Art History 244 Anthony W.

Lee
Global Modernisms office: Art Bldg 209
Thursday and Tuesday 2:55-4:30, Art Bldg 220 office hour: Tues 10-11 and
by appt.
Spring 2019 x2243, awlee@mtholyoke.edu

Description

This course examines the great ruptures in art in eastern and western Europe and North America that
today we call, and usually celebrate as, modernist. It relates aspects of that art to the equally great global
transformations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: political revolution, the expansion of
industrial capitalism across national borders, colonialism and its discontents, and world war. Among the
major figures to be studied are Duchamp, Hoch, Malevich, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, Rivera, Schwitters,
Seurat, and van Gogh.

Text

Steve Edwards and Paul Wood (eds.), Art of the Avant-Gardes (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, in association with the Open University, 2004). In addition, individual essays are
posted on the moodle course site.

Requirements

The final grade is based on: active participation in class discussions, a midterm, a final exam. All three
components are valued equally in the tally of the final grade, and all must be passed in order to pass the
course.

Study Images

Sets of images will be placed on the course website on moodle. The image sets are an integral part of
study for this course and will serve as the bases for portions of the midterm and final examinations. You
are encouraged to review the images regularly.

Class and Reading Schedule

Week 1 (Jan 22/24) Introduction; the legacy of Impressionism in the next generation
Read: Wood, “Introduction” (1-10), Eisenman, “Mass Culture and Utopia”
(moodle)

Week 2 (Jan 29/31) Utopians and radicals at the end of the nineteenth century
Image set: post-Impressionism
Read: Eisenman, “Abstraction and Populism” (moodle); van Gogh, letter
to Theo, 30 April 1885 (moodle)

Week 3 (Feb 5/7) The fauves and early 20th-century expressionism

Image set: Matisse and the fauves
 Read: Gaiger, “Expressionism and the crisis of subjectivity” (13-61),
Perry “Gender and the Fauves: flirting with ‘wild beasts’” (63-83),
Benjamin, “Orientalism, modernism, and indigenous identity” (85-107),
Harrison, “Bonnard and Matisse: expression and emotion” (109-132)

Week 4 (Feb 12/14) Radicalism in Barcelona, bohemianism in Paris

Image set: Early Picasso
No Class on Thursday, February 14

Week 5 (Feb 19/21) Cubism and a new world order

Image set: Picasso and cubism
Read: Gaiger, “Approaches to Cubism” (135-155), Ratnam, “Dusty
mannequins: modern art and primitivism” (157-183), Edwards, “Cubist
collage” (185-226)

Week 6 (Feb 26/28) Abstraction as a new way of seeing, the revolutionary art of Russia
Image set: Russian revolutionary art
Read: Wood, “The idea of abstract art” (229-271), Day, “Art, love and
social emancipation: on the concept ‘avant-garde’ and the interwar avant-
gardes” (307-337), Lodder, “Soviet Constructivism” (359-393)

Week 7 (Mar 7/9) The political critique of dada, the revolutionary art of Germany
Image set: Dada dandies
Read: Gaughan, “Naming the Dada game plan” (339-357), Edwards,
“’Profane Illumination’: photography and photomontage in the USSR and
Germany” (395-425)

Week 8 (Mar 12/14) No class (mid-semester break)

Week 9 (Mar 19/21) Midterm review Tuesday, midterm exam Thursday

Week 10 (Mar 28/30) A new public art, the revolutionary art of Mexico
Image set: Mexican Public Art
Read: Reiman, “Constructing a Modern Mexican Art” (moodle)

Week 11 (Apr 2/4) The immigration of dada to New York

Image set: Duchamp and New York dada
Read: Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon, or
Anti-Art?”, Camfield, et. al., “Discussion” (moodle)

Week 12 (Apr 9/11) Post-war trauma and the shock of surrealism

No class on Tuesday, April 9 (Community Day)

Week 13 (Apr 16/18) The surrealist image

Image set: Surrealist imagination
Read: Barber, “Surrealism, 1924-1929” (427-448)
Week 14 (Apr 23/25) Politics, publics, and art during the Great Depression
Image set: Public art of the Great Depression
Read: Pohl, “Art for the People” (excerpt, moodle), Lee, “Workers and
Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals”
(moodle)

Week 15 (April 30) Conclusion

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