Modern Art from Rodin to Warhol

Catalog description

From its beginnings in the 19th century to its deconstruction in the 20th, modernism instigated a series of seductive, often totalizing narratives about the role of aesthetics, progress, and power in the industrializing world. Those “Grand Narratives,” as philosopher JF Lyotard called them, allowed Euro-American art historians and artists to afford themselves central positions within an exclusive canon of modern art history. In Europe and later North America, avant-garde challenges to earlier styles and bourgeois aesthetics formed a dominant motif in these art historical narratives. Artists created ways of visualizing the world that reflected scientific and political revolutions-from Symbolism and the birth of Freud’s psychoanalysis to Abstract Expressionism and American Exceptionalism after WWII. We will explore how these modern revolutions unfurled and consider critiques that developed after modernism to question colonialism, empire, and exoticism. We will trace how images played central roles in ideological battles that led to both world wars. We will look at how governments in the postwar era deployed artistic programs to solidify soft power both at home and internationally. Finally, we will end with Neo-Dada and Pop Art, which proved to be harbingers of modernism’s successor: the plural voices of postmodernism. This course format features active lecturing, weekly discussions, and writing workshops. Assessment is based primarily on critical essays seen through several stages of revision. Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement.