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.

Open to Graduate students only. DRAWING IN COLOR:This course is an open-ended exploration of the possibilities of relating the social discussion of race and other categories of identity with the artistic medium of drawing in global contemporary art (since the 1960s). Drawing, once considered a preparatory medium for painting and design, is now a major medium in its own right. However, drawing is resistant to mid-century modernist theories of medium specificity and thus can be seen as an "anti-medium": its contemporary definition is not based on internal properties, such as line or the use of paper, but rather its ability to connect disparate practices, such as hand-making and digital expression; genres, such as art and design; and communities, such as art and political activism. Given its historical associations with intimacy and writing, drawing is uniquely suited to discussions that connect the personal to the political. The course will explore current discussions of race in light of its intersection with gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, politics, and history, as it develops materially in relation to open-ended formulations of drawing.