ART 244: MODERN ART 1885-1945
This course examines the great ruptures in European, American, and Mexican art that today we call, and usually celebrate as, modernist. It relates aspects of that art to the equally great transformations in late 19c and early 20c western society: revolutionary ferment, the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism, colonialism and its discontents, and world war. It places alternative modernist histories, including unheralded artists and more obscure works, in dialogue with those artists and works of the canon. Among the major figures to be studied are Duchamp, Matisse, Malevich, Picasso, Rivera, Seurat, and van Gogh.
Texts
(available for purchase at Odyssey
Bookstore or on reserve at the main library)
Charles Harrison, et. al., Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early
Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
Briony Fer, et. al., Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between
the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)
Requirements
The final grade is
based on: active participation in class discussions, a midterm examination,
a final paper/exam. All three components are valued
equally in the tally of the final grade, and all must be passed in order
to pass the course.