Art History 725 - Problems in Contemporary Art

This course addresses the art of the 1950s and '60s in Europe, from its relationship to World War II and the Holocaust to the era of the Cold War and the Bomb. The 1950s saw a major shift in the art world from a focus on abstract painting to new experiments in assemblage, Combines, Pop strategies, Neo-Data, New Realism, and the Situationist International. The course takes Cobra as a case study, focusing on the Fall 2016 UMCA exhibition "Human Animals: The Art of Cobra," curated by the professor. It examines Cobra and its legacy in later avant-gardes including the Situationist International, and addresses contemporaneous movements including European Informel, Dubuffet's Art Brut, responses to American Abstract Expressionism, postwar Surrealism, and Nouveau Realisme. It reconsiders major themes in postwar art such as the revival of prewar avant-garde experiments, mythmaking and Primitivism, spontaneous composition and its links to jazz and poetry, abstraction as a "universal" visual language, Existentialism and humanism, neo-Marxist criticism, and the positioning of these strategies as political examples of western freedom.