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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Course Number ART 92
Course Title ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Department
Campus Amherst College
Course Description Was offered in Spring 2001 "Topics in Fine Arts. Four topics will be offered in the second semester 2000-01. 1. DRAWING: INTERIOR/EXTERIOR. This course offers students knowledgeable in the basic principles and skills of drawing an opportunity to focus on the interior and landscape motifs as vehicles for developing issues of pictorial composition. Connections and contrasts between the motifs will be explored by each student by drawing primarily on site as well as from imagination and memory. Two three-hour meetings per week as well as a significant commitment of time out of class.Requisite: Basic Drawing or equivalent. Limited to twelve students. Professor Sweeney. 2. MICHELANGELO. One of the acknowledged geniuses in the history of art, Michelangelo's prodigious output of paintings, sculpture, architecture, and drawings served a remarkable variety of patrons in Florence and Rome: wealthy Medici merchants who schooled him and, later, autocratic Medici dukes who commanded him, as well as leaders of the anti-Medicean republic of Florence who won his loyalty. They included popes from the imperious Julius II who sought to revive the greatness of Imperial Rome with Michelangelo's help, to the stern Counter-Reformation pontiff Paul III who attempted to restore order to the collapsing Catholic world by means of the artist's imagery; and the noblewoman Vittoria Colonna with whom he met privately to pursue inner, fervent reform. At the same time, Michelangelo wrestled with his own internal passions and notions of creativity and autonomy, as his sonnets and letters reveal, ideas not always consonant with his patrons' wishes. This seminar, through a close examination of the development of Michelangelo's art in all media, in conjunction with selected primary sources, will explore the ways in which the intensely personal, evocative, and idiosyncratic language of art that the artist struggled to invent served his patrons' intentions, but also came to have an independent meaning divorced from its original creation, one which profoundly affected other art.Requisite: One course in the Department of Fine Arts or consent of the instructor. Professor Courtright. 3. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. This seminar will explore the works of artists such as Pollock, Gorky, DeKooning and Smith; their critics (Greenberg, Rosenberg); the implications of their new techniques; the stance they took toward Europe and toward current political, psychological and philosophical developments. We will challenge the usefulness of categories (""action painting,"" ""abstract expressionism"") as we tackle the fundamental problem of mythologies and meaning in abstract art. Trips to revel in actual paintings, drawings and sculptures will be included.Requisite: Fine Arts 1 or at least one course in Modern Art or consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Professor Staller. 4. SOCIAL SCULPTURE. Organized around the artist Joseph Beuys' description of his artistic activity as ""Social Sculpture,"" this seminar aims to explore, through studio work and discussion, art and artists who blur the distinction between life and art. We will study the new forms artists developed as they left the isolation of the studio for active engagement in the world and the resonance those forms had in the late 1960s and early 1970s in new, almost unrecognizable forms that would come to be called Conceptual Art. We will engage in a close critical examination of the socio-political and formal achievements of the Fluxus movement, Happenings, Land Art, Performance and the emergence of Installation. We will investigate how artists formulated new, often oppositional, relationships to institutional structures such as galleries, museums, and patterns of patronage. We will consider how contemporary artists continue these ideas and what forms these critical and social debates continue to engender. Along with these textual and critical studies, students will be required to formulate their own body of practical work, exploring and utilizing alternative art forms such as performance, text based, installation and other hybrid forms of artistic expression.Requisite: Sculpture II, Photo II, Painting II, or consent of the instructor. Limited to 10 students. Professor Godfrey."

Reg # Section Credits Instructors Meeting Times Location Notes
03 STALLER T 02:00 - 04:00 SCI 131

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