Introduction to Art History

Readings

SES #	LECTURE Topics	READINGS
1	Introduction: What is Art?	No readings assigned.
2a	Learning to Look/Interpreting What We See	John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 7–33. ISBN: 9780140135152. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, “Images, Power, and Politics,” in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9–48. ISBN: 9780195314403.
2b	The Devotional Image	Michael Baxandall, “Conditions of Trade,” in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–29. ISBN: 9780192821447.
3a	Pictorial Space and Perspective	Leon Battista Alberti, “On Painting” (1453), in Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents, ed. C. Gilbert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 51–75. ISBN: 9780810110342.
3b	Media Revolutions: Paint and Print in the North	Joseph Koerner, “Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-Century Influenza,” in Giulia Bartram et al., Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 18–38. ISBN: 9780691114934.
4a	Worlding the Italian Renaissance	Jill Burke, “Nakedness and Other Peoples: Rethinking the Renaissance Nude.” Art History 36, no. 4 (2013): 714–739. Paul Wood, “Renaissance and Old World,” in Western Art and the Wider World (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 12–51. ISBN: 9781444333923.
4b	Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael: Making Renaissance Art	Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings, ed. M. Kemp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9–10, 19, 38–46, 220–228. ISBN: 9780300090956. William E. Wallace, “A Week in the Life of Michelangelo,” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. S. Blake McHam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 203–22. ISBN: 9780521479219.
5a	Representing Women	Suzanna Danuta Walters, “Visual Pressures. On Gender and Looking” in Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 50–66. ISBN: 9780520089785. Rose Marie San Juan, “The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance.” Oxford Art Journal, 14/1 (1991), 67–78.
5b	The Status of the Artist	Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971), in Women, Art, Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 145–178. ISBN: 9780064301831. Giorgio Vasari, “Introduction” (optional) and “Preface” (1550) to Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, ed. J.C. Bondanella and P. Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), vii–xiv, 3–6. ISBN: 9780199537198.
6	Art as Theater in 17th-Century Rome	Genevieve Warwick, “Speaking Statues: Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne at the Villa Borghese”. Art History 27 (2004): 353–381.
7	Dutch Art in Global Perspective	Julie Hochstrasser, “Remapping Dutch Art in Global Perspective: Other Points of View,” in Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration, ed. Mary D. Sheriff (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 43–71. ISBN: 9780807872703. Thijs Weststeijn, “Cultural Reflections on Porcelain in the 17th-Century Netherlands,” in Chinese and Japanese Porcelain for the Dutch Golden Age, ed. J. van Campen and Titus Eliens (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Kunst, 2014), 213–229. ISBN: 9789491196805.
8a	Art and Absolutism in France and Spain	Norman Bryson, “The Legible Body: Le Brun,” in French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29–57. ISBN: 9780521276542.
8b	Public Exhibitions: Enter the Art Critic	Thomas Crow, “The Salon Exhibition in the Eighteenth Century,” in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–22. ISBN: 9780300033540. Étienne de La Font de Saint Yenne, “Reflections on Some Causes of the Present State of Painting in France,” in Art in Theory, 1648–1815, ed. Charles Harrison et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 554–561. ISBN: 9780631200642.
9a	The Lure of the Antique	Johann Joachim Winckelmann, from Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) in Art in Theory, 1648–1815, 450–456. ISBN: 9780631200642. Anonymous, Salon reviews from Mémoires Secrets (1783, 1785) in Art in Theory, 1648–1815, 695–701. ISBN: 9780631200642. Andrew McClellan, “Nationalism and the Origins of the Museum in France,” in The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 29–39. ISBN: 9780894682025.
9b	Beyond Representation: Color and Touch	Angela Dunstan, “Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and the Imprint of Authenticity.” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19 (2014). Peter John Brownlee, “Color Theory and the Perception of Art.” American Art 23, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 21–24. Judith Walsh, “Winslow Homer and the Color Theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul,” in Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light, ed. Martha Tedeschi and Kristi Dahm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 198–205. ISBN: 9780865592261. Jordanna Bailkin, “Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 91–110. ISBN: 9780822354482.
10	Romanticism and Empire	Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), anthologized in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 1005–1009. ISBN: 9780631227083. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Westview Press, 1989), 33–59. ISBN: 9780064301879. Zeynep Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. J. Beaulieu and M. Roberts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 19–42. ISBN: 9780822328742.
11a	Photography and Photographic Truth	Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 666–672. ISBN: 9780631200666. Jonathan Crary, excerpt on the stereoscope from Techniques of the Observer (1990), in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. V. Schwartz and J. M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004), 82–92. ISBN: 9780415308663. Richard Kreitner, “Stereoscopes could change how we see the world—again.” Boston Globe, August 16, 2015.
11b	The Artist and the City	Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 1–41. ISBN: 9780714833651.
12	The Artist and the City, part 2	Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 50–90. ISBN: 9780415007221.
13a	Modernist Primitivism	Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference.” Modernism/Modernity 10 (2003): 455–80. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Primitive,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff, 2nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 217–233. ISBN: 9780226571683.
13b	Surrealism and Dada	Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” and Richard Huelsenbeck, “First German Dada Manifesto,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 252–259. ISBN: 9780631227083. William Pietz, “Fetish,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff, 2nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 306–317. ISBN: 9780226571683.
14a	Abstract Expressionism: Art and Politics	Eva Cockroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War” (1974), anthologized in Art In Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 82–90. ISBN: 9780064302241. David Craven, “Introduction,” “Abstract Expressionism and Afro-American Marginalization,” and “Dissent During the McCarthy Period,” in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, ed. E. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 510–526. ISBN: 9780300106138.
14b	After the Art Object: From Pop to Performance	Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 49–65. ISBN: 9780300064384. Adrian Piper, “Performance and the Fetishism of the Art Object” (1981), in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism, 1967-1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 51–61. ISBN: 9780262661539.
15	Where We Are Now; Concluding Thoughts	Kate Cowcher, “Luanda Onde Está? Contemporary African Art and the Rentier State.” Critical Interventions 8, no. 2 (2014): 140–159.