107-043 French Avant-Gardes

Usually 25 points of first-year art history, see Prerequisites, or first-year European studies, see Prerequisites.

This subject focuses on the series of French avant-gardes from 1885 to 1935. An examination of theories of avant-garde culture will lead to a study of institutions (eg. the salon des indépendants), artists' groups (eg. Nabis, surrealists), individualists (eg. Rousseau, Duchamp), and the dealer-critic system. The relation of art to politics, the body and sexuality, the discourse of abstraction, and the crisis of the art object will be considered in relation to new scholarship in areas like pointillism, Cézanne's legacy, the fauves, cubism, collage, abstract sculpture, dada, post-war realism, and surrealist art and photography. Students should develop an understanding of fundamental models of avant-garde cultural practices and in what ways these incorporate ideologies of subjectivity, gender, nation and ethnicity.