Introduction to Global Modern Art

Catalog description

This course explores major developments in modern art around the world, including historical avant-garde movements in Europe and their points of intersection with movements and practices from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. While making no claim to comprising a totality, the course offers an introduction to modernism - mainly in painting, sculpture, photography, and critical writing - as a global phenomenon. While looking closely at a range of individual artists, artworks, and movements, the course contends with ways of conceptualizing modernism and modernity from the late 19th century through the mid 20th century in global terms, considering issues of periodization and temporal disjuncture, power asymmetry and decolonization, provincialism and cosmopolitanism, cultural particularity and comparison, international relations and exhibition politics.