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There has been no movement more influential to twentieth-century art than Cubism. This course treats the years leading up to World War I as a watershed moment in Western painting when the status of art, its relationship to the public sphere and everyday life, and its syntax were radically redefined. Working in close collaboration, painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque attacked painting, sculpture, and collage with an unmatched intensity and seriousness. Fueling their formal and technical experimentation was the conviction that the existing syntax of painting based in illusionism and perspective-- a syntax which had been accepted as the norm since the fifteenth century-- was inadequate to representing the full range of an individual¿s visual and conceptual experience. In an attempt to move beyond illusionism and create an art more suited to the complexity of modern experience, Picasso and Braque looked to a range of art forms and traditions omitted from the canon of Western art, including African and Oceanic masks and sculpture which had recently arrived in French ethnographic collections, as well as urban popular culture in the form of song sheets, wall paper, newspapers, and interior decoration. This course looks closely at the incredible range and variety of Cubist art, as well as historical and more recent interpretations, and shows how Cubist art is indispensable for understanding twentieth-century developments as diverse as Dada, Russian Constructivism, abstract art, and conceptual art.
COURSE FORMAT: Seminar
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