GERST 3770 - The Art of the Historical Avant-Garde

(crosslisted)
(also ARTH 3672, COML 3840, ROMS 3770, VISST 3672) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

P. McBride.

At the height of modernism (1910-1930), avant-garde artists and intellectuals began arguing that art could be employed to “reconstruct the universe,” as one Futurist manifesto put it. They joined forces with the most radical political movements of their day and created innovative artistic practices -ranging from collage, montage, and the found object to the installation and the happening -that continue to shape our perception of art and popular culture. This course will focus on strategies for politicizing art as well as formulating a new relation between high and popular culture in Germany, Italy, and France in the first half of the twentieth century. Our investigation of avant-garde art will include original documents of Italian Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism.

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