DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

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.

 PDF

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.

PDF

 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.

PDF

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.

PDF

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.

PDF

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. 

PDF

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.

PDF

No description available.

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.

PDF

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.

PDF

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.

PDF