Art in the Age of Empire, 1790–1900

Catalog description

Focusing on Europe and its intersections with the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, this course will explore how artists in the long 19th century responded to the economic, political, and social upheavals of modernity and imperialism. We will look to artists depicting plantation economies, sanitizing the slave trade, and abolitionists forging a new visual rhetoric to depict bodily freedom and personhood. We will consider how artists reveled in capitalist spectacle, leisure, and entertainment, including through the nascent medium of photography. We will also grapple with how realism and materialism became tools to voice politics amidst revolution and nationalism, social inequality, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Readings and lectures will introduce the movements of neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, aestheticism, and neo-impressionism— and dig deeper to take up questions of collective and THE CURRICULUM 26 individual; center and periphery; gender, race, class, and sexuality; and land, landscape, and industry. This lecture- seminar hybrid will also entail field trips to area museums. Anthropocene Aesthetics