Art History 323 - European Art, 1780-1880

This course explores European art and visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, and photography. We begin with the festive yet decadent Rococo, which leaves its place to Neoclassicism's utopian search for a new world in the second half of the eighteenth century. We then investigate the emergence of Romanticism from a deep disappointment with Enlightenment ideals as it transforms into a fascination with the dark recesses of the human psyche. Realism ushers in new themes of contemporary life in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848. Our survey will culminate at the birth of modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

Identity, Patronage, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture
This class introduces students to dominant practices of nineteenth-century high art sculpture: neoclassicism and polychromy. This course explores how these distinct sculptural aesthetics and thematic foci were informed by the pressing social and political issues of the day like Transatlantic Slavery, abolitionism, emancipation, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, American westward expansion, and Manifest Destiny.