Undergraduate Courses in Art History 2018-2019

This introductory course is designed to provide students with a broad understanding of art, architecture and design produced mainly - although not exclusively - in Western Europe and North America between the 1850s and the 1950s. We will be looking at paintings, buildings, and functional objects as both products of the modern age and active agents of modernization; as both reflecting the larger social, political and economic context in which they were created and changing it. The lectures will address the many ways arts, architecture and design participate in the construction of modern identities, new physical environments and experiences of time, as well as global cultural exchange. In addition to the major artistic figures and movements of the era, special attention will be given to the roles of state institutions in the process of art production and display. Students will be provided with tools to develop the essential skills of visual, contextual, and comparative analysis of artworks, buildings, and designed objects, and encouraged to critically reflect on the historical and theoretical texts on modernity and modernism(s).

This course examines a variety of artistic forms in early modern Europe (1400-1700). Throughout, we will be attentive to the way particular visual and material qualities of artworks relate to the circumstances that underlay their creation (workshop structures, patronage interests, market forces) as well as the anticipated conditions of their viewership.

Through a selection of both canonical and less-canonical artworks, we will examine the role that artistic representation played in confirming and differentiating gendered identities, social ranks, and political positions. We will equally investigate the controversial place of images within devotional contexts with reference to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Another consideration will be the way that images and the exchange of objects mediated the relationship between European powers and non European sites and peoples, an issue we will investigate through case studies focused on the visual cultures of colonial subjugation and diplomatic embassy. In this way we will begin to contextualize European art within the wider global context of power relations in the early modern world.

This course provides a historical overview of East Asian art and visual cultures from early dynastic times (ca. 6th century BCE) to the 21st century. Focusing on shared cultural foundations, we will mainly discuss China, Korea, and Japan. The course will be structured around several important themes such as funerary, Buddhist, landscape, and literati arts, each of which will be dealt with in chronological order, generally following the order of China, Korea, and Japan. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think about both the overarching characteristics and more particularly local and temporal variations in East Asian art.

This lecture course provides an introduction to the visual arts and architecture of the “long” eighteenth century. Highlighting developments in Britain, France and their colonies, we will consider key issues of the period including: the uses of pleasure; claims for modernity against established traditions; and the role of the arts in negotiating politics of class, race, gender and distance in an age of rapid social change. With particular emphasis on the dynamic encounters between Enlightenment art and science/technology, the course also introduces formal analysis, critical contextualization and other fundamental techniques of art-historical practice.

As Svetlana Alpers wrote in her provocative book, The Art of Describing: “In Holland the visual culture was central to the life of the society. One might say that the eye was a central means of self-representation and visual experience a central mode of self-consciousness. If the theatre was the arena in which the England of Elizabeth most fully represented itself to itself, images played that role for the Dutch.” In this course, we explore how the 17^th-century Dutch Republic represented itself to itself through the examination of a wide range of visual imagery, from Rembrandt and Vermeer to various forms of popular culture. The focus will be on the role of the visual in shaping merchant capitalist identity in a society dominated by Calvinism. This process of self-definition will be examined in relation to a number of key symbolic sites such as the home, the marketplace, the tavern, the brothel, the theatre, the town hall, the anatomy theatre, the curiosity cabinet, the church, the synagogue, the city and the countryside, the nation and its trading partners and colonies. Our exploration of Dutch visual culture as a central mode of self-consciousness will thus open into a broader understanding of economic, social, historic, religious, literary, mercantile, colonial, and scientific developments.

Seeking to undo the cultural dominance of formalist modernism, the 1960s-1970s was a period of significant transformation. Adopting, renewing and expanding the attitudes of the historical avant-garde, contemporary art proceeded to question the formalist principles of self-referentiality, medium specificity, presentness, the understanding of the artwork as something simply to be seen and looked at, as well as the spectator’s disembodied response to the artwork. It engaged—although not consistently and often obliquely—with the realities of society at large and the political turbulences of the times, especially with counterculture, the events of May 1968, the civil rights movements of African Americans and Native North-Americans, the feminist movement and the struggle for gay and lesbian equal rights, the opposition to the Vietnam War and the memory of the Holocaust. It invented forms and aesthetic strategies to think aesthetics politically. These included: practices of dérive and détournement, assemblages, happenings and environments, the promotion of the everyday object and the devising of “specific” objects, scored events, non-dance performances, linguistic propositions, the combination of popular culture and so-called high art, earth interventions, “poor” aesthetics, televisual art, expanded media, intermedia, and much more.

Critical Issues—Contemporary Art examines the historical development of this transformation from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Following a roughly chronological order, it investigates some of the main art movements and practices that shape that history: combines, Happening, Fluxus, Situationist International, Pop Art, Minimalism, Light and Space, Conceptual Art, Land Art and Arte Povera, institutional critique, performance art, video art, feminist art, activist art, and postmodernism. The course focuses on the study of North American and Western European art but attends to its cultural diversity and expands the Western paradigm when possible. Throughout, it addresses issues of gender, race, nationality and sexuality.

Transatlantic Slavery has impacted every facet of social, political, psychic, and cultural life. Lasting four hundred years, it literally changed the face of the world, forcibly relocating, displacing, and marginalizing entire populations, creating the Black Diaspora, new cultures, religions, and societies and helping to produce and concretize colonial racial categories. However, scholars of Slavery Studies have often neglected the importance of art and visual culture as a site not only of the documentation of slavery, but as a generative site where slavery and its oppressive colonial ideologies were produced and deployed. This course will explore art and visual culture practices, institutions, and objects of relevance to Transatlantic Slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation. Although the course will cover various regions (ie. the Caribbean, Canada, USA, Europe etc.) and historical moments, the main focus will be on forms of western cultural production of both “high” and “low” art and popular visual culture (painting, sculpture, prints, photography, cinema, dress, performance etc.)

This is an advanced seminar on art historical methods intended for Honours Art History students in their final year at McGill. The course will focus on the question of how we think about art (what is art? how do we evaluate something we think of as art? where do the models for understanding and even defining art come from?) It will explore these questions through addressing the views of different stakeholders: artists themselves, academics, curators, collectors, educators, critics, and various beholders and audiences. The ultimate goal of the course is for students, by questioning the history of how the idea of “art” came to be, what it is now and should be in the future, and how it functions in societies across time, to gain a fuller understanding of art history, the discipline that reciprocally defines and constructs art. To focus our discussion, we will trace key historical and methodological issues with special attention to those that inform current questions, approaches, and practices. Beyond this, the seminar also focuses on the special skills it takes to be an art historian including primary and secondary research, application and grant writing, producing publication quality original research, and mastering oral presentation and the description and interpretation of artworks in the classroom, museum, and other environments.

Bodies in Contact: Body Arts and Cultural Encounters
This seminar will explore body arts through tattooing and other body modification practices within a global framework of cultural encounter and exchange. Expanding on the work of anthropologists and art historians, we will examine a variety of artistic media including: colonial prints and drawings, popular tattoo patterns and designs, anatomical and medical illustrations, circus posters, scrimshaw carvings, magazines on radical body modification including Re/Search, and the artworks of contemporary Indigenous artists working in the Pacific and North America as well as contemporary body modification artists. This course will cover historical periods from first contact in the Americas circa 1500 to present day “modern primitives” and the tattoo renaissance. In addition, we will consider body arts in relation to constructions of self and community, appropriation, resistance, and the assertion of multiple identities.

Affect in Contemporary Art
The “affective turn” in the arts, humanities and social sciences initiated in the mid-1990s and 2000s took different, albeit often overlapping, conceptual trajectories. These trajectories include: a psychology and neuroscience perspective focusing on the identification and transmission of primary affects and emotions, established by the work of Silvan S. Tomkins and António Damásio, and expanded by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn, Teresa Brennan and Catherine Malabou; the Deleuzian Spinoza-informed perspective taken up by Brian Massumi and renewed in the work of Nigel Thrift, Jane Bennett, Katherine Stewart, Lauren Berlant, Catherine Malabou and new materialist thinkers, which understands the affect as a pre-conscious, non-representational or emergent, consistently embodied, intensity or force; a rehabilitated Bergsonian perspective arguing that affection not only embodies but also productively “contaminates” and can therefore change our perceptual habits—a view defended by Mark Hansen in his research on contemporary media; and a cultural studies oriented perspective discernable in Lawrence Grossberg’s attempt to explain how ideologies are internalized through affective investments—a tradition leading to the investigation of the “cultural politics” of emotions by Sara Ahmed, “ugly feelings” by Sianne Ngai and “felt spaces” by Gernot Böhme. The study of the affect persists in the 21st century, not only in the humanities and social sciences, but increasingly so in art, affective neurosciences and the field of cognitive studies. This seminar examines the interdisciplinary development of the affective turn and seeks to devise analytical tools to better understand its exploration in recent art. It asks: “What is affect (especially in contrast to feeling and emotion)?” and “Why is affect so important to the development of 21st-century art?” The artists whose work will be examined, include: Anne Imhof, Mette Ingvartsen, Tino Sehgal, Shannon Bool, Nadia Myre, Kent Monkman, Alejandro González Iñárritu, John Akomfrah, Ed Atkins and Jon Rafman.

An Engine, Not a Camera: Photography and/as the History of Combustion
This seminar proceeds from a simple observation: many of the major figures in the early history of photography were also makers of combustion engines. This fact exerts little force in recent critical discussions of photography where “indexicality,” the ontology of the photographic image and related concerns continue to command attention. This seminar seeks to change that situation. Prompted as much by the obsolescence of chemical photography as the unavoidable evidence of global climate change, we will return to the archive with eyes opened widely. What happens, the course asks, if we stop treating combustion-engine research as some distraction from the “properly” photographic endeavors of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot, Nadar and their contemporaries, and instead see the two domains as inextricably interconnected? How might reclaiming the photo-combustion help us to revisit not only familiar claims about photographic ontology, but abiding narratives of modernity that turn on notions of speed, acceleration and mechanicity? Our aim, then, is less to excavate obsolete media-technologies, but to sound the critical stakes and methodological procedures needed to illuminate visual art’s material enmeshment with the making of the “Anthropocene.”

Early modern art criticism conveys a fascination with the moving image—an artwork so strikingly lifelike that it appears to come alive. The force of the moving image is physical, immediate, and emotive. Such works deploy stunning visual effects that move and even change their human interlocutors. In the words of one commentator, the viewer thus confronted by the incarnate artwork “becomes another person.” This type of response to images has been largely repressed from art historical discourses that focus on the distanced intellectual interpretation and contemplation of the work of art as a closed field of knowledge. Frequently dismissed as a form of ‘primitivism’, the living image is most often encountered in popular culture studies or anthropologies of the image. A reconsideration of the moving image thus has the potential to put art history in motion, animating and dynamically opening it to new objects, questions, temporalities, and methods of analysis. Engagement with the affective impact of images unsettles art historical categories of understanding, prompting us to reconsider key terms of analysis like representation, mimesis, spectatorship, meaning, medium, and interpretation as mobile and transformative processes. In this seminar, we will thus seek to redress art historical neglect of the moving image and explore its multifaceted potentialities. If the power of such works was to transform viewers, how was the rhetorical force of the moving image mobilized to inspire or manipulate political, religious, colonial, and social actions?

Weekly discussions will take up a body of readings, but also a corpus of moving images and their particular modes of address. We will consider images that move (automata, mechanical moving pictures); images that appear to move or breathe (living statues, portraits, waxworks); images that physically and /or emotionally move or alter their viewers; and the transformative potential of images that migrate between cultures. Focusing on case studies, student research can take up any aspect of the moving image in the early modern period (1500-1700).

 Supervised independent research on an approved topic. Instructor's approval required.

ARTH 490 is intended to accompany and enhance students’ internships at museums or galleries. The class consists of assignments designed to allow the student to situate his or her experience within the wider concerns of museums and museum studies. For the final paper, the student is encouraged to pursue a research question of his or her own interest related to museum or gallery issues (see next page for more details).

Visual imagery was mobilized in inventive and forceful ways in the seventeenth century. This course will examine the functions and uses of visual forms within an ever-shifting context that includes tensions between absolutism and capitalism, religious battles about the image, colonial expansion and violence, the growth of cities, and the exchange of new forms of knowledge.

This course is a selective survey intended to introduce students to major artists, monuments, cities, and subjects of Italian art from c. 1300-1500. Particular attention is paid to the republics of Florence and Siena, and to the North Italian courts of Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino. The art of this period in Italy, commonly referred to as the Early Renaissance, was grounded in the exigencies of commune, court, and city, and followed a period of rapid economic expansion, urbanization, and technological development. We will consider the changing role of the artwork in political, religious, and social contexts, and in public and private life, bearing in mind the varying interests of those who commissioned and crafted works of art and those who encountered them as beholders. From this variety of uses and responses emerged multiple conceptions of the nature of art and the role of the artist. Together we will explore these through a primary and secondary source readings in which special attention is given to the historical figures of artist, patron/client, and beholder, to technique and workshop practice, to art theory, and to the powerful role of art in society. Beyond learning about milestone works of art that still possess cultural resonance today, this course will familiarize you with the excellent collection of Italian Renaissance paintings and decorative arts in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. No prior knowledge of Renaissance art or Christian art and symbolism is required.

There are two primary objectives of this course. The first objective is to provide an overview of the methods employed in the discipline of art history since the eighteenth century. The second objective is to provide students with an opportunity to determine which methods resonate with them for future coursework. We will begin with discussions of formalism and iconography; subsequently we will discuss critical methodologies including feminist interventions into (masculine) art history, writing queer art histories, attending to intersectionality and the black female subject, as well as Marxism, the social history of art, psychoanalysis, semiotics, phenomenology and postcolonialism. We will discuss a range of artworks from the Renaissance to the present day.

This course is dedicated to the visual histories, both real and imagined, of the medieval city of Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. Founded by Constantine the Great in the fourth century and conquered by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, Constantinople constituted the heart of the Byzantine Empire. As the seat of imperial and patriarchal power, it embodied sacro-imperial authority like no other city.

Weekly lectures will trace the architectural layers of this exceptional medieval city, beginning with its foundation as “New Rome” and its transformation into the capital of a vast late antique empire whose sway stretched from the Levant to the Adriatic. We will then consider the city’s later medieval history as the center of a fragmented political entity, before finally turning to its eventual demise as the Byzantine capital and transformation into the capital city of the Ottoman Empire. Throughout these different historical moments, we will trace the urban manifestations of secular spectacle and imperial memory, sacred celebrations and the sacrosanct performance of Orthodoxy. Readings will include primary sources in translation and secondary readings by leading scholars in the field. We will consider not only the visual and architectural fabric of the city—its surviving and lost edifices and sculptures as well as cartographic textual and visual representations of the city—but also the critical ritual movements through the city, especially its lavish liturgies and imperial processions.

Prerequisite: Prior knowledge of Byzantine or medieval art history is not required but recommended. Students are expected to have taken at least one previous 200-level art history class.

Course description not available.

Course Content and Objective: 

Art Now is not a survey charting the development of art since the turn of the twenty-first century or a compilation of rising stars in contemporary art. Rather, it examines contemporary art’s engagement with the historical now as a response to pressing issues and challenges of the 21^st century, including: the coexistence of humans and nonhumans, the environmental crisis, the refugee crisis, decolonization, violence, affectivity, new materialism and queer aesthetics, Black Lives Matter, the legacies of the colonization of Indigenous peoples and the pivotal development of contemporary Indigenous art, as well as the digital turn. Focusing on 21^st-century artistic practices from the West and attentive to their cultural diversity, the course investigates and historicizes emerging aesthetics by a series of case studies revolving around the work of artists who reflect upon the now, including: Stan Douglas, Kent Monkman, Nadia Myre, Teresa Margolles, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jordan Wolfson, Francisco Huichaqueo, Carolina Caycedo, Tomás Saraceno, Edward Burtynsky, Ai Weiwei, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, Simone Leigh, Trevor Paglen, Ian Cheng, Amalia Ulman, Anne Imhof, Ed Atkins, Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Sarah Sze. The course’s main objective is to enhance the knowledge of contemporary art by investigating the “becoming-environment” of 21st-century art as it responds to the historical present—both the understanding of artworks as environments and the artistic making of installations, situations, performances, assemblages, archival interventions, rematerialized paintings, textile art, habitats, public spheres, the deep web, immersive settings, large-scale montages, landscapes or biotopes, which include the viewers perceiving and experiencing them, following a dynamic of coevolution.

Ethics in Photography: Representing Pain and Violence This course will examine photography that represents violence in a range of temporal and socio-political contexts. Case studies will include photographs of conflict zones and contemporary art that depicts scenes of violence, for example, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’s whose work captures the aftermath of drug violence and femicide in Mexico City and other global contexts. Issues related to spectatorship, race, gender, trauma and social responsibility will be discussed.

This course introduces students to dominant practices of nineteenth-century “high” art sculpture: neoclassicism and polychromy. This course will explore how these distinct sculptural aesthetics were structured and informed by the political and social issues of the day. Each style emerged within specific contexts and each reveals investments in pressing social and political issues and current events. The sculpture then must be understood within the context of nineteenth-century institutions, events and issues like: Transatlantic Slavery, abolitionism, emancipation, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, American westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. It is not accidental that all of these issues intersect powerfully with issues of colonialism, nation-building, race and racism, since these were all clearly preoccupations of the majority of the sculptors and the societies of the time. The course will also examine the issue of identity (sex, gender, race, class, sexuality) in terms of sculptural production, representation and viewership. It will examine the internationally networked cultural centre of Rome and the rituals and circuits of patronage and celebrity that emerged from sculptors’ studios. Artists like Edmonia Lewis, Harriet Hosmer, Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story and Charles Cordier shall be discussed alongside authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, celebrities like Charlotte Cushman and art critics like James Jackson Jarves who constituted the cultural communities of the sculptors. A range of individual subjects shall be discussed alongside more idealized, allegorical, mythological, and religious ones. Distinctions between public and private, and so-called high and low art works will also be examined.

Despite the centuries-long presence of Africans in Canada, black Canadian artistic and cultural production has been summarily neglected within school curriculum, academic scholarship, and by public and private galleries and museums. Drawing from the established fields of African American Art History, Race and Representation, and The Visual Culture of Slavery, this course explores and contributes to an African Canadian Art History which can simultaneously examine the artistic contributions of black Canadian artists within their unique historical contexts, critique the colonial representation of black subjects by white artists, and contest the customary racial homogeneity of Canadian Art History. The course examines “high,” “low,” and popular art, artists, and visual and material culture from the eighteenth century to the present and contributes to a more inclusive and complex cultural future

This course will examine nineteenth-century (primarily though not exclusively British) art, visual culture and interior design through the lens of queer and feminist art histories, as well as some literary criticism, thereby problematizing the traditional focus on straight white male painters in the history of nineteenth-century art.

What is the role played by individuals with art historical training in the art world today and, in particular, in museums? This advanced undergraduate seminar will focus, not on museums in general, but on curatorial activities, both inside and outside the traditional museum. We will begin with a historical overview of curatorial training and some of the famous courses that trained the founders in the modern world of museums in North America and established the curatorial profession as we have come to know it. We will visit exhibitions, discuss types of collections, study objects firsthand (learning about handling objects and determining media) and consider what types of expertise are important for curators. We will examine the types of institutions that now employ art historians with curatorial expertise—not only museums but private collections, commercial galleries, municipalities, universities, and auction houses—and look closely at how they operate and the responsibilities of the curatorial staff. Current events in the art world will figure prominently in our discussions as well as major exhibitions, such as the Françoise Sullivan retrospective at the MAC and the Kent Monkman exhibition at the McCord Museum. We will examine the wide range of disparate skills and types of expertise that now may be expected of a curator: connoisseurship along with an understanding of art conservation, ethics, project planning, proposal writing, public speaking, and writing for specialists, writing for the general public, etc. Guest speakers will provide additional perspectives. This is not a theoretical course, but a course based on actual exhibitions and actual situations faced by curators.

The McGill Visual Arts Collection (VAC) serve as our laboratory. We will learn about the projects underway at the VAC: migration to a new cataloguing system, tours for groups, and an expanded website, but this is not a technical course; students will be expected to bring their expertise as art historians to bear on class discussions and assignments. Class members will be expected to write an exhibition review, make a presentation on an object in the VAC collection, write a text that expands on the topic in your presentation, and develop an idea for an exhibition. Everyone will be expected to visit museums as well, either in Montreal or other cities, and keep up with current events in the art world.

How did traditional Chinese visualize their happiness, humor, love, sorrow, or pain? What did smiling, crying or frowning in art signify in classical China? This seminar will historically examine expressions of emotions in art and visual culture in pre-Modern China, from the early to late imperial periods. Generally considered more demure than their counterparts in the European tradition, Chinese representations of emotions have been understudied in the field of art history. Beginning from the typology of this general impression, this seminar asks why certain types of emotions were chosen for representations and how these representations of emotional expressions were shaped by cultural, social, and intellectual environments, as well as what specific ways of visualizing emotions can tell us about traditional Chinese society.

Supervised independent research on an approved topic.

Course description not available.