Art History-Visual Arts

AHIS C3001x Introduction to Architecture 3 pts. Satisfies the architectural history/theory distribution requirement for majors, but is also open to students wanting a general humanistic approach to architecture and its history. Architecture analyzed through in-depth case studies of major monuments of sacred, public, and domestic space, from the Pantheon and Hagia Sophia to Fallingwater and the Guggenheim. Discussion Section Required.

AHIS BC3031y Imagery and Form In the Arts 4 pts. Please attend the first day of class if interested. No application required. The operation of imagery and form in dance, music, theatre, visual arts, and writing; students are expected to do original work in one of these arts. Concepts in contemporary art will be explored.

AHIS V3201 (Section 001) Arts of China 3 pts. An introduction to the arts of China, from the Neolithic period to the present, stressing materials and processes of bronze casting, the development of representational art, principles of text illustration, calligraphy, landscape painting, imperial patronage, and the role of the visual arts in elite culture.

AHIS V3203y The Arts of Japan 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the 19th century. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts.

AHIS W3205 Introduction to Japanese Painting 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. A survey of the multifaceted forms of Japanese painting from antiquity through the early modern period. major themes to be considered include: painting as an expression of faith; the interplay indigenous and imported pictorial paradigms; narrative and decorative traditions; the emergence of individual artistic agency; the rise of woodblock prints and their impact on European painting in the nineteenth century.

AHIS W3208x The Arts of Africa 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Introduction to the arts of Africa, including masquerading, figural sculpture, reliquaries, power objects, textiles, painting, photography, and architecture. The course will establish a historical framework for study, but will also address how various African societies have responded to the process of modernity

AHIS W3230x Medieval Architecture 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Developed collaboratively and taught digitally spanning one thousand years of architecture.

AHIS W3234 (Section 001) Medieval Art II: Romanesque and Gothic 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This lecture course is intended for students with little or no background in medieval art. It provides an introduction to a period of one thousand years (fourth to fourteenth centuries) employing a dialectical interaction between memories of the imperial past and the dynamic, forward-moving force of "Gothic." We will survey all aspects of artistic production, with especial emphasis upon architecture and monumental sculpture. In the last part of the term we will turn to some of the principal themes of medieval art, focusing upon objects accessible to the students in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters.

AHIS V3248x Greek Art and Architecture 3 pts. Introduction to the art and architecture of the Greek world during the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods (11th - 1st centuries B.C.E.). Discussion Section Required.

AHIS V3250y Roman Art and Architecture 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The architecture, sculpture, and painting of ancient Rome from the 2nd century B.C. to the end of the Empire in the West. Discussion Section Required.

AHIS H3320 Medieval Art and Architecture

AHUM V3340y Art In China, Japan, and Korea 3 pts. Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia. Discussion Section Required.

AHUM V3342x and y Masterpieces of Indian Art and Architecture 3 pts. Introduction to 2000 years of art on the Indian subcontinent. The course covers the early art of Buddhism, rock-cut architecture of the Buddhists and Hindus, the development of the Hindu temple, Mughal and Rajput painting and architecture, art of the colonial period, and the emergence of the Modern.

AHIS W3407x Early Italian Art 3 pts. An introduction to the origins and early development of Italian Renaissance painting as a mode of symbolic communication between 1300-1600. Artists include Giotto, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Mantegna, and Leonardo da Vinci. Emphasis on centers of painting in Florence, Siena, Assisi, Venice and Rome.

AHIS H3545x Paris, Cultural Capital in the Middle Ages [in English] 3 pts.

AHIS H3550 French Architecture, 1750-1930 [In English]

AHIS W3600x Nineteenth-Century Art 3 pts. The course examines selected topics in the history of European painting from the 1780s to 1900. It will explore a range of aesthetic, cultural and social issues through the work of major figures from David, Goya, and Turner to Manet, Seurat and Cezanne. This is a no laptop, no e-device course. Discussion Section Required.

AHIS H3604 Seminar: Contemporary French Art

AHIS W3645y Twentieth Century Architecture and City Planning 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This undergraduate lecture course is an introduction to the crucial and peculiar topics in the history of modern (western) architecture of the twentieth century. The course does not systematically cover all the major events, ideas, protagonists, and buildings of the period. It is organized around thematic and sometimes monographic lectures, which are intended to represent the very essential character of modern architecture from its beginnings around 1900 until some more recent developments at the end of the century.

AHIS W3650y Twentieth-Century Art 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art-from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond-situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century's ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses. Discussion Section Required.

AHIS BC3673x History of Photography 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Focuses on the intersection of photography with traditional artistic practices in the 19th century, on the mass cultural functions of photography in propaganda and advertising from the 1920s onwards, and on the emergence of photography as the central medium in the production of postwar avant-garde art practices.

AHIS V3673x History of Photography 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Few media have shaped the course of modernity more powerfully than photography. Law, science, journalism, criminology, urban planning, and entertainment are but a handful of the fields remade by the introduction of photography. More ambivalent has been photography's relationship to art. Once relegated to the margins, photographic practices now occupy the center of much artistic production. This course will not attempt a comprehensive survey of the medium. Rather, we will trace central developments through a series of case studies from photography's nineteenth century birth to its current, digital afterlife. We will cover seminal movements and figures as well as more obscure practices and discourses. Particular attention will be paid to the theoretical and methodological questions concerning the medium.

AHIS H3715 Art In Paris, 1900-1965

AHIS W3770 Art, Media and the Avant-Garde 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. At the center of the avant-garde imagination-and the interwar period in Europe more broadly-were photography and film. Long relegated to the margins of art history and rarely studied together, photography and film were often the guiding lights and vehicles for mass dissemination of avant-garde images and techniques. This lecture course delves into interbellum art, photography, film, and critical writing as it surveys a range of avant-garde movements and national cinemas; seminal artists and theorists; and topics such as montage, abstraction, technological media, archives, advertising, sites and architectures of reception. Film screenings will take place most weeks.

AHIS W3813 (Section 001) Materiality in the Middle Ages 4 pts. This seminar will examine the significance of various materials and media in visual culture of the Mediterranean and Medieval Europe. From the sumptuous (gold, silver, ivory, gemstones, silk) to the sacred (earth, bones, blood, paint wood), we will address not only the symbolism of raw materials and the techniques of their manipulation, but their aesthetic, sensual, and cultural dimensions as well. How did particular materials shape the medieval viewer's optic/haptic encounters with objects? Did their use in different spheres, whether cultic, courtly, or diplomatic, impact meaning? In addition to these questions, we will attend to the intercultural appeal of certain media along with the reuse and spoliation of specific objects among cultures: for instance, Sassanian rock crystal carvings in European courtly life, Byzantine silks in European funerary contexts, or ivories from Islamic Spain repurposed as Christian reliquaries. This course will include visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, and The Hispanic Society of America Museum.

AHIS W3814 (Section 001) The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints, 1750-1850 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014.The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints 1770 - 1850 will open in Philadelphia in late 2013 and travel to several venues. Drawn entirely from Philadelphia Museum of Art's uniquely rich holdings of more than 8,000 prints by 800 German School painters and printmakers of this period, the exhibition will feature 125 works by leading Austrian, German, and Swiss artists working at home and abroad, including Josef Danhauser, Caspar David Friedrich, Ludwig Emil Grimm, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Ferdinand Olivier, Johann Christian Reinhart, Ludwig Richter, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Philipp Otto Runge, and Adrian Zingg. Spanning eight decades, from the first stirrings of a Romantic sensibility among German-speaking writers and artists in the 1770s to the pan-European uprisings of 1848/49, the selected works mirror many of the sweeping social and political changes that occurred during these turbulent times, reflecting such significant new trends in the arts as the growing appreciation of late Gothic and early Renaissance art - especially Dürer and Raphael - and the widespread enthusiasm for recently rediscovered medieval sagas, age-old fairy tales, popular ballads, and folk songs. The prints of the period document important shifts in taste in contemporary art circles, including the rise to prominence of landscape, informal portraiture, and scenes of everyday life alongside the more highly-ranked academic art categories of history and religion. The exhibition and catalogue will also treat a number of important printmaking innovations, among them the introduction of new technology (lithography and steel engraving) and new methods of print distribution (print albums, illustrated books and almanacs, annual print club editions), all of which served a rapidly expanding world of print collectors made up of a newly flourishing segment of the population, the cultivated citizenry known as the Lesepublikum, or reading public.

AHIS W3816 (Section 001) Mapping Gothic England 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Prerequisites: Some knowledge of medieval architecture. In this seminar we will apply the notion of "mapping," or spatial databasing to a corpus of English Gothic churches and cathedrals. We will, in addition, explore the notion of "Englishness" in architectural production of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.

AHIS W3833 Architecture, 1750-1890 3 pts. Major theorists and designs of architecture, primarily European, from the Age of Enlightenment to the dawn of the art nouveau critique of historicism. Particular attention to changing conditions of architectural practice, professionalization, and the rise of new building types, with focus on major figures, including Soufflot, Adam, Boullee, Ledoux, Schinkel, Pugin, and Garnier.

AHIS W3885 Intellectuals, Gods, Kings & Fishermen 4 pts. During the Hellenistic period (330-30 BCE), themes that were considered uninteresting, even inappropriate for the viewer of Classical and Late Classical sculpture became extremely attractive: old people, hard working peasants, old drunken prostitutes, fishermen in the big harbours, or persons ethnically different from the Greek ideals became the subject of the Hellenistic sculpture in the round that also produced images of serene divinities and dynamic members of the elite in an entirely Classical tradition. Besides Athens, new cultural and artistic centres arose: Alexandria in Egypt, Antiocheia and Pergamon in Asia Minor, or Rhodes. Despite its importance as the birthplace of all arts, Athens did not dominate anymore the artistic language, so that an unprecedented variety of styles characterises the sculptural production of the Hellenistic period. The seminar will study the sculpture of the Hellenistic period as an extremely imaginative and dynamic artistic expression without the Classical bias. The styles of the various Hellenistic artistic centres will be individually analysed based on representative works and then compared to each other and to the sculptural traditions of the Classical period, so that Hellenistic sculpture can be understood both as a continuation of the Classical and especially Late Classical sculpture and as an artistic and intellectual revolt against the ideals of the past.

AHIS W3889 (Section 001) Approaches to Contemporary Art 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Prerequisites: Approval of instructor, 20th Century Art recommended. This course examines the critical approaches to contemporary art from the 1970s to the present. It will address a range of historical and theoretical issues around the notion of "the contemporary" (e.g. globalization, participation, relational art, ambivalence, immaterial labor) as it has developed in the era after the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s.

AHIS W3894 (Section 001) The Floating World 4 pts. Prerequisites: ArtHum, Preference given to students with some background in Asian Art "Pictures of the Floating World" (Ukiyo-e) constitute one of the most significant developments in the history of Japanese art, and one that would have profound impact on the history of art in Europe and the west in the early modern period. These images were created on all pictorial formats, from scroll paintings and painted fans to woodblock prints, wooden posters, lanterns, and kites. Because these images pervaded so many different media, Ukiyo-e images offer a unique lens through which to examine the role art in early modern society as well as the very nature of that society. Our course will focus primarily on the woodblock print, a popular pictorial form that was accessible to broad sectors of society, and will focus on woodblock prints created in the city of Edo between 1700 and 1850. The course will be shaped around three approaches: brief weekly lectures to introduce prominent images and themes; discussion of readings that offer critical perspectives; and direct examination of works of art in the collections of Columbia University and other institutions and collections in New York.

AHIS W3895x and y Majors' Colloquium: the Literature and Methods of Art History 4 pts. Prerequisites: the department's permission. Students must sign-up in 826 Schermerhorn. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

AHIS W3897x Black West: African American Artists in the Western United States 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This course considers the creative production of African Americans primarily in California in the 19th and 20th centuries. Themes pertinent to the course include: how are African American identities and cultural production imbricated with concepts of what is considered "western" or trends of west coast artmaking?; what can these artists tell us about notions of space, place, and migration in the African American imagination?

AHIS W3904y Aztec Art and Sacrifice 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This seminar explores the issues of art and sacrfice in the Aztec empire from the points of view of the 16th century and modern times.

AHIS W3907 Construction of Andean Art 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Explores various ways in which the West has made sense of Andean Art from the 16th century to the present.

AHIS W3923x The Public Monument in the Ancient Near East 4-4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This seminar will focus on the invention of the public monument as a commemorative genre, and the related concepts of time, memory and history in the ancient Near East and Egypt. Public monuments will be studied in conjunction with readings from ancient texts (in translation), as well as historical criticism, archaeological and art historical theories.

AHIS C3948x Nineteenth-Century Criticism 4 pts. Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing and the instructor's permission. Selected readings in 19th-century philosophy, literature and art criticism with emphasis on problems of modernity and aesthetic experience. Texts include work by Diderot, Kant, Coleridge, Hegel, Emerson, Flaubert, Ruskin, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche.

AHIS BC3949x The Art of Witness: Memorials and Historical Trauma 4 pts. Attendance at the first class is mandatory. Limited to 15 students. Instructor determines class roster on first day of class. Examines aesthetic responses to collective historical traumas, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, AIDS, homelessness, immigration, and the recent attack on the World Trade Center.

AHIS W3951x (Section 001) Expatriate, Emigre and Exile Artists, 1789-1830 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This course explores the relation between the creative process and the respective conditions of expatriation, emigration and exile from the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 until the end of the Bourbon Restoration in 1830. While all three conditions involve distance from one's home, the personal and historical factors that define them varied significantly, with corresponding differences in the way that the creative process was approached. Examining the cases of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Jacques-Louis David and Francisco de Goya among others, this course focuses on the works artists produced while away from their native land, often by constraint rather than choice. Topics of discussion include: the Grand Tour and cosmopolitanism circa 1789; the category of the émigré(e)-artist; Revolution, gender and exile; uprooting and creative paralysis/creative fury; the refashioning of artistic identity; and the relation to history and the recent past.

AHIS W3961 (Section 001) Sacred Love in Italian Renaissance Art 4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. What is the nature of sacred love? How is it different from love experienced within romance, marriage, and friendship? How does one love God? What role does art play in conceptualizing divine love? How does it stimulate desire in the viewer's soul, mind, and body? Such questions structure this course's investigation of sacred love in Italian Renaissance art. The course examines religious art created between 1250-1550 within the cities of Florence, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Mantua, while simultaneously exploring the changing theological notions of love from the late medieval period through the Counter-Reformation. Topics covered within the course include the adoration of Jesus' body in the altarpiece; devotion in the context of Madonna and Child paintings; ecstatic transcendence in portrayals of saints like St. Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine of Siena; holy matrimony within the convent and monastery; as well as charity in the art of confraternities dedicated to amor dei and amor proximi.

AHIS H3962x Gothic and the Kings [in English] 4 pts.

AHIS W3966 (Section 001) The Printed Image and the Invention of the Viewer 4 pts. By the third quarter of the fifteenth century, the mechanically reproduced image could offer a variety of visual experiences: occasions for devotional encounters, markers of scientific data, portraits substituting for real presence, moral commentaries, templates for designs, and performances of stylistic bravado. Some of these categories had never before been presented for ownership, nor in the format of a single sheet that could be bought, colored, cut, pasted, written upon, copied, or sent as a greeting card. In order to attune prospective buyers to the capabilities of this medium, artists developed different strategies for signaling how their images might be enjoyed, put to use, or interpreted. Structured around visits to work with originals in New York collections, this course aims to develop our skills at "reading" prints, to understand how they invited certain behaviors and practices and offered new kinds of pictorial experiences. Through close reading of texts and close analysis of images, we will discover how early modern prints created artistic conversations and trained the eyes and minds of their viewers.

AHIS W3967y Sacred Love in Italian Renaissance Art 4-4 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. What is the nature of sacred love? How is it different from love experienced within romance, marriage, and friendship? How does one love God? What role does art play in conceptualizing divine love? How does it stimulate desire in the viewer's soul, mind, and body? Such questions structure this course's investigation of sacred love in Italian Renaissance art. The course examines religious art created between 1250-1550 within the cities of Florence, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Mantua, while simultaneously exploring the changing theological notions of love from the late medieval period through the Counter-Reformation. Topics covered within the course include the adoration of Jesus' body in the altarpiece; devotion in the context of Madonna and Child paintings; ecstatic transcendence in portrayals of saints like St. Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine of Siena; holy matrimony within the convent and monastery; as well as charity in the art of confraternities dedicated to amor dei and amor proximi.

AHIS C3980x or y Supervised Independent Study 3 pts. Prerequisites: the permission of the departmental consultant or director of undergraduate studies and of the instructor. Independent research and the writing of an essay under supervision of a member of the Art History Department. Only one independent study may be counted toward the major.

AHIS BC3985y Introduction To Connoisseurship 4 pts. Prerequisites: Please see Barnard College Art History department Web site for instructions. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 15. Factors involved in judging works of art, with emphasis on paintings; materials; technique, condition, attribution; identification of imitations and fakes; questions of relative quality.

AHIS C3997 (Section 01) Senior Thesis 3 pts. Prerequisites: Must receive departmental approval. Required for all thesis writers.

AHIS G4084x Mesoamerican Art and Architecture 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. A survey of the major pre-Hispanic cities of Mexico and Guatemala, including San Lorenzo, Teotihuacan, Tikal, Monte Alban, Uxmal, and Chichen Itza. Aesthetic, historical, and archaeological problems are discussed.

AHIS G4085y Andean Art and Architecture 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Survey of the art of the Andes from earliest times until the Spanish conquest. Emphasis on the nature of Andean tradition and the relationship between art and society.

AHIS W4131x (Section 001) Medieval Art I: From Late Antiquity to the End of Byzantium 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. A survey of Early Christian and Byzantine art from its origins in the eastern provinces of the Late Roman Empire through the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The course is first segment of a two-part survey of medieval monuments offered by the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

AHIS W4155y Mesopotamian Art & Architecture 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Introduction to the art and architecture of Mesopotamia beginning with the establishment of the first cities in the fourth millennium B.C.E. through the fall of Babylon to Alexander of Macedon in the fourth century B.C.E. Focus on the distinctive concepts and uses of art in the Assyro-Babylonian tradition.

AHIS G4357 Gothic Architecture 3 pts. The course will combine synchronic with diachronic approaches. Under the former heading comes the historiographic exploration of the way in which the epithet "Gothic" came to be attached to this particular kind of architecture and the way in which a more precise definition of the phenomenon emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exploration should embrace the range of approaches and methods appropriate to our own age with its passion for literary criticism. The diachronic approach will allow us to tell the story of Gothic, looking it as a phenomenon that exists over time and space. We will return frequently to the question of representation--the problems encountered when buildings and concepts of "style" are carried over into words and images.

AHIS G4385y Renaissance Architectural History & Theory 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. A survey of Renaissance Architecture in Italy through its buildings and its theory, from Brunelleschi to Palladio and the influence to other European country.

AHIS W4480 Art In the Age of Reformation 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Artistic production in Germany and the Netherlands in the 16th century and the transformation of the social function of art as a consequence of the development of reformed theories of art and the introduction of humanist culture: Albrecht Durer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Altdorfer, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden, Jan Gossaert, Jan van Hemessen, and Pieter Aertsen.

AHIS W4848x (Section 001) Neo-Dada and Pop Art 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This course examines the avant-garde art of the fifties and sixties, including assemblage, happenings, pop art, Fluxus, and artists' forays into film. It will examine the historical precedents of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann and others in relation to their historical precedents, development, critical and political aspects.

AHIS W4850x Collecting 3 pts.