ART HISTORY
ART H 602 Research Methods of Art History
Prof. Richter
This course is required of all graduate students and should be taken as close to entry into the program as is feasible. The course will offer an introduction to the discipline of art history and to a range of methodologies that have impacted on developments in the field. The seminar will combine a close examination of primary and secondary sources with a historiographical approach to the material. Several classes will be conducted at various libraries including Hunter
Library, the New York Public Library’s Main Research Branch at 42 nd
Street, and the Watson
Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to familiarize students with the variety of resources available in the area. By the end of the semester, students will have an understanding of the various usages, both pro and con, of different search engines and other reference sites. In preparation for their eventual thesis, class members will learn how to correctly formulate bibliographies, footnotes, illustrations and other basic research elements. Students will also learn to use ARTStor and OIV or Power Point in preparation for a visual presentation in class.
The seminar will focus on the career of Raphael (1483-1520). While establishing an unparalleled standard for seemingly effortless elegance in the High Renaissance, Raphael’s relatively short career also set the stage for the advent of both Mannerism and the Baroque.
Suggested topics include the artist’s impact on not only his contemporaries but also Annibale
Carracci and Poussin in the seventeenth century as well as contemporary artists such as Ingres,
Degas, Picasso, Ernest, and Warhol for those who are more interested in Modern Art.
Requirements include: formulating a brief annotated bibliography, the creation of museum label, a visual presentation, and final research paper.
ART H 602 Research Methods: Cubism (Seminar)
Prof. Braun
Students will learn to research and write a comprehensive catalogue entry and catalogue essay on an art object, including: documentation of the work’s provenance; its material, exhibition, and publication histories; and methods and theories of interpretation. You will be asked to select a cubist painting, sculpture or work on paper on view in a New York museum. (Artists may include Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Gris, Leger etc. or Futurist, Russian, British, Latin American or American cubist-influenced works). The task consists of two parts. The first is assembling the full technical data on the object (title, date, medium, dimensions, markings, provenance, exhibition history, bibliography, and condition); the second is a detailed essay on all aspects of the work and its meaning, written in a publishable, expository style. The course provides fundamental training for academic and curatorial work by emphasizing the foundational tools and methods needed to analyze artworks as historical and material documents. It also offers pragmatic instruction in determining appropriate and viable frameworks for critical

interpretation. We will cover a variety of methodological approaches, from connoisseurship and related issues of authenticity, to recent interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches in art history.
Finally, strategies for writing - the organization of the information retrieved, clear articulation of ideas, logical structure of argument, and developing an authoritative voice -- are also stressed.
In addition to the classroom sessions there will be instructional classes at either the NYPL or the
Watson Library and the Hunter College Library, addressing bibliographic searches in both print and electronic media. Students will also learn by doing through a series of technical tasks involving information retrieval and analysis pertinent to their object and cubist studies. In addition to the weekly tasks, students will also be required to give a class presentation on progress and problems in their research. The final paper (catalogue entry) will include the provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography specific to the object, along with the comprehensive descriptive and interpretative essay.
ART H 622 Modern Art II
Prof. Weintraub:
This course examines the forces that shaped Western visual culture from 1900 to mid century.
We will be focusing on the major artmovements of the period with the goal of examining the formulation of key aesthetic strategies, situating them within contemporaneous philosophical and theoretical developments, and considering their art historical and theoretical precedents and legacies. Course readings will emphasize primary texts, but will also include a selection of secondary sources that have shaped our critical understanding of the period in question.
ART H 627
Prof. Montgomery
Modern Art in Latin America :
The Global 1920s: Decentering Modernism from Latin
America
Raymond Williams has argued that modernism is an artistic form born of immigrant encounters in European cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Striving to evaluate instances of so-called alternative modernism, this course will examine well-known centers of modernism during the 19-teens and 1920s, such as Paris and Berlin, alongside those cities in
Latin America usually seen as modernism’s peripheral centers: Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and
São Paulo. Following John Tomlinson’s theory of globalization as networks of “complex connectivity,” we will explore how artists forged such networks among multiple cities during the
1920s, asking what revisiting this key historical decade can tell us about how artists working in peripheral and/or dual contexts negotiate relationships with centers. We will consider how recent theories of Global Art History and cosmopolitanism help us analyze the problematic status of the artist and her art as transcultural agents and the questionable faith in artistic form as a medium of cultural translation. In the process, we will ask if it is possible for art to circulate within global networks while simultaneously critiquing them. Readings will include recent theory on globalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism, as well as historical primary and secondary

texts on 1920s modernism in Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, and Mexico. In addition to attending weekly classes and completing readings, class requirements include 2 short papers, a presentation of a text, and a final exam.
ART H 631
Prof. Jozefacka:
The Architectural Avant-Garde
Divergent Modernisms, 1910’s-1940’s
The course surveys twentieth century architectural avant-garde practices, from their emergence in Western and Central Europe in the 1910s, to their subsequent dissemination across Europe and beyond. Taking a global approach, the course places emphasis on regional, national and international idioms of radical architecture, and explores such influences as local technology and environment. The objective is to pinpoint the theoretical principles of the unfolding architectural avant-garde and examine the meaning behind the numerous terms coined during this period: the
International Style, Modern Movement, Neues Bauen, Functionalism, Rationalism, etc.
Focusing primarily on architecture, but including other related disciplines such as urban design, this class introduces the main theories, design tendencies, and construction methods pursued by architects who embraced an anti-historicist stance and participated in the modernization of architectural practice. By examining career trajectories of individual architects, institutions, and organizations, as well as events and publications associated with this broad yet closely-knit international network of practitioners, the class addresses the permutations of the architectural avant-garde.
The class is structured around lectures. Students will be responsible for reading and writing assignments based on primary and secondary literature. There will be a midterm and final exam, as well as a paper assignment.
ARTH 632 Neoclassicism and Romanticism
Prof. Zanardi:
This lecture course will cover the two major movements of the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. These two movements occurred simultaneously and are often difficult to separate, since many artists utilized aspects from both styles. While the debate between “Classicism” and “Romanticism” was heightened in the 1824 Paris Salon and associated with two distinct artistic practices and theories, disegno and colore , the two movements share many similarities and were practiced by artists who received traditional academic training. By closely examining these movements in their cultural, historical, and political contexts, we will cover a broad range of objects and subjects from Europe and the United States.
Requirements:
Class participation, weekly readings, a final exam, and a short paper and presentation.

ART H 638 Medieval Art II
Prof. Hahn
This course will cover themes in Gothic art through the discussion of current scholarship.
Included will be the birth of the Gothic and the role of the patron, court art and artistic exchange, devotional art and the process of looking, Gothic architecture--issues of structure, aesthetics and economics, secular art and gift culture, and many others.
ART H 734 Theory and Criticism
Prof Weintraub
This course considers art from 1940-1970, focusing on the artists and art critics that have come to define this transitional period between Modernism and Postmodernism in post-war art. The class will isolate the key themes in the art and art critical debates from the first half of the 20th century and consider them in the context of contemporaneous philosophical, political and cultural developments. We will then explore the legacies of and subsequent revisions to this pivotal period in art, with particular attention given to the those art movements and theories in the 1960s that challenged Modernism's central assumptions and concerns, and to later critiques that have questioned established ideas about Modernist art and art history.
ART H 734
Prof. Gaines Theory and Criticism: Get Me Bodied: Theories of The Body
This seminar will focus on ideas of the body, from the practice of embodiment to modes of representation. Theoretical texts will be discussed alongside other writing and works of art, investigating phenomenological experience, the relationship between physicality and subjectivity, the body as signifier, social regimes of the body such as gender and race, the ideal body, the grotesque body, the abject body, the body of the desired other. Texts will include
Mikhail Bakhtin’s
Rabelais and his World , Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish , Saidiya
Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection , Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, Marcel Mauss’
“Techniques of the Body,” Maurice Merleau-­ ‐ Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception , Elaine
Scarry’s
The Body in Pain,
Susan Sontag’s
Regarding the Pain of Others , and more. Artists and writers considered will include Marina Abramovic, Ron Athey, Matthew Barney, Octavia
Butler, Felix Gonzalez-­ ‐ Torres, Jerzy Grotowski, Paul McCarthy, Yukio Mishima, Yvonne
Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, David Wojnarowicz, and others.
Students will discuss assigned readings, give research presentations tracking historical changes in conceptions of the body, and submit final research papers using course materials and themes to analyze particular artists’ works. Occasional class exercises will attempt to draw attention to the physicality of the seminar experience.

ART H 734 Theory and Criticism
Prof. O’Neill-Butler
This class will be structured around a set of questions prevalent in contemporary art and criticism—primarily, what is the role of the critic today? What would it mean for a critic to be, a la Gertrude Stein, continuously present? Each week, we’ll attempt to occupy this “presentness” by choosing an exhibition or two to visit individually. All classes will begin with a brief discussion of the show(s) and then move to the assigned readings or presentations. Readings will include recent essays by a range of eminent critics, art historians, artists, and art workers.
Students will write six short exhibition reviews over the course of the semester
ART H 780.08 The Artist's Institute: Lucy McKenzie
Lucy McKenzie (b. 1977, Glasgow) has long espoused an interest in the outmoded and redundant, in materials that have been drained of their special qualities through time and reuse.
Her paintings incorporate craft-based applications, like faux reproductions of marble and wood and trompe loeil still life, and her fashion line, Atelier E.B., draws from the history of Scottish textile design and manufacturing. It is impossible to speak about McKenzies painting without mentioning a range of other interests, including fashion, but also architecture, fiction-writing, and friendship. Like many artists today, McKenzie repurposes her paintings as props or background for other activities, a shift in emphasis from art as a self-contained gesture within a frame to its performative role amongst a range of actions. Dissatisfied with the nominal question of what makes a painting -- much less the normative pondering of what makes a painting any good -- McKenzies work is sensitive to how such a form might be used: to establish interpersonal or historic relations within the art context, to position artistic identity, or to infiltrate economic networks. Her investment in collaborative pursuits over a range of artistic disciplines makes her work particularly resonant with a generation of contemporary of younger artists, and will form the basis for her season with The Artists Institute from September 2013 to
January 2014.
Permission of Instructor is required: any interested student must submit of letter-of-motivation that articulates the nature of their interest in the work of Lucy McKenzie and what themes/ideas related to his work they would like to research in more depth over the course of the semester.
Please submit letters to jenny@theartistsinstitute.org by May 17, 2013.
ART H 780.14 Curatorial Methods

Art H 740 Photography in the 19 th Century –Past & Current Issues
Prof. Pelizzari
In a key essay titled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes that “tradition involves the historical sense […], and the historical sense involves perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” This course on nineteenth-century photography takes its cue from T.S. Eliot’s fundamental idea that, in order to understand current works in photography, we need to grasp the tradition that shaped and grounded the medium. Considering the fact that contemporary photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abelardo Morell, Sally Mann, Adam Fuss,
An-My Lê, and Thomas Ruff – to name just a few – have retraced the steps of historical processes and have drawn inspiration from narrative strategies, techniques of surveillance, and war propaganda that were practiced during the nineteenth-century, the course studies historical works as precursors of current artistic expressions. We will investigate how the medium of photography shaped particular genres that informed the growth of a modern society, constituting progress and mediating power, and we will look at the beginnings of photography in relationship to the current global exchange of visual information and image saturation.
There will be a few field trips to private collections, the Metropolitan Museum, and the NYPL, in order to become familiar with the original artifacts and their archival access in the city. The course will have a midterm exam and a final paper based on an original work and research.
ARTH 780.77 Art and Enlightenment
Prof. Zanardi
The Enlightenment is characterized as a time of tremendous growth, secularization, and progress in Europe and the Americas between the end of the seventeenth century and the French
Revolution. Many motifs of enlightenment thought were shared; however, the period does not represent a single movement or a core of common ideas. Rather, boundless curiosity regarding the natural world and the human mind and a critical questioning of traditions, superstitions, and institutions created a collective purpose, providing a vast array of new subject matter for artists.
In this course we will address the various trends in political, philosophical, intellectual, and aesthetic thought, and consider how artists responded and contributed to the myriad transformations typical of this period. We will discuss a broad range of topics, including the creation of museums and taxonomic methods of collecting and display, the relationships between art and science and art and politics, the emphasis on individual experiences, novel forms of sociability, and the importance of travel and exploration for artists and others. Although France often dominates as the disseminator of new modes of thinking during this period, we will examine artists and subjects from a variety of countries, thus, emphasizing a global approach to the study of the Enlightenment.
Requirements:
Class participation, weekly readings, an oral presentation, and a final research paper.
Preliminary Readings:
Immanuel Kant, “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784)
Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment , 2 nd
edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Art H 780.10
Prof. Agee
Special Topics :
Land Art in America seminar proposal
The term Land Art is most often used to refer to the movement of site-specific works developed during the 1960s and 70s, but this class seeks to explore the deeper historical legacy of appreciation for and connection with the land in American art. The history is indeed deep, and broad: from burial grounds and effigy mounds built by American Indians; to the landscapes of early American modernist painters such as Arthur Dove and John Marin; to Abstract
Expressionist engagement with landscapes (see Pollock, de Kooning, Noguchi); to the
Earthworks of Robert Smithson and Carl Andre, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and James Turrell; to Maya Lin, and even Donald Judd, whose minimalist sculptures were influenced by his love of the landscape of the American southwest.
This course will investigate this long legacy, asking questions such as: what, if anything, is inherently American about this impulse? How might this connection to the land across disparate time periods and art historical movements help us see continuities in American art that until now remained mostly hidden in the art historical narrative?
The course will be run as a seminar, with class visits to sites under consideration, including the
High Line, Storm King Art Center, and a possible trip to Spiral Jetty . It will also form the basis for an exhibition planned for spring 2014; students will collaboratively produce the exhibition through class discussions and assignments throughout the semester, selecting works for exhibition and contributing all writing: wall text, artist biographies, and catalogue entries. To this extent, the class will largely be shaped by student contributions and interests.
Art H 780.1P Asian Art
Prof. Karetzky
Contemporary Chinese Art is a survey of the various forms of expression employed by artists living in China and overseas. The course will begin with an overview of the premodern era, explore the early twentieth century interaction with Western art, and trace the development of modern art through the propagandist, socialist and post socialist periods. Artists today engage in a national as well as global discourse: the one concerned with social injustices at home and the restoration of Chinese culture, the other with the challenges of addressing an international community. In addition to lectures, class time will be spent in galleries and museums in NYC.
Short papers will address topical issues, and a longer paper will take the form of an exhibition catalogue. There are no course prerequisites.
WR5.1.13