Roman Art & Architecture

ROMAN ART & ARCHITECTURE

The architecture, sculpture, and painting of ancient Rome from the second century BCE to the end of the Empire in the West.

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Blair Fowlkes Childs
  Info
• 3 points

Northern Renaissance Art

This course will explore extraordinary artworks made by Northern European painters, sculptors, weavers, and printmakers from about 1400 to 1590. Sessions will examine outstanding productions by such figures as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hans Holbein, and Bernard Palissy. The themes we will discuss include the redefinition of the aims and nature of art and the artist, Protestantism and iconophobia, the ascent of the printing press, the dissemination of humanism, familial relations, courtly politics, art and knowledge, technology, the persecution of witches, as well as exploration and the broad-based shift from a European to a global mindset. The course will focus on the patterns of visual culture and how those patterns develop over time. The course is suitable for students from all disciplines and all years.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Susanna C Berger
  Info
• 3 points

Renaissance Architecture

RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE

This course examines the history of architecture between roughly 1400 and 1600 from a European perspective outward. Employing a variety of analytical approaches, it addresses issues related to the Renaissance built environment thematically and through a series of specific case studies. Travelling across a geographically diverse array of locales, we will interrogate the cultural, material, urban, social, and political dimensions of architecture (civic, commercial, industrial, domestic, ecclesiastical and otherwise). Additional topics to be discussed include: antiquity and its reinterpretation; local identity, style, and ornament; development of building typologies; patronage and politics; technology and building practice; religious change and advancements in warfare; the creation and migration of architectural knowledge; role of capitalism and colonialism; class and decorum in domestic design; health and the city; the mobility of people and materials; architectural theory, books, and the culture of print; the media of architectural practice; the growth of cities and towns; the creation of urban space and landscape; architectural responses to ecological and environmental factors; and the changing status of the architect.

Students must registere for a required discussion section.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Michael J Waters
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe

19th-Century Art in Europ

How do you represent a revolution? What does it mean to picture the world as it “really” is? Who may be figured as a subject or citizen, and who not? Should art improve society, or critique it? Can it do both? These are some of the many questions that the artists of nineteenth-century Europe grappled with, and that we will explore together in this course. This was an era of rapid and dramatic political, economic, and cultural change, marked by wars at home and colonial expansion abroad; the rise of industrialization and urbanization; and the invention of myriad new technologies, from photography to the railway. The arts played an integral and complex role in all of these developments: they both shaped and were shaped by them. Lectures will address a variety media, from painting and sculpture to the graphic and decorative arts, across a range of geographic contexts, from Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid to St. Petersburg, Cairo, Haiti, and New Zealand. Artists discussed will include Jacques-Louis David, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault, J.M.W. Turner, Adolph Menzel, Ilya Repin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, C. F. Goldie, Victor Horta, and Paul Cézanne.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Meredith Gamer
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

ARTS OF JAPAN

Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the present. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts.

• MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Matthew P McKelway
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 3 points

ARTS OF CHINA, JAPAN AND KOREA

Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Yi-Bang Li
  Info
• 3 points

Introduction to East Asian Art: China, J

Intro to East Asian Art

This lecture course, with two weekly lectures and additional section meetings, surveys the broad outlines of the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan, introducing key concepts, such as multiplicity, impermanence, and transmediality, through a diversity of forms of visual expression in painting, sculpture, bronze, ceramics, lacquer, and architecture. The weekly lectures and discussions will explore interregional relations and influence in order to discover not only the features that make each geographical tradition distinct, but also closely interconnected. Among the key themes to be examined are the archaeology of ancient East Asia, the development of Buddhist art, the arts of landscape and narrative painting, woodblock prints, and finally East Asia after modernity.

• MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Jin Xu
  Info
• 4 points

INTRO LIT/METHODS OF ART HIST

Required course for department majors. Not open to Barnard or Continuing Education students. Students must receive instructors permission. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

• Instructor: Michael Cole
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Avinoam Shalem
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS

Prerequisites: the departments permission. Required for all thesis writers.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Branden W Joseph
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

REFLEXIVITY IN ART & FILM

This seminar will explore a range of individual works of Western art from the 16th century to late 20th century in which the tension between illusionism and reflexivity is foregrounded. It will focus on well-known paintings and films in which forms of realism and verisimilitude coexist with features that affirm the artificial or fictive nature of the work or which dramatize the material, social and ideological conditions of the work’s construction. Topics will include art by Durer, Holbein, Velazquez, Watteau, Courbet, Morisot, Vertov, Deren, Godard, Varda, Hitchcock and others. Readings will include texts by Auerbach, Gombrich, Brecht, Jameson, Barthes, Didi-Huberman, Bazin, Lukacs, Mulvey, and Daney

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan K Crary
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Medieval Art II: Castles, Cathedral, and

MEDIEVAL ART II

This advanced lecture course is intended for students with little or no background in medieval art of Latin (“Western”) Europe. It provides a comprehensive introduction to a period spanning roughly one millennium, from Pope Gregory the Great’s defense of art ca. 600 to rising antagonism against it on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. Themes under consideration include Christianity and colonialism, pilgrimage and the cult of saints, archaism versus Gothic modernism, the drama of the liturgy, somatic and affective piety, political ideology against “others,” the development of the winged altarpiece, and pre-Reformation iconophobia. We will survey many aspects of artistic production, from illuminated manuscripts, portable and monumental sculpture, stained glass, sumptuous metalworks, drawings, and reliquaries to the earliest examples of oil paintings and prints. While this course is conceived as a pendant to Medieval Art I: From Late Antiquity to the End of the Byzantine Empire (AHIS GU4021), each can be taken independently of one another. In addition to section meetings, museum visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, and The Morgan Library are a required component to the course. Students must register for a mandatory discussion section.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Gregory Bryda
  CULPA: 7 h-index: 1 Info
• 4 points

MODERN JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE

This course will examine Japanese architecture and urban planning from the mid-19th century to the present. We will address topics such as the establishment of an architectural profession along western lines in the late 19th century, the emergence of a modernist movement in the 1920's, the use of biological metaphors and the romanticization of technology in the theories and designs of the Metabolist Group, and the shifting significance of pre-modern Japanese architectural practices for modern architects. There will be an emphasis on the complex relationship between architectural practice and broader political and social change in Japan.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan Reynolds
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 3 points

Art and Theory in a Global Context

Art & Theory in Global Co

What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: John Rajchman
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

CURATORIAL COLLOQUIUM

The Curatorial Colloquium is taken in the second semester of study and is required for the completion of the M.A. in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies. The course introduces students to the history, theory and practice of object collection and display as well as to exhibitions such as Documenta and the various international biennials. The course is designed to allow for guest presentations on particular issues by curators and museum professionals, 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 in the exhibition and display of modern and contemporary art. In addition to department faculty, curators from MoMA, the Whitney, the International Center for Photography, and other institutions regularly participate in the colloquium.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Janet L Kraynak
  Info
• 4 points

MATERIALS & PRACTICES-ART HIST

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Frederique Baumgartner
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

MODA THESIS PREP

The MODA Thesis Prep is a required course for MODA students who plan to commence their thesis in the Fall of the following semester. The course introduces students to the fundamentals of an MA thesis; the process of identifying and developing an appropriate topic; the distinctions between a written/scholarly, or an exhibition-based thesis; formulating a proposal; and an introduction to the research and writing process that will be undertaken during the thesis year. As a central aspect of modern and contemporary art historical writing is determining one’s methodological approach––i.e. the “how” of the argument––during the course of the semester, key methodologies used in modern and contemporary art history will be reviewed, helping students to identify an appropriate approach to pursue with their select topic.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Janet L Kraynak
  Info
• 3 points

ORIGINS OF MOD VISUAL CULTURE

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• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jonathan K Crary
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 3 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.
• Instructor: Rosalind Krauss
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

How to Study Clothing?

At a time when courses on clothing draw exceptionally large audiences in the humanities field, and when art museums depend increasingly for audiences and revenue on exhibitions of clothing, accompanying those exhibitions with increasingly ambitious catalogues, it has become pertinent for graduate students in a range of art history sub-fields, as well as in adjacent disciplines such as history, design, or anthropology, to become familiar with the newest options for the study of clothing.  Among the 10 most visited exhibitions in the 150-year history of the Met, for instance, 5 have been devoted entirely or in part to clothing.  The trend toward the incorporation of clothing in temporary exhibitions nominally devoted to painting, or to a period subject, as well as the installation of clothing in permanent galleries, will also be discussed. This seminar reads recent books or museum catalogues, chosen to offer a representative range of approaches, time periods and issues of rank, gender, race, geography, and politics.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Anne Higonnet
  CULPA: 31 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Aesthetics

What is beautiful? What is sublime? What makes a work of art good? What are artworks for? This course will address these and other questions with a focus on Western art and its evaluation by European thinkers from antiquity to more recent times. We will begin with Plato’s discussions of art in the
Ion
and
The Republic
and we will turn next to Aristotle’s defense of art in the
Poetics
. The course will go on to discuss writings on aesthetics by thinkers such as Aquinas, Vasari, and Bellori. We will then devote considerable attention to eighteenth-century contributions to the history of aesthetics and art criticism, as it was in this period that the term “aesthetics” was first coined and that the “philosophy of art” was invented. Many of the most influential and difficult notions in modern aesthetics, such as genius and originality, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will analyze the writings of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Hegel, and others. This course is appropriate for graduate students in art history, visual art, history, philosophy, music, English, and other humanities departments.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Susanna C Berger
  Info
• 4 points

Art History and the Archive

This graduate seminar explores the role of archives and “the archive” in the history and making of art history. How has the discipline defined its archives in the past, and how is it doing so now? How does one identify, navigate, and mine repositories of information for the purpose of art historical study? And what challenges or problems—theoretical, methodological, ethical—does such work raise? Our investigation will be grounded in and guided by readings drawn from a range of fields, including history, anthropology, critical theory, and queer, feminist, postcolonial, Indigenous, and critical race studies. Over the course of the semester, seminar members will also design and undertake an independent research project using one or more archives in the New York City area.

• Instructor: Meredith Gamer
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points