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COURSES SPRING 2009

Histart 190F

MODERN ART IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE (4 units) Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:30-5 101 Moffitt, CCN: 05565 Aruna D'Souza

After the relative stability of the 1870s and 1880s in France, the last decade of the 19th century ushered in a period of deep ideological confusion, marked by the anxieties over population growth (and thus over the sexual practices of its citizens), rise in labor movements, anti-Semitism, reactionary religious conservatism, and, simultaneously, the rise of anarchist leftist movements and an early phase of feminist activism. Within this ideological confusion, the place and role of art-making was no less fraught: from the politically motivated work of figures like Van Gogh and Seurat, to the simultaneously radical and deeply conservative breakdown of the boundaries between art and craft effected by the Nabis circle, to the ideological disengagement of a figure like Cézanne, to the politicized "retreat" of Gauguin into a modernity produced outside European borders in Tahiti, French art of this period struggled to respond to a constantly shifting cultural and political ground. This course will delve into a decade that has (except for its most famous practitioners) rarely been studied by art historians, in order to tease out the stakes of various positions within the art world. In addition to canonical figures, we will look at a range of under known artists, often working in uninspiring visual mediums, in order to get a sense of how art was being shaped by its historical moment, and (as important) to get a sense of how that historical moment was being shaped by art.

 

 

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