ART HISTORY COURSES

Fall 2017

School of Art + Art History

University of Florida

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

ARH 2050

Introduction to the Principles and History of Art I

Dr. Ashley Jones

This course is an overview of the history of art from Prehistory through the Middle Ages. It aims to familiarize students with key monuments of the art of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, and to give them the tools to describe, analyze, and contextualize artworks.

ARH 2051

Introduction to the Principles and History of Art II

Dr. Matthew Jarvis

Continuation of ARH 2050. Art and architecture from the Renaissance to the present.

ARH 2930

Introduction to Latin American Art

Dr. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

This course introduces the art and architecture of Pre-Columbian, colonial, and modern Latin America. We will examine the way the field of Latin American art has developed and how scholars approach this art. The fall class will take advantage of the exhibition of modern Latin American art currently at the Harn Museum of Art, and will have a special focus on the Aztec Calendar Stone (ca. 1520 CE), of which there is a full-size replica on campus.

No pre-requisites.

ARH 3552

Early Chinese Art and Archaeology (5000 BCE-220 CE)

Dr. Guolong Lai

This course covers the art and material culture from the beginning of civilization in China to the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE). While centered upon the visual arts, the course considers palaces and tombs, religious art, and the rise of new media and technologies during that span of Chinese history. It incorporates archaeological discoveries of the last five decades, which have fundamentally transformed our understanding of Chinese history and cultures. The important themes in this course include the origins of civilizations in China, the origins and early development of pictorial art before the introduction of Buddhism to China.

ARH 3562

Text and Image in Chinese Art

Dr. Guolong Lai

This course brings general art historical discussions on the dialectics of text and image into Chinese art history by examining canonical and more recent theoretical accounts of that relationship and assessing their variety and also identifying different approaches to the visual and verbal arts in China. The topics that we will explore include the role of picture in the origins of writing, the relationships between surface and ornament, motif and background, text and ornament, the origins and development of pictorial narrative, the interplay between text and image in transmitting knowledge, the importance of diagram, and the use of diagrams in representing the heavenly, earthly and human realms, in early Chinese religion, Daoism, and Buddhism.

ARH 3653

Mesoamerican Art

Dr. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

This course will explore the art and architecture of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, a region that corresponds to the modern-day countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. The time period is from 1500 BCE (before common era, or BC) to about 1550 CE (common era, or AD). The class will also cover the histories of discovery of this art and the major theoretical and ethical issues related to its study. Highlights will include the San Bartolo murals in Guatemala and the recent discovery of a relief depicting the Earth Goddess under the Aztec Great Temple in the heart of Mexico City.

(H and N) (WR)

ARH 4310

Early Renaissance Art in Italy

Dr. Elizabeth Ross

This course offers an introduction to the art of Italy from the death of Saint Francis in 1226 to the years after the death of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1469.  We will focus on the painting, sculpture, and civic architecture of the republican communes of Florence, Siena, and Venice, in addition to Papal patronage in Rome and Assisi, with particular attention to the work of Duccio, Giotto, Simone Martini, Donatello, and Piero della Francesca.           

The Italian commune served as an arena for political and social competition, where an urban mercantile class showcased their rising wealth and cultural ambitions through the patronage of art and architecture.  Experiments with pictorial space lead from the expressive tension between naturalism and abstraction in the Duecento and Trecento to the development of linear perspective in the Quattrocento.  Artists negotiated the influence of Christian Byzantium, the Gothic North, and Italy’s own Classical heritage, until the fifteenth century chose the language and visual forms of Antiquity as the predominant model and marker of elite culture.  The rise of art theory and a humanist discourse about art changed the conception of the role of art and artists in society.  Together, this extraordinary patronage, new pictorial space, and intensive interpretation of Classical Antiquity began to establish the paradigms that continue to shape the Western tradition.

ARH 4453

Mid 20th Century Art

Dr. Kaira M. Cabañas

This lecture course addresses key artistic practices and movements from 1940s to the 1960s. By introducing students to the development of modern art in the United States, Europe and Latin America, the course encourages reflection on the material differences in processes and procedures and also on the social and historical context of art’s production. It thus probes how these questions of materials and historical specificity might inflect a work’s meaning as well as contemporary understandings of modernism in a global context. Each session focuses on a few significant figures so that students can draw out the complex interrelationships between artistic experimentation, geopolitical context, and identity.

ARH 4930

Dark Romanticism

Dr. Matthew Jarvis

During the late eighteenth century art and culture began to recoil from the philosophy of the Enlightenment and many artists sought a return to aesthetics founded in the sublimity of nature. The horrors of Pan-European war brought about by the French Revolution and later Napoleon instigated a movement within art which would examine the darker side of the human condition. Morbidity and a fascination with the uncanny as well as evil, death, superstition, and social exclusion led artists of this time period to explore emotional extremes in their work. In this course we will discuss artists such as Francisco de Goya, Henry Fuseli, William Blake, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich, and Carl Blechen as a first generation of reactors to the twilight of the Enlightenment. Moving forward through the nineteenth century we will look to Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Franz von Stuck, and Edvard Munch as questioners of the self and man’s true nature. The antagonist of the course will be industrialization and its thrusting of the social order into modernity, mechanization, and global war. Our dark romantics, however, will not be stifled as they appropriate the mediums of machine. As such we will also examine photographers like Brassaï, Roger Parry, and Hans Bellmer in addition to films by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. This study of Dark Romanticism will conclude with a disassociation of the self that can be found in Surrealism— artists such as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee, and Max Ernst. The course is bookended by yet another emerging global conflict as the specter of World War II looms across Europe. 

IDH 3931

Interdisciplinary Junior Honors - 18th Century Women

1 credit course

Dr Melissa Hyde

Dr Sheryl Kroen (Dept. of History)

This course is designed to run in conjunction with a major exhibition of eighteenth-century French art, guest curated for the Harn by UF art history professor, Melissa Hyde. Like the exhibition, the class is entitled Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment. It will explore themes that in the eighteenth century circulated around the so-called Woman Question, which was essentially an ongoing quarrel about the nature and social role of women (or rather, Woman, as a category). The Woman Question was the heart of some of the most pressing cultural, philosophical, political, and social debates of the great intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. A central theme for this  class is how these debates shaped the representations and experiences of women of different classes and conditions.  Our focus will be on visual representations, as well as period writing of and by women.

This course will further students’ understanding of a fascinating and formative moment in the history of Europe and beyond, but it will also offer opportunities to understand how the past can help us to think about the present. For although the circumstances and the specifics have changed, the woman question remains a pressing one that can still provoke contentious debates, as the recent presidential election and its aftermath so readily attest. That these issues are still very much with us today gives this course particular relevance as it explores the Woman Question in the period often seen as that in which our modern notions of, for example, marriage, the family, childhood, and adolescence were being formed.

Taught by two specialists in the period (along with Hyde, Sheryl Kroen, Dept. of History), it will be a fundamentally interdisciplinary course that centers around short weekly readings and discussions, but will include guest speakers. There will be several field trips to the Harn over the course of the semester. As an additional way to explore issues and concepts in the course, students will attend a one woman play at the Performing Arts Center about Mozart’s sister, who was herself a musical prodigy, composer and keyboard virtuoso, but whose work and story have been all but lost to history. In addition to readings and participation in class discussions, each student will be expected to do a 15 minute presentation, either in the form of a gallery talk about a particular theme or set of works in the exhibition; or a conference-style presentation on some appropriate theme or issue.

Contact Dr Hyde if you are interested in the course but are not in the Honors Program.

GRADUATE COURSES

ARH 6496

Graduate Seminar: Modern Art

Dr. Kaira M. Cabañas

This seminar on the subject of art and war will raise core questions about how war is remembered and represented through visual art and film. With his Disasters of War (1810–1820) series, Francisco de Goya signaled the beginning of a new understanding of the power of art as historical testimony, what Susan Sontag in her Regarding the Pain of Others described thus: “With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art.” Questions will be anchored in concrete case studies, beginning with Goya’s prints and ending with the contemporary art installation 9 Scripts from a Nation at War (2007), which questions the individual roles constructed by war and at once probes how war impacts the classroom. Seminar readings will include key scholarship in art history and critical theory. 

ARH 6477

Graduate Seminar: Eighteenth-Century Art

Dr. Melissa Hyde

This seminar will be taught in conjunction with a major exhibition of eighteenth-century French art, guest curated for the Harn by Professor Hyde. Like the exhibition, the seminar is entitled Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment. It will explore themes that in the eighteenth century circulated around the so-called Woman Question, which was essentially an ongoing quarrel about the nature and social role of women (or rather, Woman, as a category). The Woman Question was the heart of some of the most pressing cultural, philosophical, political, and social debates of the Enlightenment. A central theme for this  class is how these debates shaped the representations and experiences of women of different classes and conditions.  Readings will include period sources, recent scholarship in art history, with a particular emphasis on feminist scholarship and feminist theory.