DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Some of the most influential works of art and architecture and enduring styles in world history were created in the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, Greece, and the Roman Empire. In this course we investigate their formal traditions, styles, and built environments, focusing on the highlights—by general consensus—of these cultures’ artistic and technological achievements. A primary objective is to examine the key monuments that have influenced Western (and global) art over the centuries, along with gaining skills in visual literacy and an understanding of art historical methods and aims. Another goal is to provide insight into the specific historical contexts in which buildings, sculptures, and paintings were produced and the particular political, social, and religious functions they served. To provide exposure to a wide variety of material within a critical framework, we will examine specific case studies to supplement textbook readings.

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This course offers an introduction to major artistic monuments and artistic developments of the medieval period (roughly 300-1450 CE) with a focus on Europe and the Middle East. It surveys a diverse range of works of art and architecture from this period and positions them within their original social, political, economic and spiritual contexts. Lectures and discussion sections will trace the shifting ways in which images were defined and perceived over time and consider how the flow of objects and styles linked Europeans to a broader world system. Students will develop skills in visual analysis and gain a basic understanding of the methods and aims of art historical study.

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AH 228 offers an introduction to the art and architecture of the Pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico, Central, and South America from approximately 1500 B.C.E. to the Spanish invasion of the 16th century. Among the topics to be examined will be the Mesoamerican ballgame, the great stone heads of the early Olmec civilization, the mural painting tradition of the massive urban center of Teotihuacan, Maya calendrics, history, and writing, and the eclectic art style developed by the short-lived imperial Aztec. In the Andean region, we will explore the complex and enduring textile traditions of Peru and Bolivia, the early religious cult of Chavín, the great earthworks of the Nazca, the spectacular recently-discovered burials of Moche rulers, and the impressive stone architecture and road system of the Inka. Students will learn about the intellectual and artistic achievements of these ancient civilizations, to recognize differences in artistic styles between cultures, and to track how these cultures interacted with each other. Additionally, we will briefly study the impact of the European conquest on indigenous art and culture. Travel to the Art Institute will be required at least once during the term.

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How did European art come to be “European art”? This course studies the early modern period, ca. 1400–1800, the time of formation of many of the standard conventions and genres of European art, such as linear perspective and landscape. The period also coincides with the beginnings of European exploration and colonization of other parts of the world. What, if any, is the relationship between these two phenomena? What is the relationship of art to power, knowledge, conflict, race, religious devotion, gender relations, and aspirations to freedom and self-expression? We will study key works of European art produced in what are conventionally called the “Renaissance” and “Baroque” eras, in dialogue with historical context and art objects produced around the globe. This course is intended as an introduction to the artworks and historical material covered in the class and to skills in visual analysis and historical interpretation. No prior art history coursework is required.

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What is contemporary art? When is contemporary art? For whom is contemporary art? Where is contemporary art? And...why does contemporary art matter? This undergraduate survey provides an introduction to some of the central artists, themes, works, and debates comprising the history of contemporary art (roughly 1960 to today), with a particular focus on the social and political engagements that have informed artistic developments during those decades. The ways in which artists have approached, contested, reflected, and reconfigured the problems and possibilities of institutions - be they social, governmental, academic, political, commercial, media-based, or the art world itself - is a central theme around which the course will find critical traction and build historical context. In addition to cultivating an understanding of what has made particular genres and instances of artistic practice significant to art history, this course allows us to think about how globalization, technology, current world conflicts, and social media, for example, have shaped artistic production, art criticism, and the art market. It also asks us to reflect upon the temporality of our present and what it is that is "contemporary" to our "now." Assignments include short writing assignments based on local art exhibitions of international artists, weekly readings and online viewings, regular canvas posts, and a flexible-format final exam. No prior knowledge of art history or contemporary art is required.

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This course places the revolutionary developments that took place in Italian art and architecture from 1300 to 1527 within a broad historical and thematic frame. This entails scrutiny of particular artists - Giotto, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Mantegna, Botticelli, Bramante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and others - and particular works of art - paintings, sculptures, prints, and architecture. Emphasis falls on the most active and influential art center, Florence, but the political, social, and artistic environments of Rome, Siena, Mantua, Milan, Ferrara, Urbino and Venice are also considered. The aim of the course is to provide an understanding of the social and physical contexts of early Renaissance art, as well as an introduction to a range of art historical analyses and interpretative methods. In pursuing this goal, issues of production and reception, gender and representation, religious and political ideologies, public and private space, memory and likeness are addressed.

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 This course is designed to introduce you to the history and art of the book, particularly in the Western world, and particularly in the early modern period. As I approach it, this course has three separate, but inter-related, emphases or themes. The first is about seeing the book as a physical artifact – how to look at a book as a biblio-archaeologist would. To do this you will learn to uncover information about the nature, purpose, and implications of a book's material features: its type, paper, printing, illustration, and binding.

The second theme is the impact of the book on European society. That is, the book not only as a commercial commodity and as the primary vehicle for the transmission of ideas but also as an expression of the mentalité, or mind-set, of all those who came in contact with it: author, printer, publisher, seller, binder, illustrator, reader, and censor.

And the third theme that will weave through our investigations is the mutability and transience of the text, the sometimes fragile and tenuous transmission of a work from edition to edition, century to century, civilization to civilization. In exploring this theme we will be mainly concerned with the question of how the physical form of a book affects the way a text is understood and disseminated.

Over the course of the semester you will have the advantage of being able to work with many “real” examples of manuscripts and printed books from the McCormick Library of Special Collections in order to learn the basic taxonomy of the book, that is, to be able to identify and name its parts. You will also develop the ability to ascertain what these physical objects can tell us about their creators’ varied intentions and anticipated audiences. You will be able to do this simply by virtue of what you discover by examining them attentively, quite apart what you learn by reading them. In other words, books are “primary sources” from several points of view, and you should finish the semester more aware of how many different kinds of things books can tell us.

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 The materiality of art is obvious—and central to how art looks, how it means, and how it endures. This new course is designed as a survey of current discussions of the materiality of objects and works of art made during the early modern era (c. 1400-1700). Works in a variety of materials—ivory, wax, woods, feathers, shells and mother-of-pearl, oil paint, lacquer, metal, fresco, stone—populate a series of case studies drawn from European, Mesoamerican, and East Asian workshops. In addition to learning about what goes into making an early modern work of art, students will trace the geographies of materials, and the ways in which materials, format, and durability all affect the viewer’s experience. Students will read, analyze, and discuss current research on the makings of art, on theories of the materiality of art, and problems in conservation of art—and will participate in close examination of works in the collections of the Block Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Loyola University Museum of Art. (Admission to collections is free; travel is available on the intercampus shuttle.) Prior coursework (AH 250 or AH 330) is beneficial but not required.

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The course will study a wide range of developments in European art from the second half of the 1800s, a fabled era of innovation in painting, sculpture, urban transformation, architecture, printmaking, photography, and World’s Fairs. We will analyze art in light of a constellation of explanatory factors (“causes”): personal, aesthetic, technical, gender, social, ethnic, political, economic, and institutional. The primary focus will be the foremost vanguards (avant-gardes) of the era, individuals and groups who contested norms and authorities, but we will also consider competing forms of visual culture. Because of the cultural authority of Paris in these years, French art and architecture will claim most of our time, but we will consider the entanglements of France with other cultures and nations. At the center of the course will be discussions of Realism (Gustave Courbet), Édouard Manet, Impressionism (Cassatt, Morisot, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Caillebotte and others), and “Post-Impressionism” (Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne). A central question will be: why is Impressionism so beloved today? Among other goals, the course will endeavor to make Impressionism weird again.

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Taking inspiration from Nathan Hare’s 1970 essay “Black Ecology” and Félix Guattari’s 1989 essay “The Three Ecologies” (which discusses ecology in relation to environment, society, and human consciousness and also includes a memorable comparison of Donald Trump to invasive algae), this course addresses the question of eco-aesthetics in relation to environmental justice with a focus on the experiences, political struggle, and art making of people of color in the U.S. and internationally. We will read fiction and scholarly writings, view artworks, and participate in one or more environmental projects. The class will also host several guest speakers (artists, scholars, and activists). It will also involve several field trips during class time—potentially extending into the early evening—and/or on weekends.

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This course surveys the field of new media art, or digital art. It considers Western art and artistic practices employing digital computational technologies from the room-sized mainframe computer to today's mobile and ubiquitous media, from the 1960s to the present. We will attend to the work of a variety of artists working in a host of emergent genres (net art, glitch art, GIFs, etc.) in order to gauge the ways in which digital media has changed, continues to change, and has failed to change contemporary art, culture, and experience more broadly. Topics to be studied include new media art's vexed relation to the art world, networked sexuality, and Chicago and Midwestern ties to new media art. The course will include visits to fall 2018 exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the VGA Gallery, and the Block Museum.

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This course explores modern architecture, design, and urban planning from the late 19th century to the 1970s. Focusing primarily on the modern movement in architecture, we will situate key figures, objects, and design practices within broader political, cultural, social, and economic contexts. Among the themes we will explore are how the major world wars, the Soviet Revolution, colonialism and decolonization influenced the production of architecture; how aesthetic considerations such as the relations between form and function were imbricated with questions about technology and labor; how architectural modernism became the International Style and what were the effects of its internationalization; and how discourses about hygiene, race, and climate informed modern architecture’s global expansion.

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PLEASE NOTE: This course is cross-listed with American Studies 301-20; for American Studies, it serves as a core seminar. Art History majors will be admitted to available seats by permission of the instructor (please send an email to rebecca.zorach@northwestern.edu explaining interest and background).

"Chicago 1968" typically refers to the tumultuous events surrounding the Democratic National Convention, but this is not the full story of this momentous year. This course studies 1968 (defined broadly as the late 60s/early 70s) through political events and cultural production, with a particular focus on the Black Arts Movement (an interdisciplinary movement in the visual arts, literature, music, theater, and film) along with the Chicago Imagists and Chicago Surrealists, media activism, the women's movement, and the community mural movement. We will examine primary texts (novels, poetry, newspaper articles) images, film and video, and archival materials. Students should expect to work collectively and individually and to do rigorous primary historical research (with guidance).

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Since its early 19th century entry into both academic discourse and western colonial control, Borobudur in Central Java has been in constant flux, literally and metaphorically in terms of its place in Buddhist, Asian, and architectural history and canons. A massive stone pyramid with open-air galleries for low-relief narrative sculpture, the structure culminates in a platform for a life-sized sculptural mandala. It forms a totalizing monumental Buddhist cosmological model, but was suddenly abandoned soon after completion in the ninth century—perhaps because of a volcanic eruption. Gradually it was reduced to a ruin as it was reclaimed by jungle. In the mid-19th century it became a source of antiquities for wealthy visitors from abroad, and subsequently has been transformed into an archaeological site, a work of art, an architectural complex, and after 1949, a national monument for Indonesia. It has inspired European artists as diverse as M. Cornelius, William Daniell, and Paul Gauguin and remains a perennial subject for contemporary Indonesian painters. Its architecture, narratives, history, and meaning—past and present—have occupied statesmen, engineers, architects, anthropologists, Buddhologists, art dealers, curators and art historians. Yet is rarely receives the notice it deserves in the art historical curriculum. The seminar will explore the phenomenological experience of the site, the narratives of its reliefs, issues of image-text relations through the identification of particular Buddhist texts as sources, its place in colonial and contemporary ideologies, and the ongoing attempts to understand the intentions of its makers.  Four visiting speakers have been arranged.

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The impact of the printing press in the Renaissance is often compared with the internet today.  But how did other technological and artistic innovations transform early modern culture? This course will use the renowned sixteenth-century print series entitled the Nova Reperta (New Discoveries) to explore and question innovation and novelty in the Renaissance.  Topics represented in the series include syphilis and its cure, the Americas, distillation, eyeglasses, and the iron clock. To study the prints requires engagement with the history of art, science, medicine, and technology.  The course will be taught primarily in the rare book room of the Newberry Library and will include class visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Adler Planetarium to examine related works on paper, paintings, printed books, and objects. Students will aid with the preparations for a Newberry exhibition and contribute to a forthcoming related publication. 

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The seminar will study the global rise and proliferation of World’s Fairs in the modern era: high profile political, aesthetic, technological, spatial, scientific, social, and cultural events in many key world cities. We will mine their impact on habits of display, consumption, visual and literary representation, and travel during the era of High Capitalism. The seminar will focus in upon specific fairs starting with the foundational 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (in Hyde Park, London) through to the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (in Paris). The French capital hosted the lion’s share of World Expositions in this period, but fairs were mounted in cities in the USA, England, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Spain as well.

Advanced undergraduates as well as Ph.D. students may enroll.

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The seminar is intended to acquaint students with the work of William Morris and to evaluate his position in the history of modern art, poetry, design politics and environmentalism. For this purpose, we will look at, read and discuss Morris and his works from four different vantage points: 1) in the history and theory of ornament; 2) as an entrepreneur and professional artist in late Victorian England; 3) as a theorist and critic of art, design and politics; and 4) as an environmentalist, ecologist and architectural preservationist.

We will read texts by Morris, Pevsner, Thompson, Salmon, Naylor, and Eisenman, among others.

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In this seminar, designed for undergraduate art history majors, we will consider the history of art and architecture, and explore the range of approaches that define the discipline today. Through a series of short writing exercises, we will examine ways of writing about works of art from different critical perspectives, including biography, iconography, formalism, social history, as well as feminist and post-colonial theories. This course will address the historical context in which these options emerged and the stakes and implications of choosing a particular approach.

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In this class students will negotiate the practical and conceptual challenges that arise in reinterpreting an exhibition for three different national contexts. The Block Museum’s exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa includes loans from museums and research institutes in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria. Returning unique versions of the exhibition to these countries that use each country’s loans as a focal point is among the exhibition’s goals. Working in teams in close consultation with the exhibition’s curator, students will formulate a curatorial approach, select key objects, and revise label texts.

 The Block Museum’s exhibition Caravans of Gold tells the story of medieval exchange across the Sahara Desert, and its far-reaching impact. Trans-Saharan exchange was central to an interconnected economy that stretched from West Africa to Europe, the Middle East, and beyond, stimulating the movement of things, people, and beliefs, especially Islam. Iconic works of medieval art—including gold leaf embellished books and panel paintings, ivory boxes and sculptures, lusterware ceramics, and delicate glass vessels—were tied to this trade. By bringing together such artworks with archaeological fragments from major sites in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria the exhibition reveals a largely forgotten view of the Middle Ages.

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In our epoch of the Anthropocene–when climate change has been deemed irreversible and its effects command more attention–looking to the roots of this crisis with industrialism in the late-nineteenth century reveals the interwoven colonial and environmental conditions that are at the heart of our contemporary moment. This seminar will teach the history of French art during the late nineteenth century–encompassing the artistic movements of Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau–through the lenses of the environment and colonialism. Conducted at the Art Institute of Chicago, this course is a unique opportunity for students to develop the analytical skills of visual analysis first-hand in the museum collection, to apply these skills to theoretical paradigms, and to gain exposure to museum practices more generally.

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This course offers an introduction to the analysis of art and visual culture. The course will review research tools, cultivate analytic and writing skills, and survey a broad spectrum of themes and issues that inform current work in art history. The course will give some attention to classic, field-defining texts, but more to recent critiques, issues pertinent to scholarship in a globally and historically broad range of subfields, and approaches drawn from feminist, queer, trans, decolonial, and critical race theory.

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Team-taught at the Art Institute of Chicago by faculty and staff from Northwestern, the Art Institute of Chicago, and University of Chicago, this course focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects in the AIC collection and the methods and questions such inquiry raises. Students will be introduced to basic techniques of stylistic and scientific analysis as well as recent theoretical debates that resituate art history as a study of physical things and conceptualize their disembodied images. Required for all first-year art history graduate students.

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Aniconism is often defined as the absence of any material representation of living, divine, or mythical beings. Widely recognized as aniconic phenomena - both in antiquity and in cross-cultural perspective - are built monuments, such as pillars and steles, and natural formations, such as uncarved stones. In ancient Near Eastern studies, aniconism has traditionally been examined within the context of biblical texts prohibiting the making of cult images, or "idols," and has played a significant role in analyzing artistic and religious practices in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In recent decades, aniconism has attracted fresh attention among scholars engaged with a wide range of historical periods and geographical regions, with significant results. These investigations have newly emphasized how nineteenth-century scholarship profoundly shaped subsequent studies, promoting the idea of an "aniconic age" that was widely adopted by scholars of ancient Greece, the Near East, and early Buddhism. Drawing on innovative approaches introduced from anthropology, religious studies, art history, and media studies, and new investigations of ancient written sources, this course explores current directions in the study of aniconism within multiple cultural spheres: ancient Greece, Egypt, the Near East, and the early Islamic world. What does "aniconic" embrace, and how do we demarcate it from other representational modes? What are the advantages and limitations of cross-cultural comparison? Topics include analysis of key concepts such as image, representation, figuration, and abstraction; the coexistence of aniconic and figural approaches to representing the divine; the agency and efficacy of material and scale; aniconism and the spiritual experience of vision; comparative approaches to classification; and aniconism and the natural environment.

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In her seminal study of the medieval world system, Janet Abu-Lughod sidelined sub-Saharan Africa as a non-player in the intricate circulations of goods and people that spanned the medieval world. Drawing in part on the show “Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time” at the Block, this course will consider recent work—based largely in the material record—which has begun to refigure our understanding of the place of Africa in medieval studies. While the focus of class meetings will be on West Africa between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, students with interests in other regions (whether within Africa or which engaged in contact with it) or the historical legacy of this era may pursue those concerns in their research projects. In attending to this new material, we will also grapple with the theoretical problems posed by the historical differences between the fields of sub-Saharan and medieval art history. Given the paucity of general resources currently available on this material and in order to help students hone their skills as teachers and public intellectuals, the final project for the course will be a group-produced website/open course rather than the traditional research paper.

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The impact of the printing press in the Renaissance is often compared with the internet today.  But how did other technological and artistic innovations transform early modern culture? This course will use the renowned sixteenth-century print series entitled the Nova Reperta (New Discoveries) to explore and question innovation and novelty in the Renaissance.  Topics represented in the series include syphilis and its cure, the Americas, distillation, eyeglasses, and the iron clock. To study the prints requires engagement with the history of art, science, medicine, and technology.  The course will be taught primarily in the rare book room of the Newberry Library and will include class visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Adler Planetarium to examine related works on paper, paintings, printed books, and objects. Students will aid with the preparations for a Newberry exhibition and contribute to a forthcoming related publication.

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The seminar is intended to acquaint students with the work of William Morris and to evaluate his position in the history of modern art, poetry, design politics and environmentalism. For this purpose, we will look at, read and discuss Morris and his works from four different vantage points: 1) in the history and theory of ornament; 2) as an entrepreneur and professional artist in late Victorian England; 3) as a theorist and critic of art, design and politics; and 4) as an environmentalist, ecologist and architectural preservationist. We will read texts by Morris, Pevsner, Thompson, Salmon, Naylor, and Eisenman, among others.

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The seminar will study the global rise and proliferation of World’s Fairs in the modern era: high profile political, aesthetic, technological, spatial, scientific, social, and cultural events in many key world cities. We will mine their impact on habits of display, consumption, visual and literary representation, and travel during the era of High Capitalism. The seminar will focus in upon specific fairs starting with the foundational 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (in Hyde Park, London) through to the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (in Paris). The French capital hosted the lion’s share of World Expositions in this period, but fairs were mounted in cities in the USA, England, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Spain as well.

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In art history as in popular culture, approached with veneration or condemnation, Picasso is synonymous with the idea of modern art. Examining Picasso’s work from his early scenes of bohemian Paris to his engagement with primitivism, his invention of cubism, his association with the surrealists, his protest mural Guernica of 1937, and his later communist-inspired mural projects, we will ask: What makes Picasso such a powerful sign of the modern? Engaging the Picasso historiography is to engage in a focused way with the methods of modernist art history and its critics. Readings include texts by contemporaries like Gertrude Stein, Carl Einstein, and Georges Bataille, the social art history of John Berger, classic modernist texts by Clement Greenberg and Leo Steinberg, semiotic readings by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, post-colonialist revisions by Simon Gikandi, Patricia Leighten and Christopher Green, feminist critiques by Carol Duncan and Anne Wagner, Michael Fitzgerald’s economic analysis of prices and dealers, the literature on Guernica including Marxist critics of the 1930s, Sarah Wilson’s Picasso/Marx, and a special emphasis on T.J. Clark’s extensive meditations on the artist and his modernism.

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This course offers an introduction to the analysis of art and visual culture. The course will review research tools, cultivate analytic and writing skills, and survey a broad spectrum of themes and issues that inform current work in art history. The course will give some attention to classic, field-defining texts, but more to recent critiques, issues pertinent to scholarship in a globally and historically broad range of subfields, and approaches drawn from feminist, queer, trans, decolonial, and critical race theory.

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This research seminar examines the relationship between architecture, resources, and territory in 20th century modernization projects in Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa. We will explore the conditions in which architecture has become a tool of development (a concept which we will address critically), and the functions it assumed in the ordering and managing of labor, natural resources and industry. While modernization projects are usually considered in terms of engineering and large-scale infrastructure, the architectural lens will offer a tool for a nuanced social-cultural analysis of the epistemological assumptions and value systems that undergird these projects. We will examine the role architecture played in the consolidation of "development thinking" in the shift from late colonial projects to the Cold War, specifically in reformulating the colonial relations between resource extraction and production, and the new emphasis placed on the maintaining of the "smallness" of small scale societies in terms of village habitation and vernacular forms of production.

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Since its early 19th century entry into both academic discourse and western colonial control, Borobudur in Central Java has been in constant flux, literally and metaphorically in terms of its place in Buddhist, Asian, and architectural history and canons. A massive stone pyramid with open-air galleries for low-relief narrative sculpture, the structure culminates in a platform for a life-sized sculptural mandala. It forms a totalizing monumental Buddhist cosmological model, but was suddenly abandoned soon after completion in the ninth century—perhaps because of a volcanic eruption. Gradually it was reduced to a ruin as it was reclaimed by jungle. In the mid-19th century it became a source of antiquities for wealthy visitors from abroad, and subsequently has been transformed into an archaeological site, a work of art, an architectural complex, and after 1949, a national monument for Indonesia. It has inspired European artists as diverse as M. Cornelius, William Daniell, and Paul Gauguin and remains a perennial subject for contemporary Indonesian painters. Its architecture, narratives, history, and meaning—past and present—have occupied statesmen, engineers, architects, anthropologists, Buddhologists, art dealers, curators and art historians. Yet is rarely receives the notice it deserves in the art historical curriculum. The seminar will explore the phenomenological experience of the site, the narratives of its reliefs, issues of image-text relations through the identification of particular Buddhist texts as sources, its place in colonial and contemporary ideologies, and the ongoing attempts to understand the intentions of its makers.  Four visiting speakers have been arranged.

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