Impressionism to Surrealism

Catalog description

A survey of European painting, sculpture, and photography from ca. 1850 to ca. 1940. ARTH 325 Impressionism to Surrealism (3) (GA;IL)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. Art History 325 is a survey of European painting and sculpture from approximately 1860 to the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940. This course will provide an introduction to Impressionism (Manet, Monet, Renoir, Morisot), Post-Impressionism (Seurat, Czanne, van Gogh, Gauguin), Symbolism, the Nabis, Edvard Munch, Rodin, Fauvism (Matisse), Cubism (Braque, Picasso), Italian Futurism (Boccioni), Expressionism (Kirchner, Kandinsky), Dada (Duchamp), De Stijl (Mondrian), Suprematism (Malevich), Russian Constructivism (Tatlin), the Bauhaus, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and Surrealism (Ernst, Miro, Dali). The course will close with Surrealist work done prior to the onset of the Second World War. The course is designed to meet two principal goals. The first is to increase students' powers of visual analysis and help them build a critical vocabulary for discussing an art object's medium, composition, style, and iconography. The second is to foster an understanding of the deep implication of the visual arts in their social and cultural contexts. The course therefore involves significant material relating to political, economic and religious issues. It investigates problems in patronage, function, reception and censorship. It considers such intra- and cross-cultural issues as representations of gender. As a general education course in the arts, this course provides an introduction to European art to a student of any major. This course has no prerequisite, and presumes no prior exposure to fine art. Students majoring in Art History will learn in it both the common vocabulary of the field and the outlines of the field that form the foundation for future study.