111-103 Brave New Worlds: Modernity and the Visual Arts, 1850-1918

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Subject Description:

This subject will introduce students to key historical and methodological issues in the study of modern art. It is both chronological and thematic; using the history of 19th and early 20th century art to explore the impact of modernism on art and society. Students will encounter various art historical methodologies - visual analysis, style, intention, social history, pscyhobiography, feminist and postcolonial analysis - but will also consider artists' efforts to understand the changes wrought by industrial culture. Themes raised include: the changing nature of realism; the contrast of nature and culture; the development of new forms of consciousness (science, consumerism, spiritualism, nationalism); the ideas of progress and individualism. Lecture and tutorial topics include: the painting of modern life; the nude; avant-garde attitudes; the social status of the artist; the city and the country in colonial art; abstraction and utopia; photography and the graphic arts.

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Prescribed Texts:

• Clark T J, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Princeton U. P. 1984.
• Frascina, F. et. al., Modernity and Modernism: French painting in the nineteenth century, Yale U. P., New Haven, 1993.
• Harrison, C. & Wood, P (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.
• Harrison, C et. al., Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The early twentieth century, Yale U. P., New Haven, 1993.