ARTH 2600 - Introduction to Modern Western Art, from the Age of Revolutions to the Age of Capital

(CA-AS)

Fall, Summer (offered on demand). 4 credits. Student option grading.

Fall, A. Kim; Summer, I. Dadi.

This course surveys major artistic movements and artists in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in 1950s New York. It introduces students to the study of “modernism” as a broad designation of the defining aesthetic innovations of this period. The course will consider the main currents of modernism with a focus on both formal analysis and historical context: Neoclassicism and Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, Abstraction, Dada and Surrealism, the School of Paris and Abstract Expressionism. Major themes will include the onset of capitalist development within a metropole-colonial world system, the arrival of new scientific and technological discoveries promising transformations of everyday life, the emergence of new forms of individual and collective experience, and the impact of revolutionary political alignments on avant-garde practice and the novel theorizations which addressed it. Finally, the course will consider the formative encounters of various modernisms with a non-European world of art, and offer critical perspectives on the contemporary philosophical responses to this encounter.