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This course will introduce students to the major avant-garde art movements from the first half of the twentieth century as they took root in France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Russia. Movements we will examine include Symbolism, Cubism, German Expressivism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Photography and montage, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus. Our focus will be on painting, but we will also take seriously attempts to go beyond painting in an attempt to gain greater immediacy or social relevance for art. To this point, we will study the emergence of design and photography as parallel fields of inquiry. This course aims to introduce the main artists and movements and give an overall sense of modern art's trajectory over fifty years, but its main emphasis will not be straightforwardly chronological or stylistic. Some lectures will be broad discussions of large topics such as the "Total work of art," "Photography," or "Primitivism"; other lectures will focus on a single art work in depth. Some lectures will focus on a single artist's career, and still others on an historic period. Topics which will receive special emphasis include the relationship between abstraction and figuration; the impact of primitivism and contact with non-Western arts; modernism's relationship to mass culture; modernism and classicism; war and revolution; gender and representation; and the utopian impulse to have the arts redesign society as a whole.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ART Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: NONE
Last Updated on MAR-19-2004
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459