TWENTIETH CENTURY ART
The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond–situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century’s ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Alexander Alberro
CULPA: 12
h-index: 17
Info
- 4 points
18TH CENTURY ART IN EUROPE
This course will examine the history of art in Europe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. This was a period of dramatic cultural change, marked by, among other things, the challenging of traditional artistic hierarchies; increased opportunities for travel, trade, and exchange; and the emergence of “the public” as a critical new audience for art. Students will be introduced to major artists, works, and media, as well as to key themes in the art historical scholarship. Topics will include: the birth of art criticism; the development of the art market; domesticity and the cult of sensibility; the ascension of women artists and patrons; and the visual culture of empire, slavery, and revolution. The emphasis will be on France and Britain, with forays to Italy, Spain, Germany, India, America, and elsewhere.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Frederique Baumgartner
CULPA: 3 Info - 3 points
History Painting and Its Afterlives
History Painting & Afterl
This course will study the problematic persistence of history painting as a cultural practice in nineteenth century Europe, well after its intellectual and aesthetic justifications had become obsolete. Nonetheless, academic prescriptions and expectations endured in diluted or fragmentary form. We will examine the transformations of this once privileged category and look at how the representation of exemplary deeds and action becomes increasingly problematic in the context of social modernization and the many global challenges to Eurocentrism. Selected topics explore how image making was shaped by new models of historical and geological time, by the invention of national traditions, and by the emergence of new publics and visual technologies. The relocation of historical imagery from earlier elite milieus into mass culture forms of early cinema and popular illustration will also be addressed.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jonathan K Crary
CULPA: 11
Wikipedia
Info
- 3 points
Architecture and Deception
Fittingly in the age of fake news, this seminar addresses how lying, deception, concealment, and forgery have shaped the history of architecture and its historiography. It deals not only with architects’ lies, but also with how their architecture can be deceptive in many different ways. It also analyses how architectural narratives—including biographies—and historical accounts have been shaped by falsehoods and distortions.
While addressing philosophical issues that remain relevant to our present, the course will examine some of the most influential architects and key works of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century—a pivotal time within intellectual history for the definition of the concept of ‘truth’ and also, therefore, of its opposite.
Students will learn how to make use of the many lenses through which architecture can be investigated. The goal is not only to acquire a foundation in European architectural history, but also, more broadly, to develop the skills necessary to analyze architecture and to deal with original architectural objects and texts, as well as to cultivate a critical attitude towards architectural literature.
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Eleonora Pistis
Info - 4 points
Shaping Renaissance Rome
This year the eyes of the Catholic world will once again turn to Rome as the city celebrates the Jubilee—a tradition that has occurred every twenty-five years since the fifteenth century. In this seminar, we will investigate the architectural and urban history of Rome, stressing projects (both realized and ideal) conceived during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The city will be analyzed as the product of successive interventions that have created a deeply layered topography. How Rome has continued to build upon its past, both literally through physical reuse and figuratively through symbolic appropriation, from the time of Pope Martin V to Pope Sixtus V, will thus serve as a key theme. Working within this overarching framework, each class session focuses on a thematic group of projects that will be studied in relationship to one another rather than as independent monuments. We will examine churches, palaces, villas, public amenities, streets, and piazzas through the functional demands that shaped them and the life that went on in and around them. Topics under discussion include architectural and urban palimpsest; the resurgence of interest in antiquity; building typologies; self-aggrandizement by means of architectural patronage; the reverberations of the Counter-Reformation in architecture; the role of urban rituals and spectacles; and the representation of the city and its buildings in drawings, maps, and prints.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Michael J Waters
CULPA: 5
h-index: 3
Info
- 4 points
NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM
This course examines a diverse selection of social and aesthetic responses to the impacts of modernization and industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe. Using works of art criticism, fiction, poetry, and social critique, the seminar will trace the emergence of new understandings of collective and individual experience and their relation to cultural and historical transformations. Readings are drawn from Friedrich Schiller's Letters On Aesthetic Education, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Time," poetry and prose by Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin's writings on art and political economy, Flora Tristan's travel journals, J.-K. Huysmans's Against Nature, essays of Walter Pater, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and other texts.
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jonathan K Crary
CULPA: 11
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points
AIDS Is Contemporary
This seminar examines two intertwined propositions. One is the undisputable fact that the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is ongoing and that the disease continues to shape the way artists and activists grapple with public health, national policy, and medical injustice. The other is my own polemic-in-formation, which is that the eruption of AIDS in the 1980s was
the
threshold event that inaugurated what is now understood to be “the contemporary” within the art world. Rather than periodize the start of “the contemporary” with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, as has become conventional, we will investigate how the AIDS crisis precipitated a sudden urgency that more decisively marks this transition, in particular around the promiscuous inclusion of non-fine art forms such as demonstration posters, zines, and handmade quilts. We will read foundational texts on HIV/AIDS organizing and look at interventions with graphic design, wheat-pasting, ashes action protests, body maps, embroidery, performance-based die-ins, voguing, film/video, and photography.
We will consider: the inextricability of queer grief, anger, love, and loss; lesbian care; the trap of visibility; spirituality and death; activist exhaustion; the role played by artists of color within ACT-UP; and dis/affinities across the US, Latin America, and South Africa. Our investigations will be bookended by two critical exhibitions,
Witness: Against Our Vanishing
(Artists Space, 1989) and
Exposé-es
(Palais de Tokyo, 2023). Authors and artists/collectives include: Aziz + Cuchar, Bambanani Women’s Group, Felicano Centurion, Douglas Crimp, Ben Cuevas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Darrel Ellis, fierce pussy, Elisabeth Lebovici, José Leonilson, Nicolas Moufarrege, Marlon Riggs, Matthew Wong, and the Visual AIDS archive. We will conclude with feminist, queer, and collaborative artistic work made during the (also ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic. In small groups, students will lead discussions of our texts and the final project will be a collectively curated virtual exhibition.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Julia Bryan-Wilson
Wikipedia Info - 4 points
Temples of Kyoto
TEMPLES OF KYOTO
Perhaps no other single institution has played a more crucial role in the development and preservation of Japanese art and other forms of visual culture than the Buddhist temple, itself an entity that has undergone significant change, particularly in the modern period. This seminar will examine Buddhist temples in the city of Kyoto, Japan’s imperial capital from 794-1867 from their beginnings in the late eighth century into the early modern period. Although painting, sculpture, and architecture will be our primary focus, the course will provide students with multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives on the diverse forms of institutional organization, architecture, art, and liturgy that comprise Buddhist houses of worship, with particular attention to their development in the city of Kyoto. We will take a site-specific approach, attending to the following general issues: the legacy of continental practices in such early monasteries as Hōryūji and Tōdaiji in Nara; adaptations to Japanese urban space and landscape at Tōji and Enryakuji; physical changes in temples with the introduction of new sects such as Zen and Pure Land Buddhism; and the transformation of temples in the early modern period. Coinciding with the course will be a series of five guest lectures in February and March on the topic of medieval Japanese sculpture.
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Instructor:
Matthew P McKelway
CULPA: 6 Info - 4 points
Medieval Art I: ca. 280 1453 CE
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Holger A Klein
CULPA: 13
Info
- 4 points
NEO-DADA AND POP ART
This course examines the avant-garde art of the fifties and sixties, including assemblage, happenings, pop art, Fluxus, and artists' forays into film. It will examine the historical precedents of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann and others in relation to their historical precedents, development, critical and political aspects.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Branden W Joseph
CULPA: 9
Wikipedia
Info
- 3 points
Chinese Art: Center and Periphery
Chinese Art: Center& Peri
This course introduces you to the rich and diverse tradition of Chinese art by focusing on materials and techniques. We will discuss a wide array of artistic media situated in distinct cultural contexts, examining bronzes, jade, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, and textiles in the imperial, aristocratic, literary, religious, and commercial milieus in which they were produced. In addition to developing your skills in visual-material analysis, this course will also acquaint you with the diverse cultures that developed in China’s center and periphery during its five thousand (plus) years of history. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how native artistic traditions in China interacted with those in regions such as the Mongolian steppe, Tibetan plateau, and Central Asia.
Sacred Space in South Asia
“Sacred” space in the Indian subcontinent was at the epicenter of human experience. This course presents Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jain spaces and the variety of ways in which people experienced them. Moving from the monumental stone pillars of the early centuries BCE to nineteenth century colonial India, we learn how the organization and imagery of these spaces supported devotional activity and piety. We discuss too how temples, monasteries, tombs, and shrines supported the pursuit of pleasure, amusement, sociability, and other worldly interests. We also explore the symbiotic relationship between Indic religions and kingship, and the complex ways in which politics and court culture shaped sacred environments. The course concludes with European representations of South Asia’s religions and religious places.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Subhashini Kaligotla
Info - 3 points
GILLES DELEUZE:THINKING IN ART
The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has emerged as one of the richest, most singular adventures in post-war European thought; Foucault considered it the most important in France, and more generally, in the 20th century. In all of Deleuze's work there is a search for a new 'image of thought.' But how did art figure in this search, and how did the search in turn appeal to artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, as well as curators or critics? In this seminar, we explore the complex theme of 'thinkin in art' in Deleuze, and its implications for art in the 21st century or for the global contemporary art of today.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
John Rajchman
Wikipedia Info - 4 points
Art and Archaeology of Immigrants in Chi
ArtOf Immigrants in China
This seminar examines the art and archaeology of immigrants and immigrant communities in pre-modern China. Since the beginning of China’s dynastic history around the first millennium BCE, people from surrounding regions and even further afield have consistently moved into the Chinese heartland. These groups include not only nomads from the Mongolian steppes and the Tibetan Plateau, but also merchants, missionaries, and Muslims arriving via the so-called “Silk Roads”—a network of land and sea routes connecting China to the rest of the Eurasian continent (India, Persia, Central Asia, etc.). In certain periods, descendants of the Chinese diaspora and refugees in frontier regions also played significant roles in Chinese history. This seminar focuses on the archaeological remains and artistic expressions of these immigrants, as well as their interactions with native Chinese art and culture. Topics covered range from painting, sculpture, and calligraphy to crafts and architecture.
Architecture in the Age of Progress
Architecture and Progress
This course focuses on buildings and design theories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States that were responding to industrialization and rapid urbanization. Based on the premise that modernism in architecture has as much to with attitudes toward change as it does a particular set of formal traits, this class will examine those works that responded to significant technological and social upheaval in an effort to welcome, forestall, or otherwise guide change. We will look at broad themes of the period, including national character, rapid economic growth, the quickened pace of urban life, and shrinking distances due to emerging forms of transportation and communication, all in the light of new methods and materials of construction, new functional programs, and the growing metropolis.
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Instructor:
Samuel Isenstadt
Info - 4 points
CRITICAL COLLOQUIUM
The structure of the colloquium combines reading and analysis of texts by major theorists and critics. Each week discussions focus on key terms and analytical lenses in the history of art and art criticism. The course is designed to allow for guest presentations on particular issues by critics and writers, just as it draws on the expertise and participation of Columbia faculty. The aim is to develop students critical thinking and for them to learn directly from leading practitioners writing about modern and contemporary art. In addition to department faculty, writers for Artforum, Grey Room, Parkett, Texte zur Kunst, and October, among other venues, regularly participate in the colloquium.
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Janet L Kraynak
Info - 4 points
MA METHODS: COLLOQUIUM
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Frederique Baumgartner
CULPA: 3 Info - 4 points
The Real Picasso
Picasso’s work is the great kaleidoscope through which 20th-century art passes: from its beginnings in Cubism through which the world is given as though through cut crystal; to the commercial forms of collage; to the presage of surrealist anguish; and, finally, to an untoward neo-classicism. The result of this restless exploration is the invention of multiple formal languages, which need to be deciphered in spite of the perverse literature on the subject which insists on transposing this into the art-historical language of iconography. The literature is rich with the analytic struggles between the great Picasso scholars: William Rubin, Leo Steinberg, and Picasso’s biographer, John Russel. The skirmishes over the “iconography” of cubism extends to the interpretation of the work’s relation to “primitivism.” This controversy has given rise to yet a new vector on Picasso’s work: structuralism and semiotics.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Rosalind Krauss
CULPA: 10
Wikipedia
Info
- 3 points
PROSEM-INTRO-STUDY OF ART HIST
Required course for first-year PhD Students in the Art History Department.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Lisa Trever
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
THE PERFORMATIVE OBJECT
The 1960’s and ‘70s witnessed an explosion of performance works in the visual arts. Departing from precedents in the early 20th century, performance during this period is marked both by its international reach and breadth of artistic experimentation: process painting, extreme bodily acts, textual scores, video and audio recordings, sculptural installations, ritualistic drawings, and direct political interventions, proposing complex relations between object, process, and act. This course explores this history and its legacy through the lens of two contributing factors: first are political events, upheavals and revolutionary movements that erupted across the globe, generating artistic performance as protest and activism; and second is an emergent media culture characterized by technologies of repetition and recording, resulting in performance works that are defined through reproduction rather than liveness, while taking inspiration from experimental film, music, and dance. To explore these themes, the class will examine select case studies of individual artists, movements and collectives: among which include the NY based Guerilla Art Action Group; Japanese Gutai and international Happenings; Brazilian neo-Concretism; South Korean Experimental art (
silheom misul
); as well as video, audio, photographic and durational works (by Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Tehching Hsieh, etc.), to name a few. In final research papers, students will trace this genealogy, examining contemporary performance works that are realized variously through networked and digital forms, uncapturable ephemerality, or direct social action.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Janet L Kraynak
Info - 4 points
Photographies in Counterpoint
This course examines the impact of the display of different photographic practices around the world beginning in the 1990s on the heretofore universalizing discourse around photography and modernism. It will read certain canonical texts of photo criticism in counterpoint with research on African photography. We will also consider how the display of these photographs has heightened ethical questions around the competing rights of photographers and their subjects. Who has influenced whom?
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Zoe S Strother
CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
Painting in Sixteenth-Century Japan
PAINTING IN 16TH CENTURY
Japan’s brief Momoyama period (1573-1615) is often characterized as an “age of gold,” an era in which politically powerful warlords commissioned lavish works of art. During the 150 years between the Ōnin War and establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 17th century, a series of military rulers unified the warring Japanese states, and for the first time in Japan’s history engaged briefly with the world beyond China through contact with European missionaries and merchants. The same warlords participated in every sphere of cultural life, sponsoring the construction of lavish fortresses and temples, contributing to the development of the arts of Tea and Noh drama, and encouraging the importation of printed books from China and Korea. This course will explore the art of painting in the Japan’s “era of unification.” We will concentrate on the gilded screens and panel paintings that temples, castles, and palaces, but will also study fan paintings, portraiture, and genre painting in order to comprehend the profound impact that this pivotal era would have on all succeeding periods of Japanese art.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Matthew P McKelway
CULPA: 6 Info - 4 points
Cities of Knowledge: Orientalizing Manha
'Orientalizing' Manhattan
In this course, graduate students from different disciplines will explore the ‘Orient’ in Manhattan. The course involves the active search for and analysis of Manhattan's urban space to survey its ‘Oriental’ buildings, monuments, parks, public inscriptions, and even ephemeral, everyday spaces that carry the sense of the ‘Orient’ to the city. Cities are physical places, yet, they are also assemblages of different layers of time, and geographies. These layers are designed to create communal identities and evoke recollections of past memories. Focus will be put on the written history of these spaces by searching in archives (in the City of New York) and digging out written and oral information about the histories of the formation of these spaces and their interactions with their surroundings.
The course will cover many monuments, like the famous obelisk in Central Park or the lessknown Jordanian column in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens; public buildings like Central Synagogue on Lexington, the Islamic Cultural Center on Upper East Side Mosque, or Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, NY; but also, the inner decorations of restaurants, bars (the Carlyle Bar) and even oriental Halal shops, as well as ephemeral spaces like international fairs, and Cairene grill boots.
Traditionally, Islamic art and Islamic architecture have been studied separately within art history and architecture history disciplines. The purpose of this course is, in the first place, to bridge the gap between the two disciplines while working across theories of visual culture and critically revisiting urban studies. A further aspect evolves the discourse about architectural ornament as part of the entire approach to ornament as an ‘Oriental’ trope. Thus, canonical discussions about Orientalism will form part of the course’s readings and will contribute to understanding how the architectural ornament of Manhattan forms identities. The course will introduce and discuss theoretical issues concerning urban architecture and ‘Orientalism’ and the making of the image of ‘Others’ in NYC public spaces. It will also provide a historical survey of these spaces and aim to create a novel comprehensive map for ‘Orientalized’ New York.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- 4 points