GRADUATE CURRICULUM
FALL 2009, Spring 2010
Fall 2009
ARTH 500 (F) Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Portraiture [same as ARTH 400 (F)] d.c.4
The portrait is one of the oldest Western art forms, and one of the few to remain an object of both demand and innovation nearly continuously until the present day. One might follow the history of portraiture, in fact, by tracking its relationship to the changing art around it: its emergence in antiquity as a variety of honorific sculpture, its identification in the Middle Ages with the iconic devotional image, its transformation in the early modern period into a quasi-autonomous collectable, its fraught subsequent life as both an embodiment of private decadence and a revolutionary touchstone. This course will look at the whole history of portraiture, but with special attention to the years after 1500, when Raphael embraced portraits as the epitome of “Renaissance” art and Michelangelo all but refused to make them, when Dürer turned the portrait into a distinctively modern religious artform and preachers both north and south insisted that portraits had no place at all in the church. Students will be responsible for readings, a presentation, and a research paper.
Enrollment limit: 14, with places for 7 undergraduate [ARTH 400] and 7 graduate students [ARTH 500] assured.
Hour: 1:10-3:50 M COLE
ARTH 502 (F) Violence and Artistic Representation
Topics in the psychology, politics, and aesthetics of violence in artistic representation, from Lessing to the present day. A significant portion of the class touches on 19th-century art, but readings will be drawn from a range of fields and disciplines. Research projects in other fields welcome. Students will be responsible for readings and one research paper/presentation.
Enrollment limit: 12. Preference will be given to graduate students and then to senior majors.
Hour: 2:30-5:00 W GOTLIEB
ARTH 504 (F) Methods of Art History and Criticism
This is a seminar in the intellectual history of the history of art, with some concentration on the ways in which this disciplinary tradition has been challenged by recent critical theory. It will begin its study with the “founders” of the field and end with issues and problems that generated the “new art history” twenty years ago and “visual studies” in the last decade. Topics to be covered include: style, iconography/iconology, semiotics, identity politics, formalism, deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and gender studies. Resident Clark Fellows will occasionally talk to us on perspectives of their choice. Each student will write one short mid-term paper and a longer concluding essay, as well as present a couple of the readings to the class.
Limited to and required of first-year students in the Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Hour: 1:10-3:50 T HOLLY
ARTH 506 (F) Nostalgia/Modernity: Landscape in Britain, France, and America, 1650-1900 and Beyond d.c. 5
This seminar rests on two suppositions, one a core principle, the other an assertion to be tested. The first part of the course, articulated through discussions of readings and images (both real and virtual), will focus on the principle: that the primary mode of representing the "natural world" through a Western genre of art called "landscape" developed in early modern Europe and remained relatively consistent for over two hundred years. We will explore the theoretical, critical, and practical implications of this historical phenomenon. The second part of the seminar, developed through student presentations of research topics, tests the assertion: that, despite seeming to undermine the traditions of "landscape," modern and contemporary European and American art, with its expanding vocabulary (land art, earthworks, new media, etc.) and overt political dimension (ecological, environmental, etc.) nevertheless remains wedded in many ways to the framework developed centuries before.
Enrollment limit: 12. Preference will be given to graduate students and then to senior majors.
Hour: 1:10-3:50 R RAND
ARTH 555 (F) John Singer Sargent d.c. 5
In this seminar we will consider the life and art of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Paintings in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute will focus our discussions and provide the basis for exploring his art-making and his place within the art-culture of his day. Sargent—born in Italy, trained in France, active in England—epitomized the cosmopolitanism of American artists in the late 19th century. Consideration of his career will encourage us to think about questions of nationality; the mechanisms of fame in the modern art world; the tension between the lures of artistic tradition and innovation; and the fluctuating taste for his art among critics, collectors, and historians of the past century. Students’ responsibilities will include class discussion, weekly summaries of readings, two short papers, an oral presentation (and response to someone else’s), and a final research paper. A field trip to Boston is likely.
Enrollment limit: 12. Preference will be given to graduate students and then to senior majors.
Hour: 1:10-3:50 F SIMPSON
Spring 2010
ARTH 500 (S) Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Arte Povera [same as ARTH 400 (S)] d.c. 4
In the 15th-century, a number of Italian painters began to eliminate gold from their pictures, letting the works’ value depend of their makers’ skill rather than on the cost of their materials. In the 16th century, Tintoretto adopted a manner of painting quickly with a restricted range of color so as to be able to win prominent commissions and deliver them at low cost. In the 17th century, Caravaggio spurred imitation and provoked criticism with grimy-looking paintings that appeared to feature poor models taken from the street. In more modern times, painters have assembled cheap, mass-produced materials directly into pictures. This course will look at the “impoverishment of the image” as a strategy across time. Students will be responsible for readings, a presentation, and a research paper.
Enrollment limit: 14, with places for 7 undergraduate [ARTH 400] and 7 graduate students [ARTH 500] assured.
Hour: 1:10-3:50 M COLE
ARTH 501 (S) Museums: History and Practice
This course will examine the history of museums in Europe and America, focusing on historical traditions and current expectations affecting institutional operations today. Historical tradition and current practice as it relates to museum governance and administration, architecture and installation, acquisitions and collections, cultural property issues, as well as the many roles of exhibitions in museum programming, will be addressed, along with museums’ social responsibility as scholarly and public institutions in an increasingly market-driven, non-profit environment. Evaluation will be based on oral presentations as well as two term papers. Enrollment limit: 12. Preference will be given to graduate students and then to senior majors.
Hour: 2:30-5:10 T CONFORTI
ARTH 508 (S) Art and Conservation: An Inquiry into History, Methods and Materials
ARTH 508 is designed to acquaint students with observation and examination techniques for works of art, artifacts and decorative art objects, give them an understanding of the history of artist materials and methods, and familiarize them with the ethics and procedures of conservation. This is not a conservation training course, but is structured to provide a broader awareness for those who are planning careers involving work with cultural objects. Class format includes slide presentations, lectures, gallery talks, hands-on opportunities, technical examination of artwork and group discussions. Classes are held at the WACC building in the Stone Hill Center on the Clark campus. Field trips this semester will include the Governor A. Nelson Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York, and two others to be announced. Students receive a syllabus with session outlines and required reading lists. Required reading is mainly from books on reserve at the Clark Library. No book purchases are required. Attendance is required at all sessions. The course grade is based on exams given throughout the semester, which are weighted according to the number of sessions covered. There is no final exam.
Enrollment limit: 12. Preference will be given to graduate students and then to senior majors.
Hour: 6:30-8:30 MR BRANCHICK and WACC STAFF
ARTH 509 (S) Graduate Student Symposium
This course is designed to assist qualified fourth-semester graduate students in preparing a scholarly paper to be presented at the Graduate Program’s annual spring symposium. Working closely with a student/faculty ad hoc advisory committee, each student will prepare a twenty-minute presentation based on the Qualifying Paper. Special emphasis is placed on the development of effective oral presentation skills. Each student is required to present three dry runs and a final oral presentation at the symposium. Prerequisite: successful completion and acceptance of the Qualifying Paper. Limited to and required of second-year students in the Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Hour: TBA GOTLIEB
ARTH 544 (S) History Painting d.c. 4 or 5
This course is about the genre known as “History Painting,” which since the Renaissance, and particularly after the founding of the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture, came to be perceived as the most complex and noblest genre of painting. The course asks about how and why history painting emerged as a category, what its rules were, and why they mattered. It also explores history painting in its historical development, with a particular focus on the moment (roughly) between 1650-1850 when the category bore the most weight and significance, and will not shy away from moments (like the period of the French Revolution) when the relationship between History Painting as “Istoria” and the historical process was most dynamic and problematic. It will explore the work of painters from Raphael to Poussin and Rubens to David, West, Hogarth, Reynolds, Ingres, and Delacroix. The course will be assessed on the basis of oral presentation (normally focused on an individual painting or group of paintings) and one research paper per student. In addition, students will be expected to lead discussions of readings and to respond to the presentations of others in the class. Enrollment limit: 12. Preference will be given to graduate students and then to senior majors.
Hour: 2:30-5:00 W LEDBURY
ARTH 554 (S) The Matrix and the Market: Printmaking and Photography in the Late Nineteenth Century d.c. 5
During the last half of the 19th century, technical, commercial, and aesthetic approaches to printmaking and photography experienced dramatic paradigm shifts. Etching, for example, simultaneously functioned as a reproductive medium and one that carried experimental, vanguard associations. Practitioners of lithography strove to distance themselves from denigrating commercialism and raise the medium’s status to a respected art form. Photography, in turn, negotiated the boundaries between “documentary” and “artistic.” This seminar will address the complex issues that swirled around printmaking and photographic matrices, critical responses to the various processes, artist-driven initiatives, and the formative role of the art market and book trade in shaping popular opinion. We will consider these topics across political and geographic borders from Europe to the United States, reading both primary and secondary sources. The class will be held in the study room of the Clark’s department of prints, drawings, and photographs, with visits to the Clark and Chapin libraries and the Williams College Museum of Art likely. Students will be responsible for readings and involved class discussion, several short and one long presentation, and a final paper. Enrollment limit: 12. Preference will be given to graduate students and then to senior majors.
Hour: 1:10-3:50 R CLARKE
ARTH 569 (S) Film as Art: Cinema in the Weimar Republic d.c. 5
This seminar will explore the attempt, in Weimar writing on film and film production itself, to raise the status of cinema from a low-brow mass entertainment medium to a visual art form worthy to stand alongside traditional painting. As the critic Rudolf Arnheim argued in Film als Kunst (1931), “in film one continues to work with the means and devices of traditional art, [and] one can speak just as seriously about Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, editing, and panning as one does about Titian, Cézanne, Baroque, and pleinairism.” Among directors, F. W. Murnau studied art history at university, Fritz Lang began as a painter and sculptor in Vienna; they and other filmmakers availed themselves of the services of painters and established architects for the creation of film sets. The seminar will focus precisely on this constitution of film as a primarily visual medium in which, to paraphrase Arnheim, the most profound content was conveyed by light, framing, physiognomy, and editing, against which the word and the often kitschy or hackneyed story line remained secondary. While the primary focus of the seminar will be the work of German directors, we shall also examine the work of filmmakers of other nationalities who were passionately committed to raising film to the level of high art: for example, the Russian Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin was a major cinema event in Germany, and the Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer, who directed three films there. Topics to be examined include: “Expressionism” in film, Weimar film theory and criticism, the physiognomic paradigm, the transition from silent film to sound film, as well as case studies of specific films. During the first half of the semester there will be weekly readings in English with occasional short source readings in German, hence a reading knowledge of German is a prerequisite for enrollment. Requirements: students will be responsible for an oral report, to be presented in revised, written form at semester’s end, and a 10-minute critical commentary on another student’s oral report. Enrollment limit: 12.Hour: 1:10-3:50 F HAXTHAUSEN