will attempt to understand the interactions between the artists of these cities as they worked in various combinations for a variety of patrons and audiences. Among the topics for investigation and discussion are the relationship of the Assisi frescoes to painting projects associated with the "revival" of Rome in the late 13th century and those executed for the first Holy Year in 1300, the role of the Assisi frescoes in defining a public-oriented painting, and the question of Giotto's place in these developments.

ARH 383 Bruegel and His Contemporaries:

This class will explore the art of the Low Countries between about 1550 and 1580. We shall consider the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his peers within its cultural contexts. This was a period of tremendous political, religious, and social upheavals. Antwerp was at once the wealthiest trading center in Europe and a city decimated by violent iconoclasm and political skirmishes. I am especially interested in the new scholarship on methodological approaches to Bruegel and such contemporaries as Pieter Aertsen, Cornelis and Frans Floris, Jan Massys, and the printmakers associated with Hieronymus Cock's publishing house. There will be several visiting speakers during the semester.

ARH 386N Border Art:

The Border in Latin American Art: In this graduate seminar the theoretical concept of border will be explored. The border between Mexico and the United States is the geographical area this course will emphasize, although other challenging concepts of border will be discussed, such as "la guagua aérea" and its relevance to Neoyorican art. Latino artists have produced art that relates to the physical, social, political, historical, geographical and symbolic borders which became very relevent in the 20th century. As globalization and migration become important challenges of the 21st century, the concept of the border in the arts and artists that deefine their work as border art present intriguing and provocative narratives that will be address in this seminar. Works by David Avalos, Pepón Osorio, Daniel Martínez, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Marcos Ramirez, "el erre" among others will be discussed.

ARH 386N Issues In Contemporary Latin American Art:

We investigate the major post World War II tendencies and movements (abstraction to conceptual art) that occurred particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia and compare them to their United States counterparts. Art forms and artists objectives in articulating spaces (gallery or street, or between object and audience) were markedly different from those of the United States. The purpose here is to discover how these tendencies were the outcome of specific cultural factors and less of external influences to explain the divergences from one country to another. This process will require a close reading of texts including by critics like Marta Traba, Ronaldo Brito, Guy Brett, Nelly Richard and others.

ARH 387 Inventing The American Artist, 1760-1910:

The seminar will explore the representation of the American artist from the late colonial period to the early twentieth century. Such representations include both images (portraits and self-portraits of artists, as well as paintings that came to be considered as distinctly American) and texts (diaries and letters, biographies and autobiographies, histories and criticism, and fiction, including works byHawthorne, James, and Dreiser.) The aim is not to argue for American exceptionalism or to ask ìwhat is American in American art?î but to explore the changing construction of American artistic identity (identities), as fashioned by artists themselves and those who have written about them.

ARH 390 Iconography in Ancient Andean Cultures:

The Moche Case: In the first part of this seminar, we will focus especially on the methodological and theoretical issues regarding the study of ancient Andean system of representations. A number of perspectives and theoretical approaches used in the study of Moche iconography will be introduced. In the second part, a multidisciplinary approach operating at the interface between iconography and archaeology will be described. Finally, the methodological implications of this approach will also be explored with the presentation of three distinct case studies.

ARH 394 Post Structuralist Methods:

This course will investigate the writings of major theorists associated with post-structuralism such as Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze, as well as socially-oriented critical theorists, such as Benjamin and Adorno. Do such bodies of theory and modes of criticism have application within the history of art? How are they presently affecting the practice of art criticism? All readings will be in English. The group of theorists to be studied may be augmented by others according to the research interests of those in the seminar. Class discussions will be linked from week to week by relating the various theoretical positions and vocabularies to a single artistic theme or a given set of art objects.

ARH 395 Art Historical Methods:

This is a one-semester seminar studying major theoretical and methodological concerns of the discipline. It is required for all first-year graduate students in Art History. Weekly readings and brief presentations will investigate the genres of art history, including style, connoisseurship, iconography, social history of art, structuralism, psychology of art, and art criticism. In addition, each student will research a problematic art object in the university collections and write a substantial paper on it.

ARH 382 Narrative Structures in Roman Art:

The Romans used representations of mythical and historical events for many purposes, from the decoration of their homes to the advertisement of imperial authority. To read these narratives correctly, the modern viewer must understand their contexts. Physical context, including the architectual setting and the viewers position in real space while reading the narrative, constitutes one kind of narrative structure. Visual and literary conventions, such as composition, the practice of explaining visual representations in words (ekphrasis) conventions used to show the passage of time, and the use of repetitive stock or topoi, also form part of Roman narrative structure. Taken together, these physical intellectual contexts illuminate not only the subject matter itself but also how ancient Romans conceived of and employed narrative in their art. In an effort to see narrative with Roman eyes, the seminar will concern itself more with the structure, or the "how" of narrative, rather than with the iconography, or the "what" of narrative. The seminar has two principal objectives: 1) to survey the narrative elements in Roman art, ca. 100 B.C.-A.D. 350 paying special attention to how the story gets told, or how the representation communicates its messages; 2) to find strategies for understanding narrative as a construction of Roman culture(s); 3) to give the members of the seminar the opportunity to explore one monument or one narrative theme in depth.

ARH 384 Renaissance Portraits:

This seminar focuses on the development of the portrait as a means of self-fashioning during the period from c. 1400 to c. 1600. Combining art historical and sociological methodologies, and utilizing readings from a variety of fields, we will explore questions about the ways in which the vocabulary of portraiture creates meaning. The primary focus is on Italian examples, though contacts between Italy and the North also play a significant role in our investigation. Our list of topics is fluid, but will include, inter alia: polemical/defaming portraits; portraiture of women; donor portraits; role-playing portraits; emblematic portraits; group portraits; the Renaissance medal; and prints intended for a variety of different audiences. Our investigation will stress the functions of Renaissance portraits as well as what we can reconstruct about their display and their reception by contemporary viewers.

ARH 385 Italian Drawings:

Drawing emerged as an independent and systematic art in late 15th-century Italy. Over the course of the 16th century, the new art acquired its theoretical apparatus, essential functions, and characteristic forms. These were collectively termed "disegno" and proposed as the foundation of all visual creation. Through the early 18th century, this system of visual thinking and practice was steadily refined and differentiated, giving rise to one of the most complex and influential languages in the history of art. This seminar is an intensive introduction to that language, its precepts, development, and traditions, as well as numerous significant personalities. All presentations, discussions, and assignments (regular oral reports and one research paper) are based upon original works in the Blanton Museum's distinguished collections. Prospective students should have completed at least one Italian Renaissance or Baroque survey course.

ARH 386N The Cultures of Modern Art:

This seminar will explore the art and theory of selected early 20th —century artists and movements in the context of the cultures in which they operated. Specific subjects to be studied include some or all of te following: Cubism, Futurism, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and that modernist leitmotif, "the fourth dimension." Where relevant, we will begin our examination by evaluating recent literature on the subject and then proceed to close readings of artists’ writings and contemporary source material. The overall goal of the seminar is two-fold: first, to give students experience in doing primary research as cultural historians; and secondly, to recover aspects of early 20th-century modernism that have been overshadowed by Clement Greenberg’s later codification of modernist painting. Toward that end, the course will begin with a sampling of recent texts on modernism.

ARH 386P Feminism and Representation: The 1970S:

This seminar will function both as a historical survey of the major feminist texts of the 1970s, and as a methods course for students interested in working on U.S. cultural production during the mid sixties to late seventies in relation to feminist issues. We will also read some of the major texts that seventies feminists responded to, and we will situate their work historically in relation to other contemporary texts dealing with marxism, psychoanalysis, and cultural production.

ARH 390 Death and Transfiguration in the Art of Mesoamerica:

Death is an experience central to human existence. At the same time, death is a taboo in most human societies and rarely articulated and discussed. Together with birth, death is a classical example for a rite of passage, in which the human being is transformed from one state of existence into another. This process of transformation is accompanied by culture specific rituals, such as his burial. Other rituals help to free the soul (or the souls) or to integrate the dead into a new community in the otherworld. At the same time, ritual activities after death reconstitute the society of the survivors. In class, we will apply both an art historical and an anthropological approach to the study of material objects that are related to Mesoamerican beliefs about death and transfiguration. Vase paintings show the journey and transformation of the deceased, sculptures display the entrance into the otherworld, and burials give witness to ritual and cosmological order. This will be a comparative class where we focus on art from all areas of Mesoamerica to get a deeper understanding about parallels and differences between Mesoamerican civilizations.

ARH 390 Maya Hieroglyphic Writing:

This course will be a general and systematic introduction to Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. In the beginning the degree of previous knowledge about Maya writing will be determined and the outline of the course will be changed accordingly. The course will give an overview over all relevant issues of Maya hieroglyphic research. It is clear that many topics can only be addressed superficially; the goal is to provide participants with an analytical framework that permits them to penetrate more profoundly into the subject independently. The classes will consist of discussions of important articles, the joint analysis of texts in class, and homework. At the end of the semester, participants will prepare research papers dealing primarily with the newly discovered hieroglyphic inscriptions from Palenque, Chiapas.

ARH 394 Administration and Development:

This course provides the student with theoretical, technical and administrative information relative to the development and management of image collections. Topics are collection development and acquisitions, copyright, conservation and maintenance of slides and photographs, descriptive catalog records, classification schemes, technical procedures for production of visual resources, circulation and control for collections, planning for facilitated and applications of new technologies.