DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Taught primarily at the Block Museum, this course is based on close engagement with artworks as ever-changing material objects and the methods and issues that they raise. From raw materials in an artist’s studio to fragile objects that require or resist conservation, we will trace the life history of things and consider the ethical and interpretive questions that arise from their changing states. Students will be introduced to the material histories of objects and global media practices, basics of technical and scientific analysis and related theoretical debates that resituate art history as a study of physical things as well as their disembodied images.

PDF

This course examines the intersections between historical and political developments in the African diaspora and the history of art.  It starts with a consideration of slavery and its visual representations and thereafter explores efforts by people of African descent to forge the contours of an internally complex diasporic community through visual means.  Broader issues—such as modernity, race, capitalism, coloniality, syncretism, transnationalism and the limits of visibility—are productively complicated both historically and theoretically when examined through a consideration of visual arts in and representations of the African diaspora.  Readings in the course will include work by Robert Farris Thompson, Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, and Richard Powell.

 PDF

 This undergraduate lecture course introduces one of the most contested terms of art-historical inquiry today: modernism. For some, the word simply defines Western art of the last two hundred odd years. For others, modernism refers to forms of advanced visual art, whether the cubist distortions of Pablo Picasso or the all-over abstractions of Jackson Pollock, that break with established representational conventions. For still others, the term singles out modes of artistic opposition to the ravages of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, imperialism, and war that continue to define our world. Over the course of the quarter, we will keep these competing definitions in play as we examine signal episodes of European and U.S. modernism from the mid-nineteenth- through mid-twentieth- centuries as well as their counterparts in Brazil, China, Haiti, India, Japan, Mexico, and Nigeria. At the same time, we will engage the work of thinkers from Freud to Marx whose writing has come to define the modern era and our approaches to its understanding within humanistic discourse. We will proceed more or less chronologically, doubling back or projecting forward when necessary to understand the determinative historical influences that have shaped the development of modernist idioms in particular times and places. In every instance, we will study works of art that have confronted our culture’s visual means—of life, death, consumption, and display—and attempted to work them over into critical form.

 PDF

How do institutions such as museums, along with other created contexts such as websites and archaeological sites developed as tourist destinations, shape and construct our notions of the past? How are these institutions enmeshed with broader cultural and political agendas regarding cultural identity and otherness, the formation of artistic canons, and even the concept of ancient art? This course explores modern strategies of collecting, classification, and display of material culture from ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome, both in Europe and the United States and in their present-day homelands.

By analyzing programs of collecting and display, it seeks to understand both the development of modern scholarship in ancient art and the intersection of institutional and scholarly programs. Topics examined include the historical development of modern displays devoted to ancient civilizations in public and private museums, notions of authenticity and identity, issues of cultural heritage and patrimony, temporary and “blockbuster” shows, virtual exhibitions and museums, and the archaeological site as a locus of display.

REQUIRED TEXTS: None. Assigned readings will be available on CANVAS.

PDF

 Who was Rembrandt and (why) are his works still relevant? The Dutch artist is celebrated as the inventor of the selfie; as a master of landscape, portraiture, and history (narrative) paintings; and as an experimental printmaker. He experimented throughout his life with materials, media, and genres. His most famous work, The Nightwatch, updated the sober conventions of group portraiture in ways we are still accounting for. He was a Dutchman by birth and never left his native country, but has been claimed as an intrinsically German and even a modern artist.

Timed to coincide with the 350th anniversary of the death of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), “Rembrandt Year 2019,” this lecture course offers students an introduction to the works, life, and critical legacy of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist. By the end of the quarter, students will be familiar with the most central aspects of his art, its primary themes and concerns; the place of Rembrandt’s oeuvre within early modern art in a general sense; and the ways in which his memory has been preserved and his efforts celebrated over the intervening centuries. We will also consider the matter of connoisseurship (“who done it?”) with direct reference to workshop practice, considering technological methods of analysis. This course coincides with a stunning exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago of Dutch and Flemish Drawings, which we will visit. Topics to be addressed include but are not limited to: Rembrandt Storyteller; early modern self-portraiture; Rembrandt experimental printmaker; Rembrandt and the Dutch landscape; the representation of the passions; Rembrandt and classical antiquity; Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt (connoisseurship and attribution); the representation of women; sight and blindness; Rembrandt and film; and Rembrandt collector.

PDF

One of the highly developed genres of Himalayan Buddhist art that corresponds (to an extent) with Euro-American artistic traditions is portraiture.  This course will look at the development of portraiture in pre-modern and contemporary Himalayan art across media, including painting, sculpture, and photography.  After grappling with theoretical accounts of portraiture in general, we will look at the functions and the conventions of portraiture in its Himalayan religious and socio-cultural contexts, paying special attention to the ways that align with and differ from other traditions of portraiture, broadening its definition and questioning assumptions about universal values.  Studies of specific portraits will be drawn from Central Tibet, Nepal, the Western Himalayas, and Tibetan-inspired contexts in the Mongol and Manchu courts of China.

PDF

This course studies art that is motivated by ecological concerns, exploring how artists and activists have adapted artistic strategies to address environmental issues over the past 50 years. Themes to be addressed may include sustainability, materiality, labor, and recycling; how artists collaborate with natural processes; how art can address crises such as industrial toxins and global warming; and the place of human ecologies and political struggles in relation to gender, race, poverty, territory and indigeneity. The class will look broadly at environmental art but will focus specifically on one or two neighborhoods as case studies in the Chicago area; another case study will be the region around Carbondale in southern Illinois. There will thus be several field trips outside of class hours. In particular, a required field trip to Carbondale (with travel costs and accommodations covered) will be held from the afternoon of Thursday, October 24 to the evening of Sunday, October 27. Students must be available for this trip in order to take the class. 

PDF

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.  

PDF

This seminar will explore Spanish art in all media (including painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints) produced over the course of the long sixteenth century. It will begin with the reign of Fernando and Isabel and then trace artistic developments during the emergence and consolidation of the Spanish Habsburg transatlantic empire.

 Art collections, royal portraiture, building decorative programs, cartographic imagery — all of these complementary endeavors, and others, will be investigated to help situate Spain in the wider world of Renaissance culture in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas.

 Seminar participants will make use of the rich holdings of the Newberry Library and Chicagoland museums for individual research projects. As some course readings will be in Spanish, a reading knowledge of that language would be beneficial but is not required.

PDF

“Appropriation” is a capacious term equally indexical of cultural, power, and proprietary relations. In the South African art-historical context, appropriation can refer to the ongoing forms of displacement, marginalization, and primitivization of the continent’s artistic production. Within North American art-historical discourse, appropriation often refers to a brand of photo- based practice associated with the work of white women artists such as Cindy Sherman who emerged in the New York art world of the late 1970s. In this exploratory graduate research seminar, we will aim to historicize, contest, and crosswire these mobilizations of the term by considering how various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have differentially conceived of appropriation as well as how forms of “borrowing” and theft—whether of images, artifacts, bodies, or lands—continue to shape the politics of cross-cultural encounter in the Americas and beyond, whether “North” or “South.” For the first day of seminar, all interested students should read Athi Mongezeleli Joja’s “Challenging Appropriation vs. Scapegoating” and review the Fall 2019 version of the course syllabus, both of which can be accessed here: https://www.criticaltheory.northwestern.edu/mellon-project/critical-theory-in-the-global-south/sub_projects/appropriation-and-its-discontents.html

PDF

This seminar posits the figure of the ruin as a heuristic device to reflect upon time and memory in our approaches to the built environment as archive. While the ruin was a source of fascination and study throughout the 18^th and 19^th century as the emblematic embodiment of historical consciousness, its status in the 20^th century has radically diminished with the advent of modernism. Nonetheless, the idea of the ruin, and by extension, its often ambivalent or dialectic representation of history, has not disappeared but persistently gained new meanings in its different modes of manifestations, for example as a novel aesthetic based on the fragment, or as a practice of ruination in urban warfare. Through an examination of a series of readings and case studies encompassing such topics as the dialectics of destruction and reconstruction, obsolescence, post-industrial dilapidation and infrastructural precariousness drawing from postwar and contemporary cases studies from across the globe, the seminar will explore the various ways in which questions of memory, nostalgia, crisis, and catastrophe inform new approaches to the archive and the historiography of modernity.

PDF