Undergraduate Courses in Art History 2019-2020

This class uses the angle of controversy to introduce students to various academic and popular approaches to the social scientific and humanistic study of science and technology. The class draws on classic academic works in diverse fields such as the history and philosophy of science,anthropology, and bioethics, while also integrating a broad range of engaging and accessible materials (editorials, op-eds and journalistic pieces) that educate and evoke critique and transformation of the complex contemporary practices, methods, and politics of science and technology.

This year the class will be organized around the interrelated themes of truth, lies,visibility/invisibility, and bias in the fields of Science, Technology, and Journalism. Among many themes, the course will examine: the nature of truth, uncertainty, and paradigm shifts in science,the role of values and bias in the design of technological production and scientific discovery,fights for openness and transparency in science and technology, and the politics of algorithms,surveillance, and leaking.

The class is organized around two weekly lectures, course readings, and movies and podcasts that students must listen to or watch before class.

This course offers an introduction to the diverse visual cultures of the medieval Mediterranean world from the fourth to the fifteenth century. It surveys a wide range of Late Antique, Byzantine, Islamic, and European works of art and architecture, positioning them within their original social, political, and spiritual contexts and also tracing the ways in which these monuments were defined and perceived over time. Textbook readings will be supplemented by primary and secondary sources so as to provide exposure to a wide variety of methodological frameworks. In addition to becoming familiar with the central tenets of medieval art and architecture, students will also develop skills in visual literacy and gain a basic understanding of the methods and aims of art historical study.

This course examines modern art produced in France, Germany, and Mexico from approximately 1850 until 1945. Major figures, including Courbet, Monet, Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Frida Kahlo, will be considered, as well as lesser-known artists such as Tamara de Lempicka. Modern art movements including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Primitivism, German Expressionism, New Objectivity, Dada and Surrealism will be discussed. The period between 1850 and 1945 was a time of rapid social, economic, and political change, and modern art movements will be considered in light of socio-historical contexts. In other words, we will be using a social history of art methodology throughout the term, drawing on T.J. Clark’s important scholarship. Readings and lectures will give particular attention to issues related to gender, class, race and sexuality.

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 course is a selective survey intended to introduce students to major artists, monuments, cities, and subjects of Italian art from c. 1300-1520. 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 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.

What is Canada? Who is Canadian and what defines Canadian art? Shirking the assumed universal consensus, this course begins with these fundamental questions which engage with the intersection of national, racial, class, gender, sexual and cultural identity. Canada has a legacy of cultural and racial diversity which is often suppressed by romanticized Eurocentric narratives of British and French nation-building. Canadian histories and art histories have often disavowed the presence and production of Indigenous, female and people of colour artists. Adopting a transnational approach, this course creates a more inclusive narrative. It is issue-driven, thematic, and introduces students to aspects of historical Canadian art of various genres and media as well as the pressing political, social and cultural debates which inform Canadian Art History.

This course will examine the production of contemporary First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists in Canada from the 1990s to the present. A diverse range of contemporary art practices – including painting, drawing, photography, film, performance, installation and beadwork – will be considered in relation to key aspects of the cultural, political and social life of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Much of the work examined reflects and responds to the continuing legacy of colonization and successive Canadian governments’ policies of assimilation and segregation. Artists, artworks and exhibitions examined will therefore be both historically and contemporarily contextualized. We will discuss the impact of the Indian Act, the Residential School System, the establishment of Reserves and conflicts surrounding sovereignty and status, as well as the portrayal of Indigenous identity in art, popular culture and news media. Additionally, we will engage with the recent recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, scholarship in Indigenous studies and material culture, and current events related to the theme of the course. The course is divided thematically, rather than chronologically, with weekly topics addressing significant aspects of Indigenous art and culture in Canada today.

Course description not available.

Art from the 1960s to the early 1980s was a period of significant transformation—a dramatic response to the cultural dominance of formalist modernism; a necessary questioning of its principles of self-referentiality, medium specificity, disembodied authorship and spectatorship. Reviving the artistic practices of the historical avant-garde, it broke with the understanding of art as fundamentally optical to explore a variety of senses. It engaged—although not consistently and often obliquely—with society at large and the political turbulences of the times, especially with the counterculture of the 1960s, the African-American civil rights movement, the events of May 1968, the feminist and LGBT social movements, the anti-Vietnam War protests and the memory of the Holocaust, as well as the AIDS crisis. It invented aesthetic strategies to think aesthetics politically. These strategies included: assemblages, happenings and environments, montage, dérive and détournement, the promotion of everyday life and the devising of “specific” objects, scored events, non-dance, linguistic propositions, the combination of popular culture and so-called high art, earth interventions, “poor” aesthetics, televisual art, expanded media, appropriation, and much more.

Critical Issues—Contemporary Art examines the historical development of this transformation from the 1960s to the early 1980s. The course focuses on the study of North American and Western European art but attends to its cultural diversity and expands the Western paradigm whenever possible. Following a roughly chronological order, it investigates some of the main art movements and practices shaping 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, and postmodernism. Throughout, it addresses issues of gender, sexuality, race and nationality.

From the sixteenth century onward, orders and iconography from ancient Mediterranean architecture became stylistically ubiquitous in global building programmes. This course is an examination of the shift from Medieval to Renaissance building styles that would eventually become the standard around the world. We will begin with Italy’s penetrating look into its indigenous past and continue on to the reanimation of Mediterranean antiquity across the arts as a transeuropean phenomenon. Particular attention will also be placed on local nuance that employed antiquity in a different way, with case studies drawn from artists and architects in Spain and the Netherlands. Since multiple media were required in the architectural process, students will study writing, drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture as they pertained to specific archaeological contexts.

The first half of the course will be a survey of the rebirth of ancient architecture in the European Renaissance. The second half of the course will push beyond this history of architecture and examine the architecturally-derived Renaissance understanding of building worlds, both actual and virtual. When applicable, lectures will include content specific to ancient Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, which will provide students the ability to maneuver between ancient and renaissance histories of art and architecture. The purpose of this course is to provide students with strong historical case studies of formal comparison in order to develop critical skills in art history, particularly when considering influence, imitation, appropriation, iconography, and style.

This is an advanced seminar on art historical methods intended for Honours Art History students in their final year at McGill. It mainly consists in an Honours research paper written in consultation with the instructor, acting as an academic advisor. The seminar provides a framework for primary and secondary research, the description and interpretation of artworks, group discussions on readings relevant to the research papers, the writing of quality original research, and the mastering of oral presentation. A list of readings adjusted to the research projects will be provided on the first three weeks of the seminar.

Nineteenth-century France is often characterized as an era of rapid change and speed. Historians have focused on the hurried pace of modern life, the quick succession of technological advances, the hustle of capitalist economies, and the ‘sketchy’ look of modern paintings. This seminar will explore modern speed but will also reads against the grain of these histories by examining the co-existence of slow temporal modes, such as waiting. While waiting’s sluggish temporality may seem antithetical to the speed that has come to typify late nineteenth-century French culture – and art in particular –, this class will explore how slowness and deceleration were also key components of modern life: modernity’s speed was felt, rationalized and understood through its relationship with slow time.

In classical East Asia, ancestors and deities were a vital component of art-making. Many of the most innovative and impressive works that exist to us today were created for ritual activities in their honor. Focusing on China, which gave a foundation for the long-lasting tradition while in conversation with its neighboring cultures, this seminar examines major sets of images, objects, and spaces constructed around the worshiping of ancestors and deities from around the first millennium B.C.E, to the eighteenth century. Throughout the course, students will familiarize themselves with the basic concepts and historical developments of the art of worship in two main religious arenas: funerary and Buddhist.While maintaining the formal boundary between the two categories, students will also investigate their significant overlap by identifying and analyzing their shared cultural logic of ritual and visual practices. Key questions to be considered include: How did artists translate religious ideology into visual forms? How do static objects connote movement and animation? What are the connections between ritual objects and the visual culture of everyday world?

The global march of right-wing populism urges scholars in a wide variety of disciplines to reflect on the mass-appeal of nationalist and ultra-conservative rhetorics. Art historians have an important part to play in these discussions, because built environments, visual images and cultural institutions are indispensable tools of political mobilization and control. In this seminar, we will explore the complex relationship between far-right politics and aesthetics by focusing on the rise of totalitarian governments in twentieth-century Germany, Italy and Russia. Weekly readings – both scholarly articles and primary documents – as well as visual materials presented in class are meant to further our understanding of the ways in which painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and film were mobilized by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin both to terrorize and infatuate the crowds into compliance. Central to this seminar are topics of artistic agency, modernism(s), tradition(s), community, race, gender and sexuality. Towards the end of the semester, we will also be tapping into the postwar debates on the cultural significance of “difficult” heritage and representations of totalitarian regimes in contemporary art and popular culture.

Course description not available.

Advisor’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.

Please read: https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/undergraduate/ah/internship

This course examines modern art produced in France, Germany, and Mexico from approximately 1850 until 1945. Major figures, including Courbet, Monet, Manet, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Frida Kahlo, will be considered, as well as lesser-known artists such as Tamara de Lempicka. Modern art movements including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Primitivism, German Expressionism, New Objectivity, Dada and Surrealism will be discussed. The period between 1850 and 1945 was a time of rapid social, economic, and political change, and modern art movements will be considered in light of socio-historical contexts. In other words, we will be using a social history of art methodology throughout the term, drawing on T.J. Clark’s important scholarship. Readings and lectures will give particular attention to issues related to gender, class, race and sexuality.

Early modernity was a period characterized by the massive migration of peoples worldwide as a result of religious conflicts, expanding trade routes, colonization, slavery, and missionary activities, among other historical factors. Explanatory narratives of colonialism, empire building, and religious conversion-of center, periphery, and globalization-have been under revision in recent years in order to nuance our understanding of what were immensely complex and multi-faceted phenomena. Almost all of the course readings have been published within the last 5 to 10 years, which indicates the urgency of this burgeoning field of investigation. The seminar accordingly will shift the focus from governing regimes and institutions to ways in which creative forms and practices were intertwined in the dynamics of materiality and early modern globalism and to a consideration of how processes of world-making are historically connected with globalization's devastation of worlds. Such a proposition attends to the experimentation that activated and responded to the circulation of people, materials, artefacts, and motifs across borders and bodies of water; and it investigates these interactions as constant, on-going practices that could be inherently contradictory. The focus on art-on producing and engaging with it from multiple perspectives-foregrounds new and often unanticipated ways of crafting and understanding an increasing} y interconnected world. It aims to move us away _from what we. think we already know, and to be open to what we might find. A central question of the seminar is how the 'global tum' challenges the methodologies of art history.

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, and postcolonialism. We will discuss a range of artworks from the Renaissance to the present day.

This course addresses major monuments of Venetian architecture, sculpture, painting, graphic arts, and material culture within a visual culture framework that acknowledges the status of the city of Venice itself as an elaborately constructed work of art. Due to the unique position of the metropolis—built upon a series of reclaimed islands in a shallow saline lagoon—Venice has always been understood as a floating mundus alter (‘other world’), uniquely positioned between East and West. Known as La Serenissima (the Most Serene Republic), Venice employed her leading artists and architects—including the Bellini and Lombardo family dynasties, Giorgione, Titian, Sansovino, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Palladio—to lend potent visual form to a complex, multi-faceted, and carefully crafted self-mythology. Together we will recover the rich complexity of this Venetian self-portrait as it changed over time, with special focus on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (c. 1450-1580). We will examine the various strands and figures in the visualized myth, including the dual origins of Venice in ancient Rome and Byzantium; the cultivation of a materially opulent, hybrid architectural style rooted in East and West; the display of communal socio-political values through visual and ritual culture; the theoretical articulation of uniquely Venetian artistic style and subject matter; and the ambivalent projection of Venice as both center of piety, pilgrimage, and republican values, and as marketplace, theater, and playground of the early modern world.

This course undertakes the critical examination of the representation of black subjects in historical and contemporary popular culture. Although the focus is mainly American, some examples from other locations will also be introduced. The topic of black representation is challenging due to the interconnected histories of western colonialism, slavery, and racism, which have participated in the constitution of black subjects as “other” by mainly white cultural and media producers. However, moments of transformation, resistance, and alternative identifications will also be addressed. The course will examine various types of historical and contemporary popular culture across various media and contexts including slavery, minstrelsy, globalization, and tourism.

The term “visual culture” has been used for almost two decades to describe the range of images which circulate within our social and cultural worlds. "Visual culture" may include prestigious forms of image-making, such as high art painting, or less respectable forms, such as the popular cultural imagery of advertising and television. The institutions of justice and policing have used visual images for a variety of purposes, from cataloguing suspected criminals to reconstructing the scenes of crimes. Painters and photographers have used images of crime to "prove" prejudices about the criminal personality, to aestheticize the contemporary city, to raise metaphysical issues of life and death, to transgress cultural norms of taste and so on.

In this course, we will be looking at a wide range of images which deal in some way with crime. Some of these will be in the form of "moving" images -- that is, films or television programs. Others will be "still images": photographs, paintings, drawings, newspaper and magazine covers, maps, etc. The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of many of the genres and styles through which crime comes to be represented visually.

Please note that, while this course will deal with a variety of social and cultural issues, it is not primarily a course in criminology or social analysis. Rather, we will be looking at the ways in which different media -- artistic, informational and entertainment -- represent crime.

James McGill, the founder of McGill University, was a slave owner who held Indigenous people and black people in bondage in Quebec and also imported rum from the Anglo-Caribbean that was produced by enslaved blacks in tropical plantation regimes. Yet, these facts are rarely shared when people celebrate his philanthropy and his donation of the £10,000 which established a university in his name. As McGill University approaches its 200th anniversary (2021), this class explores the cultures and histories of Transatlantic Slavery and its Canadian manifestations to interrogate and contest Canadian complacency and the lack of acknowledgement and redress by the nation or by McGill University. This class is particularly important in the context of the U.N. Declaration of the International Decade for Peoples of African Descent (2015-2024). https://www.un.org/en/events/africandescentdecade/ Students will participate in a series of individual and collective assignments, both academic and artistic, which will result in public outcomes.

This seminar considers how forms of coexistence have become integral to artistic practices in the past decade in response to the migrant crisis. It examines media artworks which have been pivotal in that response, including: Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary Human Flow, which charts the global movement of refugees alongside the proliferation of borders and walls; Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (2017), a virtual reality environment inviting viewers to share the space of migrants attempting to cross the US-Mexican border; Angela Melitopoulos’s four-channel video and sixteen-channel sound installation Crossings (2017)—a meditation on the affectivity of migration in Greece considered within the longer history of capitalism and resource extraction, whose video and sound projections appear and disappear, requiring that viewers circulate in space and constantly shift their perspective (a chaosmosis reception for a chaosmosis crisis); and Isuma Production’s online 2019 Venice Biennale video-and-webcast projection—a public sphere which reflects upon the impact of forced migration on Inuit communities in the 1950s and 1960s. These works show the migrant crisis to result both from the planetary increase of displaced people since 2011—migrants displaced by conflict, economic or any other precarious condition such as global warming and the overexploitation of land, or out of fear of persecution—and the implementation of national xenophobic immigration policies and border systems that preselect some migrants over others to block as much as possible the movement of the undesired. It is a condition that turns exodus into a process of elimination of a certain segment of humanity (Trilling, 2018; Balibar, 2018; Mbembe, 2019). Contesting that process, and this is the seminar’s main claim, they uphold the requirement to think coexistence—the state, awareness and practice of existing interdependently; the production of environments in which images, sounds, living organisms, objects, actions, performers and/or spectators coevolve. Coexistence evolves not so much as a living-together than an inexorable relation between humans, as well as between humans and nonhumans, in urgent need of repair, regeneration and looping. Coexistence is also a modality by which art reinvents itself. Focusing on 21^st-century artistic practices based in the West and attentive to their cultural diversity, the seminar asks: “How is art performing migration as a ‘crisis’—what is a crisis/whose crisis is it?”; “How is art performing coexistence(s) in response to that condition?”; and “What are the possibilities of this aesthetics, i.e., how does it generate new modes of perceiving, knowing and relating?”

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.

Independent research course. Supervisor approval required.

Visual imagery was mobilized in inventive and forceful ways in the seventeenth century. This course will examine the functions and uses of a wide range of visual forms in relation to the European and global expansion of absolutism, urbanism, colonialism, capitalism, diplomacy, slavery, missionary activity, and religious strife. Artistic and architectural production will be considered in relation to the body, especially historical understandings of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, labour, authority, and social status.