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Academic Year 2005/2006


Cubism
ARHA 342 FA

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.

MAJOR READINGS

Neil Cox, CUBISM (Phaidon, 2000)
William Rubin, PICASSO AND BRAQUE: PIONEERING CUBISM (Museum of Modern Art, 1989)
A Course Reader

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Weekly response papers or presentations and a fifteen-page analytic paper, including both a draft and a revision.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS

Instructor uses enrollment requests and does not respond to emails prior to the beginning of class. All interested students should attend the first day of class.

COURSE FORMAT: Seminar

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ART    Grading Mode: Graded   

Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-30-2006


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