Revolution to Realism: European Art, 1770-1870

Catalog description

This course surveys the major trends in the arts of Europe and its colonies in the tumultuous decades stretching from the French and Haitian revolutions in the late-eighteenth century to the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth. Starting with Jacques-Louis David's revolutionary history paintings, we study Napoleonic representations of empire, Goya's imagery of violence, romantic representations of madness and desire, the origins of both nationalist and ecocritical landscape painting, the aesthetics of the industrial revolution, as well as the politicized realism of Gustave Courbet. Some of the themes that will be addressed include: the revolutionary hero, the birth of the public museum, the specters of slavery and colonialism in modern representation, the anxious masculinity of romanticism, the rise of industry and bourgeois culture, the beginnings of photography and caricature, the quest for national identity and, not least, the origins of modernist painting. Throughout, we will strive to recover the original radicalism of art's formal and conceptual innovations at times of profound political and social crisis.