Art History (ARTH)
ARTH 0127 The Material Past in a Digital World
The material remains of the human past -objects and spaces- provide tangible evidence of past people's lives. Today's information technologies improve our ability to document, study, and present these materials. But what does it mean to deal with material evidence in a virtual context? In this class, students will learn basic digital methods for studying the past while working with objects, including those in the collections of the Penn Museum. This class will teach relational database design and 3D object modeling. As we learn about acquiring and managing data, we will gain valuable experience in the evaluation and use of digital tools. The digital humanities are a platform both for learning the basic digital literacy students need to succeed in today's world and for discussing the human consequences of these new technologies and data. We will discuss information technology's impact on the study and presentation of the past, including topics such as public participation in archaeological projects, educational technologies in museum galleries, and the issues raised by digitizing and disseminating historic texts and objects. Finally, we will touch on technology's role in the preservation of the past in today's turbulent world. No prior technical experience is required, but we hope students will share an enthusiasm for the past.
Also Offered As: ANTH 1303, CLST 1303, HIST 0871
1 Course Unit
ARTH 0141 Museums, Monuments, and Social Justice
Monuments, museums, and heritage are all critical parts of the world that we have created and are shaped by. These institutions and sites often claim to represent our past, who we imagine ourselves to be today, and how we might define our futures. We often rely on museums and monuments to frame history and history’s relationship to our current social and cultural systems. However, in recent years, social, racial, and economic justice movements have pushed us to rethink the function of monuments, museums, and heritage. In particular, these social movements have helped us understand how racism, sexism, and colonialism are responsible for the creation of monuments and museums. This course examines the echoes and continuities of colonial representations in museums and monuments. In addition, we will examine how new ways of commemorating and representing the past can result in a new vision for our future. By visiting a variety of local monuments and sites and by engaging in conversations about accountability and social justice, this course will challenge us to rethink the tangible and intangible ways that we weave the past into the present for the creation of the future.
Fall
Also Offered As: ANTH 1410
1 Course Unit
ARTH 0143 The Past Preserved: Conservation In Archaeology
This course explores the scientific conservation of cultural materials from archaeological contexts. It is intended to familiarize students with the basics of artifact conservation but is not intended to train them as conservators. The course will cover how various materials interact with their deposit environments; general techniques for on-site conservation triage and retrieval of delicate materials; what factors need to be considered in planning for artifact conservation; and related topics. Students should expect to gain a thorough understanding of the role of conservation in archaeology and how the two fields interact.
Also Offered As: ANTH 3235, CLST 3315, MELC 4955, NELC 4955
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5235
1 Course Unit
ARTH 0221 Material World in Archaeological Science
By focusing on the scientific analysis of inorganic archaeological materials, this course will explore processes of creation in the past. Class will take place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will be team taught in three modules: analysis of lithics, analysis of ceramics and analysis of metals. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how the transformation of materials into objects provides key information about past human behaviors and the socio-economic contexts of production, distribution, exchange and use. Discussion topics will include invention and adoption of new technologies, change and innovation, use of fire, and craft specialization.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2221, CLST 3302, MELC 2960, NELC 2960
Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5221
1 Course Unit
ARTH 0339 Sacred Stuff: Religious Bodies, Places, and Objects
Does religion start with what's in our heads? Or are religious commitments made, shaped and strengthened by the people, places, and things around us? This course will explore how religion happens in the material world. We'll start with classical and contemporary theories on the relationship of religion to stuff. We'll then consider examples of how religion is animated not just by texts, but through interactions with objects, spaces, bodies, monuments, color, design, architecture, and film. We'll ask how these material expressions of religion move beyond private faith and connect religion to politics and identity.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ANTH 1120, RELS 1020
1 Course Unit
ARTH 0500 First-Year Seminar
The primary goal of the first-year seminar program is to provide every first-year student the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small setting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics are posted at the beginning of each academic year.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 0501 Spiegel-Wilks First-Year Seminar
The primary goal of the first-year seminar program is to provide every first-year student the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small setting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics are posted at the beginning of each academic year. This Spiegel-Wilks seminar focuses exclusively on contemporary art.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ENGL 0365
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1010 World Art Before 1400
This course serves as a double introduction to art history. First, it surveys the visual arts in a global context from prehistory to the dawn of the modern era. Focusing on multiple premodern cultures and traditions, the course examines a wide variety of art forms, from public monuments and architecture to paintings, textiles, and illustrated books. We will consider this rich material in its historical context and ask how art was made, used, seen, and valued by people in the past. Special emphasis will be placed on cross-cultural connections, interactions, and analogies. Second, the course will introduce you to the practice of art history. You will develop the skills of visual analysis and critical reading and learn the basic methods that scholars employ to interpret works of art and architecture. In the process, you will gain a deeper understanding of the intersection of art, society, and human experience at large. Lectures and group discussions will be complemented by visits to museums and other collections on campus and beyond.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1020 The Artist in History,1400-Now
This course is an introduction to the history of art in a global context from the early 1400s to the present. Lectures will introduce students to significant moments in artistic production in both the Western and Eastern hemispheres through focused studies on crucial aspects of exchange between cultures and continents. Covering an era of increasing economic transactions, imperial conquests, and industrialization, this course will build recursively through themes such as: the emergence of authorial identity and models of artistic collaboration, the traffic of artistic materials and techniques and their adaptation in different cultural settings, and the foregrounding of art to both document and initiate political change. Developing vocabularies to discuss painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints, as well as photography and film, students will learn to analyze art's decisive role during times of social transformation, including modernization, colonization, and technological advances. We will also examine the role of broad-reaching media and the advent of art criticism in forming public opinion. Assignments will encourage students to think widely across geographies and study intimately local examples in the Philadelphia museums. This course fulfills Sector III: Arts and Letters and counts towards the History of Art major and minor requirements.
Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 2320
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1030 Art and Civilization in East Asia
Introduction to the major artistic traditions of China and Japan and the practices of art history. We will also consider aspects of Korean and Indian artistic traditions as they relate to those of China and Japan. Our approaches will be methodological in addressing how we understand these objects through careful looking; chronological in considering how the arts developed in and through history; and thematic in studying how art and architecture were used for philosophical, religious and material ends. Special attention will be given to the relationship between artistic production and the afterlife; to the impact of Buddhism and its purposes; to painting traditions and their patronages; and to modernist transformations of traditions.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 0100, VLST 2330
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1040 Art of Global Asia
This course surveys flows of ideas, images, and objects across, within, and beyond Asia. It considers how the art of Asia is and has been global from antiquity through the present, and introduces 'Asia,' 'globality,' and 'art' as key terms and concepts that shift over time and place. Artistic traditions are presented within broader historical, cultural, social, and economic frameworks, with attention to their local and regional significance. Trade, exchange, and interaction between cultures and groups, including but not limited to artists, pilgrims, merchants, warriors, and rulers, and the transmission of concepts through languages, religions, and philosophies, will be highlighted throughout. We shall address problems of iconophilia and iconoclasm, narrative and temporality, archeology and historiography, ritual and religion, sovereignty and kingship, gender and sexuality, colonialism and nationalism, diasporas and migration as they pertain to the images, objects, and sites of our study. We shall make use of local resources at the Penn Museum and Penn Libraries, as well as other sites, to show how objects retain and inflect these ideas. The course builds out from a central focus on the arts of South Asia or the arts of East Asia, depending upon the specialty of the faculty member teaching the course, with additional faculty offering guest lectures as available. Students with a background in art history, studio art, architecture, history, religion, literature, anthropology, and/or South or East Asian Studies are especially welcome.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 1040, VLST 2340
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1060 Architect and History
The built environment shapes our lives and this course tackles its underpinning design principles and qualities as well as social and cultural contexts. It is an interpretative look at the built environment or, more precisely, at the ways in which monuments and cities are designed, represented, perceived and construed over time. It introduces students to the interrelated fields of architecture, art history, and urbanism and explores great architectural monuments and cities from the modern to the ancient period, from the US across Europe and from the Mediterranean to Asia. We will assess the built environment as culturally meaningful form and examine a body of historical and cultural material relevant to its interpretation. In doing so, the course seeks to foster a critical understanding of the cultural and artistic processes that have influenced architectural and urban design. The focus will be on understanding these works as results of skilled workmanship as well as social and cultural products. We will tackle ancient and modern perceptions of these monuments and cities by analyzing form, design, structure and by addressing their perceptual qualities through 3D reconstructions and virtual environments, as well as sketchbook assignments. This course fulfills Sector IV, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1100 What is Modern Art?
Modernism is not easily defined. For some, the word simply identifies Western art of the last two hundred-odd years. For others, modernism refers to forms of “advanced” visual art, whether the cubist distortions of Pablo Picasso or the allover abstractions of Jackson Pollock, that break with established representational conventions. For still others, the term singles out modes of artistic opposition to the ravages of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, imperialism, and war that continue to define our world. Among its manifold practices, we find the rise of abstraction, paintings that pretend to show nothing but an instant, dreams and erotic desires set free for everyone to see, and everyday objects elevated to the status of sculpture. At key moments, "Art" itself was declared dead, then resurrected as the solution to the social problems of the era, forming a highly ambivalent relationship to the spheres of politics and history. We will cover the development of Modernism broadly, from the 1860s to the 1960s, introducing many of the best-known figures (like Monet, Van Gogh, Duchamp, and Picasso) and movements (like Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism). Europe and North America will be the focus, but we will frequently look to global developments as well and analyze art made in colonial and diasporic conditions. The standard narratives of Modernism will be questioned at every turn, and artists of color, diverse gender and sexual orientations, as well as national and economic backgrounds studied in depth as well. We will proceed more or less chronologically, doubling back or projecting forward when necessary to understand the determinative historical influences that have shaped the development of modernist idioms in particular times and places. In every instance, we will study works of art that have confronted our culture’s visual means—of life, death, consumption, and display—and attempted to work them over into critical form.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1500 Eye, Mind, and Image
Visual Studies 101 provides an introduction to the collaboration of eye, mind, and image that produces our experience of a visual world. How and what do we see? How do we perceive color, space, and motion? What is an image? Does seeing vary across cultures and time? What can art tell us about vision? Is there a 21st-century form of seeing? This course combines different approaches to the study of vision, drawing from psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, history of art, and fine art. Professors representing two or three disciplines present lectures that demonstrate the methods of their disciplines and draw connections across fields. This course combines different approaches to the study of vision, drawing from psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, history of art, and fine art. Professors representing two or three disciplines present lectures that demonstrate the methods of their disciplines and draw connections across fields.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 1010
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1800 Introduction to Queer Art
It's no exaggeration to note that queers have long been at the forefront of innovation in the arts, and that the arts, generally, have been a comfortable home for queers, even at moments when society at large was distinctly hostile. In fact the concepts of modern art and homosexuality that we use today are twins, for they were both founded in the third quarter of the 19th century and grew up together. Introduction to Queer Art thus begins with the coining of the word "homosexual" in 1869, and surveys how a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and film shifted in response to new definitions of sexuality. Along the way, we will work towards answering two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in the arts, and 2) why do we find so often that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well? In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, including non-objective and abstract art, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. We will look into the politics of queer art, and how and why in the US, even amidst often dangerous homophobia, it was queer artists who represented America to itself. Thus, we will cover such key cultural figures such as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Agnes Martin. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.
Fall
Also Offered As: GSWS 1800
1 Course Unit
ARTH 1900 What is Contemporary Art?
What is contemporary art? When is contemporary art? For whom is contemporary art? Where is contemporary art? And… why does contemporary art matter? This survey introduces us to some central artists, themes, works, and debates currently comprising the history of contemporary art, with a particular focus on the social, racial, and political engagements that have informed artistic developments, as well as how they are historicized in relation to other art and geopolitical events, globally. We consider the ways in which artists have approached, contested, reflected, and reconfigured the problems and possibilities of institutions in order to find critical traction and build historical context. We also look at how globalization, technology, racialization, and capitalism have all shaped artistic production, art criticism, and the art market, while also reflecting upon the temporality of our present and what it is that is “contemporary” to our “now.”
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2094 Dress and Fashion in Africa
Throughout Africa, social and cultural identities of ethnicity, gender, generation, rank and status were conveyed in a range of personal ornamentation that reflects the variation of African cultures. The meaning of one particular item of clothing can transform completely when moved across time and space. As one of many forms of expressive culture, dress shape and give forms to social bodies. In the study of dress and fashion, we could note two distinct broad approaches, the historical and the anthropological. While the former focuses on fashion as a western system that shifted across time and space, and linked with capitalism and western modernity; the latter approach defines dress as an assemblage of modification the body. The Africanist proponents of this anthropological approach insisted that fashion is not a dress system specific to the west and not tied with the rise of capitalism. This course will focus on studying the history of African dress by discussing the forces that have impacted and influenced it overtime, such as socio-economic, colonialism, religion, aesthetics, politics, globalization, and popular culture. The course will also discuss the significance of the different contexts that impacted the choices of what constitute an appropriate attire for distinct situations. African dress in this context is not a fixed relic from the past, but a live cultural item that is influenced by the surrounding forces.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2324, ANTH 2024
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2120 Cities and Temples in Ancient India
The wooden architecture of ancient India's cities is represented in relief carvings from Buddhist religious monuments of the early centuries A.D. and replicated in remarkable excavated cave cathedrals. This lecture course will trace that architectural tradition, its transformation into a symbolic vocabulary for a new structure, the Hindu temple, and the development of the temple in India from ca. 500-1500 A.D.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 2120
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2130 Arts of Japan
This lecture course introduces the major artistic traditions of Japan, from the Neolithic period to the present, and teaches the fundamental methods of the discipline of art history. Special attention will be given to the places of Shinto, the impact of Buddhism, and their related architectures and sculptures; the principles of narrative illustration; the changing roles of aristocratic, monastic, shogunal and merchant patronage; the formation of the concept of the artist over time; and the transformation of tradition in the modern age.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 0140
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2140 Arts of China
A broad survey of Chinese architecture, sculpture, and painting from the Neolithic age through the nineteenth century. Topics include excavated material from China's Bronze Age, Chinese funerary arts, Buddhist caves and sculpture (including works in the University Museum), the Chinese city, the Chinese garden, and major masterpieces of Chinese painting.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 0120
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2145 Reading Maya Culture: Decipherment and a New Window into the Ancient Americas
The past three decades have seen a revolution in the study of the Ancient Americas, one with far-reaching implications for how we understand indigenous society and culture on this continent. This course will take us on a journey of academic discovery—encompassing language, art, and materiality—that explains how the decipherment of a major writing system has revealed a previously hidden world. The Maya are one of the most distinctive and best-known of Mesoamerican peoples, who live today, as they did in ancient times, in the Yucatan Peninsula and a region that spans modern southern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the westernmost fringes of Honduras and El Salvador. From as early as 1000 BCE they were erecting major architecture and flourished for twenty-five more centuries before the invasion of Europeans brought their independence to an end in the sixteenth century CE. Within their elaborate urban spaces, the Maya erected large stone monuments inscribed with imagery and hieroglyphic texts—most of them commissioned in the Classic Period that reaches from 150-900 CE—although the script is also found on many smaller and more intimate objects. For the first century of research these texts proved all but unintelligible, as faulty assumptions and lack of adequate sources left a deep pessimism that they could ever be understood. But beginning in the 1980s major progress in "cracking the code" took place and today we can read almost all inscriptions to some extent, a decent number in their entirety. This course will teach practical skills that allow students with no previous background to read Maya inscriptions and gain access to the history, politics, religious beliefs, and practical material culture they describe. The fabulous design of the hieroglyphs, that at first seem so impenetrable, will be broken-down to reveal not only language but an iconographic system that reveals much about the ancient Maya aesthetics and visual culture.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2145, LALS 2145
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2170 Chinese Painting
Study of Chinese painting and practice from the earliest pictorial representation through the late twentieth century. Painting styles are analyzed, but themes such as landscape and narrative are considered with regard to larger social, cultural, and historical issues. The class will pay particular attention to the construction of the concepts of the "artist" and "art criticism" and their impact on the field into the present. Visits to study paintings at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 1127
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2180 Art and Architecture in Ancient Egypt
This course will be an introduction to the art, architecture and minor arts that were produced during the three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history. This material will be presented in its cultural and historical contexts through illustrated lectures and will include visits to the collection of the University Museum.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANCH 1305, MELC 0210
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2200 The Ancient Maya: Integrating Material, Text, and Image
Ancient Maya studies is one of the most dynamic and innovative fields in world archaeology today. Emerging as a true historical archaeology only in the past three decades, the decipherment of Maya script now provides a powerful complement and counterpoint to both traditional excavation data and new remote sensing technologies. Equally, the reading of images, and their interaction with texts and artifacts, forms a vital part of our interest in the broader humanistic concerns of worldview and the transcendent--where our primary interest lies in gaining access to past mentalities. This course will provide a comprehensive introduction into current knowledge of the Ancient Maya, with a recurring methodological focus on how different types of evidence are integrated to assemble a persuasive "portrait of the past." This scope of this process is unique in the ancient Americas, since only the Maya offer us the opportunity to read their own descriptions of the world two millennia or more in the past. Geographically, we will be looking at the greater Yucatan Peninsula, which today covers parts of southeastern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the western extremities of Honduras and El Salvador. Since archaic times (before 1200 BCE) this has been occupied by speakers of the Mayan language group, and millions of people identified as Maya by that means continue to do so today (despite popular notions to the contrary, they have never "disappeared"). No prior knowledge of archaeology or art history is necessary. The course structure is one 3-hour session per week, consisting of a lecture followed by group discussion in seminar-style. Additionally, in Week 6 there will be a virtual tour of the new Mexico and Central American Gallery at Penn Museum. This will introduce the class to the issues of disseminating scholarship and building narratives that are accessible to the wider public.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2150, LALS 2150
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2220 Art of Ancient Iran
This lecture course offers a survey of ancient Iranian art and culture from the painted pottery cultures of the Neolithic era to the monuments of the Persian Empire.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 2050, NELC 2050
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2221 The Early Bronze Age
This lecture course offers a survey of ancient Iranian art and culture from the painted pottery cultures of the Neolithic era to the monuments of the Persian Empire. Particular emphasis is placed on the Early Bronze Age.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 2055, NELC 2055
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2240 Art of Mesopotamia
Visual expression was first developed in Mesopotamia in the same environment as the invention of writing. This lecture class will introduce the arts of the major periods of Mesopotamian History ending with the "cinematic" effects achieved by the Assyrian artists on the walls of the royal palaces. The strong connection between verbal and visual expression will be traced over the three millennia course of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest periods through the imperial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians of the first millennium BCE. The class and the assignments will regularly engage with objects in the collections and on display in the galleries of the Penn Museum.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 0060, NELC 0060
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6240
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2250 Greek Art and Artifact
This lecture course surveys Greek art and artifacts from Sicily to the Black Sea from the 10th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE, including the age of Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms. Public sculpture and painting on and around grand buildings and gardens, domestic luxury arts of jewelry, cups and vases, mosaic floors, and cult artefacts are discussed. Also considered are the ways in which heroic epic, religious and political themes are used to engaged viewers' emotions and served both domestic and the public aims. We discuss the relationships of images and things to space and structure, along with ideas of invention and progress, and the role of monuments, makers and patrons in Greek society.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3401
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2260 Hellenistic and Roman Art and Artifact
This lecture course surveys the political, religious and domestic arts, patronage and display in Rome's Mediterranean, from the 2nd c. BCE to Constantine's 4th-c. Christianized empire. Our subjects are images and decorated objects in their cultural, political and socio-economic contexts (painting, mosaic, sculpture, luxury and mass-produced arts in many media). We start with the Hellenistic cosmopolitan culture of the Greek kingdoms and their neighbors, and late Etruscan and Republican Italy; next we map Imperial Roman art as developed around the capital city Rome, as well as in the provinces of the vast empire.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3402
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2269 Classical Myth and the Image
The peoples of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds shared a vast body of stories about human and not-human beings set in a legendary deep past or supernatural present - "Classical myth." Even their neighbor cultures took up those stories (or, sometimes, gave them). The stories as spoken, read, or performed turn up in surviving ancient literature. But from the very point when Greek myth began to be written down, those stories were told with images also. Many arts of the Mediterranean world explored myth at temples and sanctuaries, in civic spaces, theaters, parks, houses and palaces, for tombs and trophies - and even on the body upon weapons, clothes and jewelry. Love and desire and hate, hope and fear and consolation, war and peace, pleasure and excitement, power and salvation, the nature of this world and the cosmos, justice and duty and heroism, fate and free will, suffering and crime: mythological images probed the many domains of being human in order to move the emotions and minds of people (and of gods). Our class samples this story art to ask about its makers and viewers and contexts. What, also, were relations between images and texts and language? What about religious belief vs invention, truth vs fiction? What might it mean to look at this ancient art today, and to represent the old stories in post-ancient cultures? The class introduces ways of thinking about what images and things do; we will read in some relevant literature (drama, epic, novels, etc); and our Penn Museum will be a resource. No prerequisites--no prior knowledge of art history, archaeology, myth or Mediterranean antiquity is assumed.
Also Offered As: CLST 3416
Mutually Exclusive: AAMW 6269, ARTH 6269, CLST 5416
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2290 Roman Architecture and Urbanism
Architecture is the most striking legacy of Rome and the well-preserved remains of Roman buildings dominate our vision of the empire. Although Roman architecture has been studied since the Renaissance, it is only since the middle of the 20th century that it has come to be appreciated for the developments in concrete construction, which led to a revolution in the treatment of interior space and landscape architecture. Indeed, Rome’s architectural revolution radically changed both cities and countryside. Romans developed a wide range of new architectural forms and technological innovations in order to meet the increasingly sophisticated and diverse needs of their society. The purpose of the course is to shed light on Roman architectural and urban projects within their social, political, religious, and physical contexts. Throughout, the emphasis will be on concepts of organizing space, issues of structure, materials, decoration and proportion, the role of architecture in Roman society, and on the varied ways that architecture was employed by individuals and communities to express and enhance their status.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3415
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2320 Byzantine Art and Architecture
This lecture course offers a wide-ranging introduction to the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium—a Christian, predominantly Greek-speaking civilization that flourished in the Eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years. Positioned between the Muslim East and the Latin West, Antiquity and the Early Modern era, Byzantium nurtured a vibrant and highly sophisticated artistic culture. With emphasis placed upon paradigmatic objects and monuments, we will examine an array of artistic media, from mosaic and panel painting to metalwork, ivory carving, book illumination, and embroidery. We will consider the making, consumption, and reception of Byzantine art in a variety of contexts—political, devotional, ritual, and domestic. Topics include the idea of empire and its visual articulation; court culture; the veneration of images and relics; patronage, piety, and self-representation; authorship and artistic agency; materiality and the sensory experience of art; the reception of the "pagan" Greco-Roman past; and the changing nature of Byzantium's interactions with neighboring cultures.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2330 Eastern Medieval Art and Architecture
This lecture course examines art and architecture in the Mediterranean, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the Christian Near East between the seventh and the fifteenth century. The focus is upon the Byzantine Empire and neighboring polities, including Bulgaria, Serbia, early Russia, Armenia, Georgia, and the Crusader states. The course introduces students to this immensely rich and multifaceted world through an exploration of key artworks and monuments, addressing in particular issues related to cross-cultural exchange, conflict, and appropriation.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2350 Introduction to Visual Culture of the Islamic World
A one-semester survey of Islamic art and architecture which examines visual culture as it functions within the larger sphere of Islamic culture in general. Particular attention will be given to relationships between visual culture and literature, using specific case studies, sites or objects which may be related to various branches of Islamic literature, including historical, didactic, philosophical writings, poetry and religious texts. All primary sources are available in English translation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: VLST 2350
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2370 Berlin: History, Politics, Culture
What do you know about Berlin's history, architecture, culture, and political life? The present course will offer a survey of the history of Prussia, beginning with the seventeenth century, and the unification of the small towns of Berlin and Koelln to establish a new capital for this country. It will tell the story of Berlin's rising political prominence in the eighteenth century, and its position as a center of the German and Jewish Enlightenment. It will follow Berlin's transformation into an industrial city in the nineteenth century, its rise to metropolis in the early twentieth century, its history during the Third Reich, and the post-war cold war period. The course will conclude its historical survey with a consideration of Berlin's position as a capital in reunified Germany. The historical survey will be supplemented by a study of Berlin's urban structure, its significant architecture from the eighteenth century (i.e. Schinkel) to the nineteenth (new worker's housing, garden suburbs) and twentieth centuries (Bauhaus, Speer designs, postwar rebuilding, GDR housing projects, post-unification building boom). In addition, we will read literary texts about the city, and consider the visual art and music created in and about Berlin, and focus on Berlin's Jewish history. The course will be interdisciplinary with the fields of German Studies, history, history of art, urban studies, and German-Jewish studies. It is also designed as a preparation for undergraduate students who are considering spending a junior semester with the Penn Abroad Program in Berlin.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1040, GRMN 1040, HIST 0821, URBS 1070
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2400 Medieval Art
An introductory survey, this lecture course investigates architecture, painting, sculpture, and the "minor arts" of the Middle Ages. Students become familiar with major monuments of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, primarily in Western Europe as well as relevant sites around the Mediterranean basin. Analyses of works emphasize cultural contexts, thematic content, and the function of objects and monuments. Discussions focus such themes as: the circulation of artists, materials and techniques; the relationships between art and power; anthropogenic impact of art making on the environment; the theological role of images; the explosion of secular visual culture; and the role of art in an interconnected world.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6400
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2450 Gothic Architecture: Gold and Stone
Key monuments of the Middle Ages, the Gothic cathedrals of Western Europe present a synthesis of the theological, economic, and social developments of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. A harmonious marriage between technology and aesthetics, of political power and imagination, these immense and ingenious structures are as famous for their sculptural programs as they are for the liturgies that animated their spaces. Students will also be introduced to local uses of Gothic in Philadelphia architecture to better understand the lived experiences of these built manifestations of transcendence.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2451 Bones to Stones: Medieval Pilgrimage Culture
Dry bones, rotted flesh and discarded teeth — these were the heart of medieval pilgrimage culture. The bodily remains of the holy dead, saints and martyrs, spurred thousands of devout believers throughout the Middle Ages to travel to far off lands to venerate these abject traces. This lecture course, while anchored in Western Europe, will consider pilgrimage as a cross-cultural phenomenon, focussing on the resplendent arts, notably reliquaries, and architecture that developed to accommodate the desire to venerate bodily remains of the sacred.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2500 Michelangelo and the Art of the Italian Renaissance
An introduction to the work of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475-1564)-his sculptures, paintings, architecture, poetry, and artistic theory-in relation to his patrons, predecessors, and contemporaries, above all Leonardo and Raphael. Topics include artistic creativity and license, religious devotion, the revival of antiquity, observation of nature, art as problem-solving, the public reception and function of artworks, debates about style, artistic rivalry, and traveling artists. Rather than taking the form of a survey, this course selects works as paradigmatic case studies, and will analyze contemporary attitudes toward art of this period through study of primary sources.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ITAL 2550
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6500, ITAL 6500
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2540 Titian and Venetian Painting
This lecture course examines the art and architecture of the Venetian Republic, with emphasis on the work of the renowned painter, Titian.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ITAL 2540
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2541 Caravaggio
This lecture course explores the artistic culture of Baroque Rome, with focus on the life and career of Caravaggio.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENGL 2541, ITAL 2541
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2542 Brazilian Baroque
This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2542, ENGL 2542, LALS 2542
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2559 European Baroque Art
This course surveys the art and architecture of seventeenth-century Europe, with particular attention paid to the visual culture of Italy, Spain, and the Northern and Southern Netherlands. Artists to be covered include Caravaggio, Bernini, Velazquez, Poussin, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Rubens. While developments in form and style will be discussed, the class will examine art in context, particularly focusing on the historical, religious, political, geographical, and theoretical basis for these works. Themes covered will include the Counter-Reformation church, emergence of the art market, the creation of new genres, the academy, and global exploration.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2580 Early Modern Japanese Art and the City of Edo
Study of the major art forms and architecture of Tokugawa (or Edo) period (1603-1868). In this lecture course, we will consider how the arts of this era occur within an increasingly urban and modern culture, particularly with regard to the city of Edo. Issues of the articulation of authority in the built environment, the reinvention of classical styles, and patronage will be raised. May include some visits to PMA, Penn Museum, or other local collections.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 1141
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2610 Northern Renaissance Art
This course critically examines concepts traditionally associated with the Renaissance by focusing on the exchange of artistic ideas throughout the Holy Roman Empire and across different media, such as the altarpieces of Jan van Eyck, the expressive drawings of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, the peasant studies of Pieter Bruegel and the prints of satirists who wished to remain anonymous. The material is organized thematically around four topics: religious art as piety and politics; antiquity as a source of tradition and imagination; the formulation of a public discourse that exposed social threats; and the distinctiveness of artistic claims of individual achievement. A motif throughout the course is the question of how the survival of fragments may be presented in museum contexts as parts standing in for an absent whole. We will also consider how historians approach designs for works of art now lost or never completed. Encouraging encounters with art and artifacts around the city, assignments focus on objects in Philadelphia collections.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GRMN 1301
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6610
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2620 Early Netherlandish Painting: Angels, Demons, Nudes
Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, painting in the Netherlands experienced dramatic technological advancements: the application of oil on panel allowed for an unprecedented richness of color; experiments with optics led to improved illusions of space; artists rendered light and reflections as never before. Did these advancements in depicting the natural world conflict with or enhance the portrayal of spiritual visions? Did realism pave the way for secular art? In this course, we will look critically at the relationship of science and art, tradition and innovation, the imagined and the experienced. The delicate preciousness of Jan van Eyck, the strange spaces of Petrus Christus, the bizarre hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch, and the peasant festivals of Peter Bruegel will guide us through these themes.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: DTCH 2610
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2621 Prints and Politics: From the Early Modern Era to Now
This course offers a history of how mechanically reproducible images reshaped the social world. Beginning in the fifteenth century in Europe, these media connected new audiences across geographies by providing access to the same visual information. Prints launched propagandistic missions, fomented rebellion against authorities, and built networks of progressive thinkers who could envision alternative futures. Prints played a key role in developing what constituted news. Mass-distributed images delivered the mistreatment of the “Indians” by the Spanish and portrayed the packing of Africans on a slave ship. Goya’s etchings protested the repression of the Second of May uprising. The silkscreens of Andy Warhol repeated the image of police dogs attacking civil rights activists in Birmingham. Covering a five-hundred-year history, this course will focus on how printed images created communities and acted as exclusionary devices. We will train our eyes on examples from local collections and pay particular attention to Philadelphia activist groups and their places in these histories.
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6621
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2670 Latin American Art
The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2670, LALS 2670
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6670
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2679 Latinx Literature and Culture
This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latinx culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latinx experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1260, ENGL 1260, GSWS 1260, LALS 1260
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2680 Art and Empire in India, 1750-1900
This course surveys transformations in visual culture between the Mughal and British empires in India from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. We shall consider changes in artistic production, patronage, publics, and viewing protocols in the contexts of the court and bazaar. We shall examine the emergence of new technologies and its impact on visual forms, media, and genres, focusing on the interplay of photography, print, and painting. We shall explore the role of institutions -the art school, the museum, and the archeological survey- and the professions and practices they engendered. We shall analyze how architecture and urban planning created new built environments and social relationships in colonial India. We shall view objects first-hand in the Penn Museum, Penn Libraries, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course. Students with a background in related disciplines such as literature, history, religion, anthropology, and South Asian Studies are welcome.
Also Offered As: SAST 2680
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6680, SAST 6680
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2699 Wolf Humanties Lecture
The Wolf Humanities Center is Penn’s interdisciplinary humanities research center based in the School of Arts & Sciences. Each year the Wolf Humanities Center hosts postdoctoral scholars as they conduct research and teach one course on the center’s annual theme.
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6699
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2700 The Modern City
A study of the European and American city in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Emphasis is placed on the history of architecture and urban design; political, sociological, and economic factors also receive attention. The class considers the development of London, St. Petersburg, Washington, Boston, Paris, Vienna and Philadelphia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: URBS 2760
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2710 Modern Architecture, 1700-1900
The history of western architecture, ca. 1700-1900, when architecture was transformed to serve a world that had been reshaped by political and industrial revolutions. Topics to be considered include the Rococo, the English Garden, Palladianism, Romanticism, neo-classicism, the picturesque, the Greek and Gothic Revivals, and the search for a new style.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2730 History of Photography
A history of world photography from 1839 to the present and its relation to cultural contexts as well as to various theories of the functions of images. Topics discussed in considering the nineteenth century will be the relationship between photography and painting, the effect of photography on portraiture, photography in the service of exploration, and photography as practiced by anthropologists; and in considering the twentieth century, photography and abstraction, photography as "fine art", photography and the critique of art history, and photography and censorship.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2740 Facing America
This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2740, CIMS 2740, LALS 2740
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6740
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2750 Revolution to Realism: European Art, 1770-1870
This course surveys the major trends in the arts of Europe and its colonies in the tumultuous decades stretching from the French and Haitian revolutions in the late-eighteenth century to the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth. Starting with Jacques-Louis David's revolutionary history paintings, we study Napoleonic representations of empire, Goya's imagery of violence, romantic representations of madness and desire, the origins of both nationalist and ecocritical landscape painting, the aesthetics of the industrial revolution, as well as the politicized realism of Gustave Courbet. Some of the themes that will be addressed include: the revolutionary hero, the birth of the public museum, the specters of slavery and colonialism in modern representation, the anxious masculinity of romanticism, the rise of industry and bourgeois culture, the beginnings of photography and caricature, the quest for national identity and, not least, the origins of modernist painting. Throughout, we will strive to recover the original radicalism of art's formal and conceptual innovations at times of profound political and social crisis.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6750
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2760 Impressionism
Impressionism opened the pictorial field to light, perception, science, modernity, bourgeoise leisure and famously the material qualities of paint itself. This course will survey the movement's major contexts and proponents--Manet, Monet, Morisot, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rodin--from its origins in the 1860's to its demise in the 1890's, as well as its subsequent adaptions throughout the world until World War I. Particular attention is paid to the artists' critical reception and the historical conditions which allowed one nation, France, to claim the emergence of early Modernism so firmly for itself. The course also analyzes the effects of the rapidly changing social and cultural fabric of Paris, and its affects on artistic developments. We also look outside of France's borders to Germany and Britain.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2770 The Rise of Modernity: Arts of the 19th Century
The nineteenth century is often considered as fast-paced, politically volatile and new-media obsessed as our own age. This course explores the nineteenth century's claim to have produced the first truly modern culture, focusing on the visual arts and metropolitan spaces of Europe and North America in their intellectual and social contexts. Stretching from the American and French Revolutions to the eve of World War I, topics to be covered include: the rise of capitalist and industrialist culture, art and revolutionary upheaval, global travel and empire, the origins of modernist art and architecture, and new media such as stereoscopes, iron and glass construction, and photography. Major artistic personalities of the age, from Jacques-Louis David and Gustave Courbet to Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh, and from Friedrich Schinkel and, Baron Haussmann to Frank Furness and Frank Lloyd Wright, are discussed. Each lecture will be followed by a brief period of discussion, and regular field trips take students to examine art and architecture first hand, in the museums and on the streets of Philadelphia.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2779 Reckoning: Art and Monuments in Europe and the Americas
In this course, we will examine how commemorative traditions in Europe and the Americas have been invented and contested since the nineteenth century. We will discuss why certain events in the past rather than others have been the object of commemoration; what these creations stood for originally; how their meanings have changed over the time; and the lessons, if any, these commemorative practices continue to teach us today. We also will examine the ways in which Europeans and Americans have protested, torn down old monuments, erected new ones, and turned to a wide variety of artistic forms to call into question stories about empire, fascism, communism, westward expansion and settler colonialism, enslavement, as well as military victory and loss. To answer these questions, we will focus on the history and theory of public monuments and sculpture, painting, commemorative sites, museum exhibitions, and film. The lecture topics will range from the Napoleonic Wars and Occupation, the American Civil War, German Unifications, National Socialism and Fascism, Holocaust Memorials and Museums, the Disappeared in Argentina, Spanish Civil War and Post-Francoism, Refugees and Migrants in the Mediterranean, as well as works by individual artists who have reflected on these historical events. Taught in English.
Also Offered As: GRMN 1240
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2780 American Art
This lecture course surveys the most important and interesting art produced in the United States (or by American artists living abroad) up through the 1950s. This period encompasses the history of both early and modern art in the U.S., from its first appearances to its rise to prominence and institutionalization. While tracking this history, the course examines art's relation to historical processes of modernization (industrialization, the development of transportation and communications, the spread of corporate organization in business, urbanization, technological development, the rise of mass media and mass markets, etc.) and to the economic polarization, social fragmentation, political conflict, and the cultural changes these developments entailed. In these circumstances, art is drawn simultaneously toward truth and fraud, realism and artifice, science and spirituality, commodification and ephemerality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, individualism and collectivity, the past and the future, professionalization and popularity, celebrating modern life and criticizing it.
Fall or Spring
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6780
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2781 African American Art
This lecture course focuses on art, architecture, and visual culture made by peoples of African descent in the United States.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2781
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2810 Modern Architecture,1900-Present
The architecture of Europe and America from the late nineteenth century until the present is the central subject of this course, but some time is also devoted to Latin American and Asian architecture and to the important issues of modern city planning. Topics discussed include the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Art Deco, the International Style, and Post-modernism. The debate over the role of technology in modern life and art, the search for a universal language of architectural communication, and the insistent demand that architecture serve human society are themes that are traced throughout the course. Among the important figures to be considered are Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. The course includes weekly discussion sessions and several excursions to view architecture in Philadelphia.
Fall or Spring
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6810
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2850 Modern Art in Africa and Europe
The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the nation and how to represent it, developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the artistic practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the ramifications of colonialism, colonial masquerade, post-colonial monuments and memorials, the African influence on Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, colonial arts education, and the South African built environment under and after Apartheid.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2850
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2860 Modern Art: Picasso to Pollock
Early twentieth-century art in Europe is marked by a number of exciting transformations. This period witnessed the rise of abstraction in painting and sculpture, as well as the inventions of collage, photomontage, constructed sculpture, the ready made and found object, and performance art. Encounters with the arts of Africa, Oceania and other traditions unfamiliar in the West spurred innovations in media, technique, and subject matter. Artists began to respond to the challenge of photography, to organize themselves into movements, and in some cases, to challenge the norms of art through "anti-art." A new gallery system replaced traditional forms of exhibiting and selling art, and artists took on new roles as publicists, manifesto writers, and exhibition organizers. This course examines these developments, with attention to formal innovations as well as cultural and political contexts.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2860
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2870 Postwar Art
At a time of seismic shifts in the American polity, postwar art has too often seemed above the fray. Even as New York came to replace Paris as the epicenter of art world in the post war period, the rapid succession of styles and movements from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Happenings can seem to have their own internal logic, severed from the historical backdrop of the time. Some of the artists we'll consider include Pollock, Krasner, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Kusama, Martin, Lichtenstein, Bearden, Oldenburg, LeWitt, Chicago and Judd. In this course, we'll reexamine American art and art criticism in the postwar period alive to everything from the Cold War's virulent anti-communism to the rise of progressive liberation movements around race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. In the process, we will repeatedly underscore how art both served, and bit, the hand that fed it.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2870
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2871 Witnessing, Remembering, and Writing the Holocaust
Witnessing, Remembering, and Writing the Holocaust What is a witness? What do the witnesses of the Shoah see, hear, experience? And how will they remember things, whether they are victims, perpetrators or bystanders? How are their memories translated into survivors' accounts: reports, fiction, art, and even music or architecture? And what does this teach us about human survival, and about the transmission of experiences to the next generation? The course will ask these questions by studying literature on memory and trauma, as well as novels, poetry, and non-fiction accounts of the Holocaust. We will also look at art work created by survivors or their children, and listen to video testimonies. Among the authors and artists discussed will be work by Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Jean Amery, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Libeskind. The course is supported by the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1210, GRMN 1210, JWST 1210
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2872 Sex in the Museum
This course maps the often fraught intercourse between the history of sexuality and the history of museums, exhibitions, and curation. Bodies have long been the mainstay of art, but the attribution of sex to those bodies is a highly variable social phenomenon that tells us as much about the culture in question as it does about ourselves. Sex is thus in the eye of the beholder, defined by cultural, religious, scientific, and political norms, themselves often defined in and through a politics of visibility and exhibition. Beginning in the ancient world and moving into the present, this course studies the sexual politics of display, inherent but little studied, in the history of art history. From Renaissance battles over fig leaves to Enlightenment Europe’s titillation at what they saw as the unbridled eroticism of the ancient world to the culture wars of today, sex has long been a hidden motor of shifts in the art world. Whether coming to understand the so-called “Free Body Culture” of turn of the 20th century Europe with its very public nudity, to the explosion in nude performance in the 1960s to the culture wars of the 1980s in the USA over an art that addressed queerness, AIDS, and their intersection, we’ll see how often exhibitions have served as proxy for other social and political issues. In this course we’ll also come to understand the distinction between the nude, a category in art, and the naked, a category that was often said to corrupt art. Reading the latest work in queer, feminist and anti-racist scholarship, we will see how easily bodies on display can turn into sex, and conversely, slip as easily back from sex into bodies again.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2872
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6872
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2879 Eastern and Central European Art, 1917 to the Present
This is a survey course examining the prolific and significant artistic production of the region in four parts: the rise and fall of the Avant-Garde (1917-1934), the development of Socialist Realism (1934-1953), the embrace of post-war Nonconformism (1953-1989); and the proliferation of contemporary art (1989 - 2023). The course will include Russian artists, where applicable; however, it will intentionally recenter the narrative around artists from the satellite states (Poland, Hungary, Romania) and republics of the Soviet Union (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine). In light of the war in Ukraine, additional emphasis on Ukrainian art will be provided. Subtopics will include architecture and graphic design; monuments and memory; colonialism and postcolonialism; feminism and LGBTQAI+; the environment; protest. All readings and lectures will be in English
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: REES 0230
Prerequisite: n/a
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2889 Fashion and Modernity
In this class we will study the emergence of the Modernist concept of the "new" as a term also understood as "new fashion." We will move back and forth in time so as to analyze today’s changing scene with a view to identify contemporary accounts of the "new" in the context of the fashion industry. Our texts will include poetry, novels, and films. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 1072, ENGL 1071, FREN 1071, GRMN 1065
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2900 Post War Japanese Cinema
Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, and Kurosawa Akira are recognized today as three of the most important and influential directors in Japanese cinema. In their films of the late 1940s and 1950s, these directors focused upon issues surrounding the human condition and the perception of truth, history, beauty, death, and other issues of the postwar period. This lecture course places their films in period context, and pays particular attention to the connections to other visual media, and to how "art" and "history" are being defined in the cinematic context. How other directors also took up these issues, and referred to the "big three" is also be discussed.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2900, EALC 1340
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2910 East Asian Cinema
This survey course introduces students to major trends, genres, directors, and issues in the cinemas of East Asian countries/regions, including Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Charting key developments over more than a hundred years from the early twentieth century to the present, this course examines films as aesthetic objects, asking questions about film form, narrative, and style. It also pays attention to the evolution of cinema as an institution (e.g. modes of production, circulation, and exhibition) in different cultural and political contexts. Weekly course materials will include both films (primary sources) and analytical readings (secondary sources). By the end of the course, students are expected to gain broad knowledge of East Asian cinema, develop skills of film analysis, and apply these skills to perform historically informed and culturally sensitive analysis of cinema. Prior knowledge of East Asian languages is NOT required.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2910, EALC 1116
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6910, EALC 5116
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2920 Digital and New Media Seminar
This course explores a particular topic in the study of digital and new media in an intensive and in-depth manner. See the English Department's website at: www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2951, COML 2960, ENGL 2950
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2930 Cultural Studies Seminar
This course explores an aspect of cultural studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2420, COML 2420, ENGL 2420
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2940 Art Now
One of the most striking features of today's art world is the conspicuous place occupied in it by the photographic image. Large-scale color photographs and time-based installations in projections are everywhere. Looking back, we can see that much of the art making of the past 60 years has also been defined by this medium, regardless of the form it takes. Photographic images have inspired countless paintings, appeared in combines and installations, morphed into sculptures, drawings and performances, and served both as the object and the vehicle of institutional critique. They are also an increasinglyimportant exhibition site: where most of us go to see earthworks, happenings and body-art. This course is a three-part exploration of our photographic present.
Spring
Also Offered As: ENGL 2639, GSWS 2940, VLST 2360
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2950 Global Film Theory
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2950, COML 2950, ENGL 2900, GSWS 2950
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6950
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2951 Russian and East European Art and Cinema since 1900
Since the turn of the twentieth century, art and politics have been uniquely intertwined in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and its successor states. In the first decades of the century, across these territories, radical artistic movements such as suprematist abstraction, productivism, constructivist architecture, Bauhaus modernism, and, finally, Stalinist socialist realism sought to support revolutionary social transformation by literally reshaping the social world and human perception. Cinema, too, played its part—Vladimir Lenin, the Communist revolutionary founder of the Soviet Union, famously said that “of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema.” Propelled by this vision, the early USSR became a laboratory for cutting-edge film that sought to transform viewers into a new kind of person. Yet as the century wore on and Soviet socialism gave way first to state terror and then to moribund bureaucratism and cultural conservatism, it was non-comformist underground artists who took the lead in experimental and politically radical art in the region. Finally, in the post-Soviet era, art and cinema in these territories embraced democratic freedoms and market institutions, before finally, in some quarters, returning to revolutionary roots in response to rising authoritarianism. In this broad survey course, we will trace the history of art and film of the region through a series of case studies, including: Erik Bulatov, Sergei Eisenstein, Miloš Forman, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Oleg Kulik, Emir Kusturica, El Lilzitsky, Kazimir Malevich, Jiří Menzel, Kira Muratova, Pussy Riot, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Dziga Vertov, Andrzej Wajda, and others.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 0274, REES 0240
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2954 Collecting Media
There are tens of billions of videos on YouTube; a similar number of photos on Instagram; seven million items in the Penn Libraries; remains from more than 12,000 people stored in the Physical Anthropology Section of the Penn Museum; roughly 250 surveillance cameras capturing footage across our campus; over one million seed varieties stored in the Svalbard Seed Vault; tens of thousands of meters of frozen samples in the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ice Core Facility — and, most likely, one huge, messy folder into which you dump all of your email. For thousands of years, cultural critics have lamented the onslaught of “information overload,” and for just as long, people have derived systems for collecting, organizing, storing, and facilitating access (or not) to media — whether Spotify playlists or cuneiform tablets or massive image files from NASA’s space telescopes. In this course we’ll consider the past, present, and future — as well as the pragmatics, politics, and aesthetics — of organizing media and information in archives, libraries, and other media assemblages. Through readings, listening and screening exercises, occasional field trips and guest lectures, a few low-stakes student presentations and group collaborations, fun design exercises, art explorations, and potential collaborations with external cultural heritage organizations, we’ll study why and how we collect media; why it matters for myriad scholarly fields, industries, creative practitioners, and communities; and how we might do it better. Because this new course is still in development, the assignments haven’t yet been finalized — but students can tentatively expect to write one or two short papers; share one low-pressure in-class presentation; participate in a few small (and ideally enjoyable) design workshops and group exercises; and, in lieu of a final exam, complete a written or creative final project.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2954, ENGL 2954
Mutually Exclusive: CIMS 6954
1 Course Unit
ARTH 2960 Contemporary Art
Many people experience the art of our time as bewildering, shocking, too ordinary (my kid could do that), too intellectual (elitist), or simply not as art. Yet what makes this art engaging is that it raises the question of what art is or can be, employs a range of new materials and technologies, and addresses previously excluded audiences. It invades non-art spaces, blurs the boundaries between text and image, document and performance, asks questions about institutional frames (the museum, gallery, and art journal), and generates new forms of criticism. Much of the "canon" of what counts as important is still in flux, especially for the last twenty years. And the stage is no longer centered only on the United States and Europe, but is becoming increasingly global. The course will introduce students to the major movements and artists since 1980, with emphasis on social and historical context, critical debates, new media, and the changing role of the spectator/participant.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6960
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3000 Undergraduate Methods Seminar
Topic varies from semester to semester. This course, required for history of art majors, acquaints students with a wide variety of historical and contemporary approachees to studying art, architecture, material culture, and visual culture.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3020 Methods of Object Study
This immersive hands-on seminar introduces students to methods of analyzing the material, physical, and visual aspects of objects in a museum, gallery, or library context. Students will receive training in curatorial practices, close observational skills, and precise descriptive terminology for materials and techniques. They also will learn about essential tools of conservation and technical analysis.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3030 Introduction to Museums
This course introduces students to the history, theory and modern practices of museums. Using the resources of the Penn Museum and other Philadelphia museums, students will study curatorial practice, education, exhibition design and conservation, while exploring the theoretical and ethical issues confronted by museums. Particularly relevant for those interested in archaeology, anthropology, art history, cultural heritage and public education.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CLST 3309
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3060 Venice Biennale Spiegel-Wilks Seminar
Founded in 1895, the Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia) is one of the art world’s most prestigious venues for contemporary art. In this seminar, we will consider the history of the Venice Biennale, its curatorial process for group shows, the role of national pavilions, and related topics, within the larger frame of the international art world. How contemporary artists cross boundaries, challenge expectations, and respond to the site itself are also key issues. The seminar focus will be adapted in each iteration according to the expertise of the instructor, and students will be funded to travel with the instructor to Venice over fall break as part of this site seminar. This course is open to History of Art Juniors and Seniors, admission by permission only.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3070 The Rise of Image Culture: History and Theories
Today images are everywhere; two centuries ago, they were rare. This seminar considers key historical and theoretical contexts for this change and its social consequences. With the help of some of the strongest critics and theorists of image culture, we will consider five interrelated aspects of the rise of image culture. - First, we will explore how new media and mechanical reproduction has changed the idea of the image over in the free market. - Second, we will explore how images operate through the psyche and gaze and how that operation is tied to social and political power. - Third, we will examine how representations make meaning and form identity in coded systems. - Fourth, we will consider the relationship between visual space and concepts of reality. And finally, we will interrogate how the physical and digital material that images are made from affects their meaning.
Spring
Also Offered As: VLST 3030
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3071 What is an Image?
The course explores various concepts of images. It considers natural images (as in optics), images as artifacts, virtual images, images as representations, and works of art as images. Themes to include: the image controversy in cognitive science, which asks whether some cognitive representations are irreducibly imagistic; the question of whether some images resemble what they represent; the development of the concept of the virtual image and of three-dimensional images; the notions of pictorial representation and non-representational images in art. Readings from C. S. Peirce, Nelson Goodman, Robert Hopkins, Dominic Lopes, W. J. T. Mitchell, John Kulvicki, and Mark Rollins, among others.
Fall
Also Offered As: VLST 3050
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3100 Cinema and Socialism
Films from socialist countries are often labeled and dismissed as "propaganda" in Western democratic societies. This course complicates this simplistic view, arguing for the value in understanding the ties between socialist governments, the cinematic arts, and everything in between. We will examine films from past and present socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as films made with socialist aspirations. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3100, EALC 2314, ENGL 2934, REES 3770
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3120 Indian Art Seminar
This seminar addresses topics in the art of India from antiquity to the present emphasizing global connections and comparisons. Topics vary from year to year and might include the arts of the book in South Asia; Indian painting, 1100-now; history and theory of museums in the colony, 1750-1950; photography, cinema, and performance art in South Asia; and art, ecology, and environment in South Asia. We shall explore objects in area collections and incorporate special excursions and programs when possible. A background in South Asian studies or languages is not required. Students from related disciplines such history, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, feminist studies, cinema and media studies, and architecture are welcome.
Fall
Also Offered As: SAST 3120
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3130 East Asian Art Seminar
Undergraduate seminar in East Asian art history. Topics vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 2100
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3131 Contemporary Art in East Asia and the World: Venice Biennale
This undergraduate seminar focuses on issues confronting artists from East Asia working in today's contemporary art world. We will begin by considering the terms that constitute the definition of the "modern" and the "contemporary," asking how, by whom, and for whom these terms have been configured. By gaining a familiarity with the major styles, media, institutions, artists, and concepts over the twentieth century in East Asia, we will develop tools to analyze how contemporary artists are crossing boundaries, challenging the limits of nationalism, and dealing with shifting political and social grounds. We will take our analysis on site at the Venice Biennale, looking closely at how East Asian artists are participating in, as well as contesting, this influential international exposition. Students will make close studies of national pavilions as well as the international exhibition, generating analyses of these display spaces, and will produce a group website in response to the Biennale as an alternative virtual exhibition. By permission only.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3150 Japanese Art Seminar
Undergraduate seminar in early modern, modern, or contemporary Japanese art. Topics vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 2140
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3170 CU in India - Topics Course
C.U. in India is a hybrid, domestic/overseas course series which provides students with the opportunity to have an applied learning and cultural experience in India or South East Asia where students participate in 1) 28 classrom hours in the Fall term 2) a 12-day trip to India or South East Asia with the instructor during the winter break visiting key sites and conducting original research (sites vary) 3) 28 classroom hours at Penn in the Spring term and 4) a research paper, due at the end of the Spring term. Course enrollment is limited to students admitted to the program. For more information and the program application go to http://sites.sas.upenn.edu/cuinindia This is a 2-CU yearlong course DEADLINE TO REGISTER IS MARCH 31st
Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete
Also Offered As: COML 2217, GSWS 2217, SAST 2217
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3180 African Art Seminar
This seminar focuses on art of the African continent. It is open to undergraduates only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3180
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3200 Aegean Bronze Age Art Seminar
In this class, we will explore the art and cultures of the Aegean Bronze Age in Greece, a period from roughly 3,300-1,100 BCE. The geographic regions of the Greek Mainland, the Cycladic islands, and the island of Crete were home to complex cultural groups that formed a unique Bronze Age society. Topics will vary from semester to semester, and may include and not be limited to the examination of the architecture, pottery, wall paintings, stone carvings, jewelry, seals, weapons and other metalwork, and the iconography of these prehistoric arts. We will also delve into issues of the organization of society and the distribution of power, the role of women and men, trade and the unique position of the (rather small) Aegean world as it existed between two huge powerhouses of the ancient Mediterranean: the Ancient Near East and Egypt.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3230 Origins of Art / Origins of Writing
Each of the earliest systems of writing had intimate and enduring ties to pictorial traditions. This seminar addresses the fundamental relationship between texts and visual imagery in the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Maya traditions. The class will take a comparative approach to examine the parallel development of scripts and images, extending from their earliest beginnings to their on-going lives as mature systems. As the individual scripts became more capable of representing speech, the subject matter, composition, and function of images changed, and one goal of this class is to identify these processes. Emphasis will be put on seeing text and image as collaborative and interactive constructions, in which parts of a single message can be encoded and presented in different ways. The class will make extensive use of the collections and the curatorial expertise of the Penn Museum.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2330, MELC 3070, NELC 3070
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3250 Classical Mythology in the Western Tradition
How and why have artists and viewers, from the Middle Ages to the global present, so often confronted ancient Greek and Roman stories? This undergraduate seminar makes use of local museum collections.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3409
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3251 Arts of the Roman House, Villa, and Palace Seminar
Private and public met in the elite Roman dwelling; this undergraduate seminar looks at the rich record of things and images, in multiple media, and in their spatial contexts, among which Romans chose to live.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3410
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3252 Violence in Ancient Mediterranean Art Seminar
Violence, physical and emotional, pervades the images of the ancient Mediterranean. This undergraduate seminar asks why, how and to what end that occurred; in these and any cultures, why do people look at such images?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3411
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3290 Luxury in the Greco-Roman World: Self-Identity and Self-Indulgence
This undergraduate seminar examines the physical contexts, artifacts and visual narratives of the Greek and Roman cultures that attest the idea of luxury. The topics of the course look at the ways in which Greeks and Romans, on the one hand, defined their personhood through the representations of the self and the other in the arts, and, on the other hand, indulged in their personal manifestations and social interactions. The course is organized in two thematic sections: self-identity (the self, the other, sexuality, death) and self-indulgence (dressing and accessorizing, dining, exercising and bathing, having fun: entertainment and educated leisure lifestyles).
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3291 Greek Art, Architecture, and Urbanism
This undergraduate seminar explores key themes in Greek Art, Architecture and Urbanism. Topics vary from semester to semester and may include: “The Greek city,” “The architecture and sculpture of Greek temples,” “The architecture and landscape of Greek sanctuaries.”
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3292 Roman Art, Architecture, and Urbanism
This undergraduate seminar explores key themes in Roman Art, Architecture and Urbanism. Topics vary from semester to semester and may include: “Houses and Society,” “The Roman city,” “Pompeii and Herculaneum,” “Designing for luxury: Roman villas and houses,” “The architecture and landscape of Roman sanctuaries.”
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3305 Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome
An intensive exploration of Rome's urban topography during the Republican and Imperial periods (6th c. B.C. through 4th c. A.D.) Using archaeological and textual sources, including the Etruscan and Roman collections of the Penn Museum, the goal will be to reconstruct the built environment and decoration of Rome over the course of a millennium. Of interest to students of classics, archaeology, art history, and architecture. Some familiarity with Rome will be a plus, but is not required.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3305
Mutually Exclusive: CLST 5305
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3320 The Byzantine Art of Devotion Seminar
Far from being exclusively a matter of belief and inner feeling, religion in the Byzantine world was intensely material. Icons, reliquaries, illustrated books, and other objects that we now consider under the rubric of “Byzantine art” played a crucial role in shaping one’s relationship and interaction with the realm of the sacred. This undergraduate seminar offers an in-depth exploration of the material culture of personal piety in Byzantium. Larger topics to be addressed include icon veneration, the cult of saints and relics, pilgrimage, monasticism, and mysticism. Special consideration is given to the ways in which personal devotion objects functioned as instrument of self-formation.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3321 Portraiture Seminar
What does it mean to depict a person? And how might culturally specific notions of personal identity and subjectivity inform such an endeavor? This undergraduate seminar takes a broad view of the forms, functions, and meanings of portraiture in the Western tradition. Images across a wide gamut of media, from monumental sculptures to portrait miniatures, will be examined alongside other signs of identity, including seals, heraldic devices, inscriptions, and insignia.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3330 Material Christianities
What can objects tell us about Christianity? How might a lavish mosaic, a withered body part, a dark crypt, or a pilgrim's oil lamp challenge and complicate visions of the past extracted from texts? This course investigates the first thousand years of Christianity through the lens of material culture. The history of Christianity - from its nebulous beginnings in Palestine to its recognition as the official religion of the Roman Empire and subsequent expansion - is often narrated from a perspective that privileges the writings of elite men. To capture the rich diversity in Christian experience and expression, we will turn to the material practices of religion and explore how things, places, and bodily acts shaped what it meant to be Christian. Building on insights drawn from archaeology, art history, anthropology, and religious studies, we will seek to recover the experiences of diverse and often marginalized subjects and communities, and in the process, will problematize the categories of religion, authority, and identity. Regular visits to the Penn Museum and other collections in Philadelphia will complement lectures and group discussions.
Also Offered As: RELS 3330
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 5330, RELS 5330
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3400 Medieval Art Seminar
This undergraduate seminar explores through the lens of more focused topics the arts produced in the European Middle Ages, and in adjacent territories, from 800 to 1400. Close readings of primary and secondary sources drive class time, and the rich resources of the Philadelphia area are brought to bear, including the Penn Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, etc. Students will work on skills relating to research, oral presentations, and academic writing.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3401 Topics in Medieval Art
Topics vary from semester to semester. For the Spring 2021 semester, the topic will be: Art in the Time of Dante. 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). While his Divine Comedy is the pinnacle of medieval literary arts, Dante was himself interested in the masterpieces of visual arts of his own time -- in Italy and abroad. Prominent artists like Cimabue and Giotto are mentioned in his texts, as well as such notorious figures linked to artistic production as the usurer Reginaldo degli Scrovegni or the mercenary Castruccio Castracani. Dante witnessed some of the most dramatic events of the Middle Ages, from the transfer of the papacy to Avignon to the salacious affair of the Tour de Nesle in France -- together we will examine the visual culture of this tumultuous time.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3430 Late Medieval and Renaissance France: Art, Politics, and Power
This undergraduate seminar will examine the commission, production, and display of art at the Valois courts from the start of the Hundred Years War with England in the 1330s to the death of Francis I in 1547. During these two centuries, conflict and conquest shaped the making of artwork in profound and sometimes unexpected ways: precarious dynastic claims could be substantiated through carefully crafted images, while foreign artists (including Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio, and Leonardo da Vinci) could be called upon to boost the monarch’s prestige. Investigating the role played by objects in cultural diplomacy and propaganda, this course will examine works in a wide variety of techniques including easel painting, manuscript illumination, tapestry, armor, and metalwork, without neglecting less tangible art forms such as feasting, chivalric tournaments, and royal processions. Topics will include the art of the gift, female patronage, the interaction between text and image, and the role of artists in shaping a royal visual identity. The course will include a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and an illuminated manuscript handling session at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3500 Topics in Southern Renaissance Art
Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2021 semester, the topicwill be: Chiaroscuro. In this seminar we will explore the artistic technique known as "chiaroscuro," the contrast between light and shadow so as to produce effects of volume and relief. While we will grapple with chiaroscuro as deployed in architecture, drawings, and prints, our focus will be all the tenebrist paintings of Caravaggio. If the lit bodies in Caravaggio's paintings project out boldly in relief, does anything remain and speak in the surrounding darkness?
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3510 Writing About Art Seminar
What does it mean to write about art? What are the historical origins of this undertaking? How does language mediate the intellectual, somatic, and cultural rapport between the viewing self and the physical object? As an initial response to these questions we will examine the writings of the Tuscan artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), the biographer of such renowned artists as Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo. We will also read the letters of famous artists from the early modern period, and examine the theoretical forays of artists such as Albrecht DÃ?rer, who attempted to sketch the relationship between the memory and the imagination. Finally, we will look to examples of works of art for how we might read visual images as expressive of theories about what are is and what it can do.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENGL 0549, GRMN 1302, ITAL 3610
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3511 Brazilian Baroque Seminar
This undergraduate lecture explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3511, LALS 3511
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3512 Caravaggio Seminar
This seminar explores the artistic culture of Baroque Rome, with focus on the life and career of Caravaggio. This course is open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ITAL 3612
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3560 Freud's Objects
How do we look at objects? And which stories can objects tell? These are questions that have been asked quite regularly by Art Historians or Museum Curators, but they take a central place within the context of psychoanalytic studies as well. The seminar "Freud's Objects" will offer an introduction to Sigmund Freud's life and times, as well as to psychoanalytic studies. We will focus on objects owned by Freud that he imbued with special significance, and on Freud's writings that focus on specific objects. Finally, we will deal with a re-interpretation of the "object" in psychoanalytic theory, via a discussion of texts by British psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3509, COML 2052, ENGL 1425, GRMN 1015
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3620 The Invention of Communication
This undergraduate seminar covers a history of print from Gutenberg to the twenty-first century.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3621 Prints and Politics: From the Early Modern Era to Our Times
By the late fifteenth century, mechanically reproducible images were reshaping the social world. Connecting new audiences across geographies through access to the same visual information, prints launched propagandistic missions, fomented rebellion against authorities, and built networks of progressive thinkers who could envision alternative futures. Prints played a key role in developing what constituted news. Mass-distributed images delivered the mistreatment of the “Indians” by the Spanish and portrayed the packing of Africans on a slave ship. Goya’s etchings protested the repression of the Second of May uprising, while the silkscreens of Andy Warhol repeated the image of police dogs attacking civil rights activists in Birmingham. Covering a five-hundred-year history, this course will focus on how printed images created communities and acted as exclusionary devices. We will train our eyes on examples from local collections.
Also Offered As: ENGL 2621
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3630 Early Modern Art Seminar
This seminar takes a thematic approach to the study of European art produced between 1400-1800. Topics, which change annually, include such offerings as "Art and Law;" "Spectacle, Punishment, and Surveillance;" "Prints and Politics" and "The Subject of Nature." In a given year, we will approach a corpus of objects, images, and performances through a study of three kinds of text: primary sources, secondary art-historical scholarship, and critical theory. Discussions will convene around local museum and library collections.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3730 American Art Seminar
This undergraduate seminar focuses on the art of the United States, the European American colonies that preceded it, and the increasingly diverse and complicated communities that have come to characterize the modern era. Topics may explore representational, material, and aesthetic aspects of painting, sculpture, and photography; the social and political roles of mass visual and material culture; and histories of exhibitions and museums. The history of artistic genres (portraiture, history, and landscape painting, still life); representational structures (common themes and types); and reproduction technologies (photography, sculpture casting, and printmaking) throughout the history of this nation may also be featured. The class is reading- and discussion-based. It is recommended for art history and other humanities majors and minors.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3749 In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique
This interdisciplinary seminar examines how popular cultural representations frame Asian Americans as either invisible or hypervisible—our explorations will move across race and national origin, language and class, gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ASAM 2272, ENGL 2272, GSWS 2272
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3750 Topics in 19th-Century Art
Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: World's Fairs. This seminar will study the manifold novelties first displayed at the nineteenth and early-twentieth century World's Fairs, stretching from 1851 to 1915. Such events-first held in cities like London and Paris, but eventually all over the world-chronicled the period's innovations in art, technology, ethnography, and science. Many of the most crucial inventions were first shown to the public at World's Fairs: electricity, the telephone, and the bicycle, among other innovative artistic techniques and everyday objects. The fairs brought a community of millions of tourists from all over the world together, thereby encoding complex structures of empire and international relations within a pretense to entertainment. The "global" ambitions of universal expositions, and the image of the "world" they helped construct, will come under close scrutiny for its frequent imperial overreach, not least in the controversial practice of human displays. We will also test the thesis that the universal expositions engendered new ways of seeing and engaging with the material world. Finally, we will study the period definitions of "innovation" in industrial production promoted by such large-scale events.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3782 Local Media
We may be tethered to global networks, streaming content from around the planet, joining in conversation (or conspiracy) with folks from all corners of the earth, but we also live in places with local characters and concerns, among people with local needs and contributions. What happens when we lose the local media — the newspapers and broadcast outlets — that bind and inform our localized communities? In this course we’ll consider the important roles served by our place-based media, as well as what’s lost when our local modes of communication collapse. But we’ll also consider what might be gained if we think more generously about what constitutes local media — and if we imagine how they might be redesigned to better serve our communities, our broader society, and our planet. Through readings, listening and screening exercises, occasional in-class field trips and guest speakers, and low-barrier-to-entry in-class labs, we’ll study local news; local book cultures, including libraries and bookshops and independent printers; local music scenes, including performance venues and record shops and music reviewers; local infrastructures of connection and distribution, including post offices and community digital networks; local data creators and collectors; local signage and interactive public media; local emergency communication resources; local whisper networks and town gossip; and a selection of other case studies that reflect students’ interests. Because this new course is still in development, the assignments haven’t yet been finalized — but students can tentatively expect to write one or two short papers; share one low-pressure in-class presentation; participate in a few small (and ideally enjoyable) design workshops and group exercises; and, in lieu of a final exam, contribute a written or creative piece to a collective class publication, perhaps a local media field guide that we’ll design and publish in collaboration with local makers.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3782, ENGL 2982, URBS 3782
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3790 Performing History
This seminar concentrates on the ways that various peoples in the world make their history by means other than relying on written texts alone. Over the course of the semester, we therefore may be examining such different public events and civic rituals as parades, political and religious processions, local historical pageants, carnivals, historic preservation, museums, military reenactments, and history theme parks. The emphasis in each of these forms, places, and semiotic processes will be on their identity and function as key performances that transform consciousness, shift individuals alternately into both actors and spectators, reframe the everyday as the metaphysical, and intensify the status of cultural values in the histories they present to view. Course requirements: a seminar paper, the topic of which you will discuss with me no later than week five of the course; and a working annotated bibliography and statement of your paper's main thesis. I will say more about these assignments as they approach.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2154, HIST 3154
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3800 Sexuality of Postmodernism
This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists and theorists of postmodernism were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism itself was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these queer figures raise the problem of the authorial as a defining issue. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of how and why so much post-war American art problematized the idea of the author, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing relevance of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. Why, at the very moment that questions of authorial difference, sexual and otherwise, emerged as important in American art did so much criticism deny the authorial role, and why did so many queer artists use that denial to camouflage their authorial voices? In other words, why does a closeted queer artist like John Cage make the performance of silence one of his calling cards? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3780
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3820 Film Exhibition and Moviegoing
Cinema has always had an audience. From its first appearances in cafes, tea houses, and variety shows to today's fragmented, digital consumption, cinema continues to exist in relation to different ways of looking and experiencing. This course examines how films have been shown and how audiences have watched films in diverse historical and cultural contexts. We will explore how the ways in which film screenings were organized shape both the films being shown and audiences' moviegoing experiences. Based on historical and site-specific investigations, we will also reflect on how our modes of engaging with cinema impact conceptions of what cinema is, what it will be, and what it can be. Unlike most film courses, this course does not focus on analyzing films, but look into the operations of cinema as an institution. There will be field trips to local movie theaters and a final collective project that asks students to curate a special film screening (in-person or online) using innovative formats.
Also Offered As: CIMS 3810
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3830 Queer Modernisms
This course tracks the development of Modernism in America, Western Europe, and specific other locations around the globe, with particular emphasis as to how and why dissident sexualities so often found expression in and as aesthetic dissent. Creating new expressive forms and theories that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, queer modernist artists often replaced dangerous forms of social dissent with more prudent forms of formal dissidence. In pursuing these questions, we will place art in its broader social context, seeking to answer such significant problems as how and why forms of artistic representation that were once transparent, eminently legible to all strata of society, increasingly became, under the avant garde, designed to speak only to an elect, to a select few in our culture. We will ask what happens when art deliberately narrows its audience, and how that narrowing is related to questions of sexual difference. What is the relationship between queerness and cultural elitism, a connection generally presumed in popular culture, but rarely examined academically? And finally we will ask about the utility of forms of queer political dissent if those forms remain illegible as queer to a wider audience. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3150
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3831 Queer Art Seminar
This course explores art and art history from a Queer Studies perspective, in a global and cross-cultural context. Topics vary from semester to semester and stretch widely in terms of geography and chronology.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3831
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3840 Cuban Visual Culture
This course will focus on the urban history and cultural politics of contemporary Cuba with an emphasis on contemporary art and contemporary developments in the city of Havana. Students will learn about the Spanish influence on early colonial art, the development of formal academic art training and the changes to art instruction and the form and content of art created since the Revolution.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3840, LALS 3840
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3850 Global Modernism Seminar
This course explores literary modernism as a global and cross-cultural phenomenon. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2071, ENGL 2071, GRMN 1304
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3860 20th Century Art in Europe Seminar
Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Fall 2021 semester, the topic will be: Modern Design. This course examines modern design from the turn of the 20th century through the present, including furniture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, plastics, lighting, electronics, and design environments. Our study focuses on design objects in museum collections as well as period journals and criticism. Topics include influential designers and movements of Europe and North America as well as counterparts in Asia, Africa, and South America. We will use design exhibitions at galleries and museums as resource for discussion and writing throughout the term.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3870 The History of American Animation
This course will look at American animation as an art form, a technology and an industry. We will explore the ways in which artistic, technical, historical, and cultural conditions shape the development of animation and in turn, how animation impacts viewers. Topics will include trends in animation and their relation to contemporary popular culture, issues of art versus commerce in the creation of cartoons, the intersection of animation and politics, and shifts in style and technique throughout the years. We will look at the personalities in animation who have shaped the art form and continue to influence it, the rise in animation's popularity, and current-day applications of animated imagery. Case studies will include Pixar, Walt Disney, UPA, television cartoons, stop motion animation, and the movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3200, FNAR 3181
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3871 The History Computer Animation
This course will look at computer animation as an art form, a series of technological innovations and an industry. We will explore the way in which artistic, technical, historical, and cultural conditions have shaped the development of computer animation. Topics will include the impact of early motion graphics experiments in the sixties, the contributions of university- and corporation-funded research, commercial production, and the rise of Pixar. We will consider the companies and personalities in computer animation who have shaped the art form and continue to influence it, the contributions to computer animation from visionaries around the world, and current day applications of animated imagery. Throughout the course, we will screen important works from the canon of computer animation, including the earliest computer-animated shorts, scenes from Beauty and the Beast, the first Pixar shorts, Toy Story, Final Fantasy and works done internationally to forward the art and the industry.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3201, ENGL 0591, FNAR 3182
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3873 The Animation Of Disney
No organization has exerted as much influence on popular culture and the art form of animation as The Walt Disney Company. For decades, Disney films were the standard by which all other animated films were measured. This course will examine the biography and philosophy of founder Walt Disney, as well as The Walt Disney Company’s impact on animation art, storytelling and technology, the entertainment industry, and American popular culture. We will consider Disney's most influential early films, look at the 1960s when Disney’s importance in popular culture began to erode, and analyze the films that led to the Disney renaissance of the late 1980s/early 1990s. We will also assess the subsequent purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and the overall impact Pixar has had on Disney. The class will also look at recent trends and innovations, including live-action remakes and Disney+.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3203, ENGL 0593, FNAR 3184
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3874 History of Children's TV
This course will survey the history of children’s television from the invention of television through the present, with an emphasis on series development and production, artistry, and the colorful personalities who built this industry. We’ll consider important figures including Fred Rogers, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Joan Ganz Cooney, Jim Henson and Walt Disney. We will discuss the history of animated cartoons that were made specifically for television, Saturday morning production, the rise of Japanese cartoons from the 1960s through Pokemon, and the growth of children’s cable channels in the 90s, as well as other landmark moments. We’ll also assess the impact of streaming platforms on television and the future of children’s media.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3204, ENGL 0594, FNAR 3185
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3880 Modern and Contemporary Theory Seminar
Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Fall 2021 semester, the topic will be: Modern Design. This course examines modern design from the turn of the 20th century through the present, including furniture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, plastics, lighting, electronics, and design environments. Our study focuses on design objects in museum collections as well as period journals and criticism. Topics include influential designers and movements of Europe and North America as well as counterparts in Asia, Africa, and South America. We will use design exhibitions at galleries and museums as resource for discussion and writing throughout the term.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3900 Historical Films
This course is a broad and eclectic introduction into the relationship between cinema and history. It explores a diverse range of films which claim to show that film can narrate and also shape history, and pays special attention to the manner in which films write and rewrite history by articulating and shaping popular memory. The course will be based on a premise that cinema, as a truly popular and global phenomenon, produces both the normative or institutional versions of history, as well as popular resistances to such official history. Because these issues are most prevalent in a genre called “historical films,” we will view and analyze several examples of this genre to try to answer the following questions: What is a historical film? What is its relationship to history and historical narratives? What is its role in producing or reshaping our memory of historical events? By extensive analysis of diverse films, both fiction and documentaries, we will thus raise significant questions about the construction of memory, history, and identity.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2020, ENGL 2941
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3901 Romantic Comedy
We may know what it is like to fall in love, but how do movies tell us what it is like? Through an exciting tour of American and World cinema, we will analyze the moods and swings, successes and failures of love in romantic comedy, one of the most popular but generally overlooked and taken for granted genres. We will turn a spotlight on it by examining what elements and iconography constitute the “romcom” genre, what specific qualities inform its sub-groupings such as screwball, sex comedy or radical romantic comedy, how they are related to their historical, cultural and ideological contexts, and what we can learn about their audiences. Watching classic as well contemporary examples of the genre, from City Lights (1931), It Happened One Night (1934) and Roman Holiday (1953), to Harold and Maude (1971), Annie Hall (1977), How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Her (2013), we will problematize this overly-familiar cinema to make it new and strange again, and open it up to creative analysis.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2021, ENGL 2942
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3902 World Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film Practice intensively. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2022, COML 2931, ENGL 2931
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3910 Film Festivals
This course is an exploration of multiple forces that explain the growth, global spread and institutionalization of international film festivals. The global boom in film industry has resulted in an incredible proliferation of film festivals taking place all around the world, and festivals have become one of the biggest growth industries. A dizzying convergence site of cinephilia, media spectacle, business agendas and geopolitical purposes, film festivals offer a fruitful ground on which to investigate the contemporary global cinema network. Film festivals will be approached as a site where numerous lines of the world cinema map come together, from culture and commerce, experimentation and entertainment, political interests and global business patterns. To analyze the network of film festivals, we will address a wide range of issues, including historical and geopolitical forces that shape the development of festivals, festivals as an alternative marketplace, festivals as a media event, programming and agenda setting, prizes, cinephilia, and city marketing. Individual case studies of international film festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Sundance among others—will enable us to address all these diverse issues but also to establish a theoretical framework with which to approach the study of film festival. For students planning to attend the Penn-in-Cannes program, this course provides an excellent foundation that will prepare you for the on-site experience of the King of all festivals.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2010, ENGL 2901
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3911 American Independents
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2011, ENGL 2911
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3912 Transnational Cinema
This is a course in contemporary transnational film cultures and world cinema. The course will examine the idea of world cinema and set up a model of how it can be explored by studying contemporary film in various countries. We will explore ways in which cinemas from around the globe have attempted to come to terms with Hollywood, and look at forces that lead many filmmakers to define themselves in opposition to Hollywood norms. But we will also look at the phenomenon of world cinema in independent terms, as “waves” that peak in different places and times, and coordinate various forces. Finally, through the close case study of significant films and cinemas that have dominated the international festival circuit (Chinese, Korean, Iranian, Indian, etc.) we will engage with the questions of which films/cinemas get labeled as “world cinema,” what determines entry into the sphere of world cinema, and examine the importance of film festivals in creating world cinema.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2012, COML 2012, ENGL 2930
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3913 Documentary Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2013, ENGL 2940
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3914 Contemporary American Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2014, ENGL 2910
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3915 Contemporary European Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2015, COML 2920, ENGL 2920
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3916 Bollywood and Beyond
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2016, COML 2932, ENGL 2932
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3930 Cinema and Civil Rights
This undergraduate seminar will examine key moments in the history of civil rights through a cinematic lens. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how filmmakers have depicted the lives, aspirations, and strategies of those who have struggled for equal rights; how different struggles have intersected with each other; what aesthetic strategies have been adopted to represent freedom and the denial of it; and how effective cinematic efforts to contribute to increased freedom have been as well as what criteria we use to evaluate success or failure in the first place. Each week, we will watch a film and read a series of texts that will be drawn from a variety of arenas, including histories of civil rights; civil rights pamphlets and speeches; filmmaker interviews; film and media theory; memoirs; and theories of race, gender and sexuality. Course requirements: mutual respect; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; a final project that can be a research paper, film, art project, or community-based initiative.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3930, CIMS 3930, ENGL 0599, GSWS 3930
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3931 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present
What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper.
Also Offered As: AFRC 3932, CIMS 3931, COML 3931, ENGL 2970, GSWS 3931
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6931
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3940 Chinese and Sinophone Cinemas
This course is a survey of Chinese and Sinophone cinemas from the silent era to the present. The Sinophone refers to Sinitic film cultures both inside and outside the People’s Republic of China that have been in relatively marginalized positions against the Han-Chinese mainstream, such as Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Tibetan, and transpacific cinemas. One major goal of the course is to interrogate the national cinema framework and to show how the meaning of “Chineseness” has been problematized by filmmakers and critics throughout modern history. Students will learn about important film movements and trends such as leftist cinema from the 1930s, socialist cinema, Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Waves, the Fifth and Sixth Generation filmmakers, and contemporary transnational productions. Attention will be paid to both films known for awards and artistic achievements and popular genres including thrillers, horror, and wuxia (martial art).
Also Offered As: CIMS 3940, EALC 1331
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3959 The Politics of Truth in the Global Documentary
This course is a study of documentary film practices internationally, beginning from the invention of cinema and ending in the contemporary landscape. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2943, COML 2943, ENGL 2943
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3965 The Art of Art Collecting
This course is taught regularly and takes up different case studies of collectors and collecting. In Fall 2024, we will undertake a semester-long study of the Neumann family of collectors. We will examine and contextualize the business they built starting in the 1920s, Valmor, that developed and sold cosmetics for African-Americans. We will then look at the collection of modern and contemporary art that the family has developed over four generations. We will draw on archival material, visits with the Neumann family, and interviews with experts on collecting, the Neumanns, and related aspects of the history. Projects for the course will include research documents as well as multimedia presentations.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3965
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3970 Spiegel-Wilks Seminar
Topic varies from semester to semester. While not having any specific pre-requisites, this seminar in contemporary art is designed for junior and senior majors in art history with some knowledge in the field. When appropriate, it may feature special guests from the art world, international travel, and/or curatorial opportunities.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENGL 2663
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3989 "In the Dark We Can All Be Free": Black Queer, Feminist & Trans Art(s) of Abolition
If the afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman argues, is an aesthetic problem, what then is the relationship between abolition and aesthetics? How has the ongoing project of abolition been an aesthetic enterprise, and how does art shape its aims and horizon -- historically, presently and in afro-futuristic imaginary of the to come? How might the analytics of black studies, feminist theory, and trans studies, in their co-implicacy and entanglement, prompt a rethinking of aesthetics -- both its limits and possibilities? In this course we will consider the art(s) of the Black radical tradition, trans art, queer art and feminist art and theory, alongside a grounding in aesthetic theory, and explore the work of a constellation of scholars in Black studies, art history and artists including Saidiya Hartman, Laura Harris, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, American Artists, fields harrington, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Tourmaline, Juliana Huxtable, Kiyan Williams, Simone Leigh, Alvin Baltrop, Tina Campt, (and more) to consider how abolition is activated in contemporary Black queer, trans and feminist visual art.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2800, GSWS 2800
1 Course Unit
ARTH 3999 Independent Study
Independent Study with a standing faculty member or instructor.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 4250 Late Antique Arts
What is 'Late Antiquity'? In 312 when Roman emperor Constantine inaugurated a Christian empire, 'Roman' culture was centuries old. The period ca. 200-650 CE saw profound transformations that launched Medieval, Byzantine and Islamic traditions. In this epoch of upheaval destruction was frequent but partial: Rome long survived, Constantine's 'new Rome,' Constantinople flourished, and around the Empire both proto-global visual culture and local forms prospered. Roman cultural models authorized both innovation and passion for tradition: we critique art-historical models for Late Antique 'decline', analyse habits of material reuse and curation, and look at new Christian and Jewish roles for Roman things as well as polytheist visual survival. Foreign allies and enemies interacted with Greco-Roman Late Antiquity; we visit them too, as in the early Islamic palaces. Media discussed include not just 'monumental' painting, mosaic, sculpture, but also silver, ceramic, ivory, figural textile, glass, painted books, jewelry, coins and more. We look too at Late Antique texts on art, objects, space and viewership. This is an advanced undergraduate lecture course.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3406
1 Course Unit
ARTH 4260 Narrative in Ancient Art
Cultures of the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean world were fascinated to make images and things tell stories and engage with time. Sometimes that implied a text - and sometimes, not. With case studies from the deep past, this interdisciplinary advanced undergraduate lecture course explores the capacity of visual language to narrate.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3412, MELC 4055, NELC 4055
1 Course Unit
ARTH 4270 Roman Sculpture
Survey of the Republican origins and Imperial development of Roman sculpture - free-standing, relief, and architectural - from ca. 150 BC to 350 AD. We concentrate on sculpture in the capital city and on court and state arts, emphasizing commemorative public sculpture and Roman habits of decorative display; genres examined include relief, portraits, sarcophagi, luxury and minor arts(gems, metalwork, coinage). We evaluate the choice and evolution of styles with reference to the functions of sculptural representation in Roman culture and society.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3405
1 Course Unit
ARTH 4280 Hellenistic Art and Spectacle
Hellenistic usually names art in the age of Mediterranean culture from the 4th century BCE and the rise of Alexander the Great's Macedon, and the Greco-Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire, to Cleopatra of Egypt's defeat by Rome at the end of the Republic. Our course looks also at the age of Augustus and his successors, 1st century CE. While Greek and Macedonian practice in city-states and kingdoms is our launching point, this course also looks at international culture and cultural interaction among peoples from North Africa and Etrusco-Roman Italy, Egypt, Anatolia, the Mideast and Central Asia. We probe art, artifacts, and visual display from a range of settings, from sanctuary to house, palace and parade, and in all media, from marble monuments to pottery and jewelry. Our archaeology of Hellenistic visual culture also looks at the rich body of Hellenistic and Roman texts of art history, art criticism, and the description of objects and image, to better understand the Hellenistic maker, patron, and viewer. No prerequisites.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3413
1 Course Unit
ARTH 4350 Islamic Art and Architecture
This advanced undergraduate lecture introduces the major architectural monuments and trends, as well as to the best-known objects of the Islamic world. Istanbul, Samarkand, Isfahan, Cairo and Delhi as major centers of art production in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Attention is paid to such themes as the continuity of late antique themes; architecture as symbol of community and power; the importance of textiles; primacy of writing; urban and architectural achievement; and key monuments of painting and metalwork.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 4550, NELC 4550
1 Course Unit
ARTH 4400 African Art, 600-1400
This course examines the flourishing civilizations of the African continent between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the "Age of Discovery." Although material remains of the complex cultures that created exceptional works of art are rare, current archaeology is bringing much new information to the fore, allowing for the first time a preliminary survey of the burgeoning artistic production of the African continent while Europe was building its cathedrals. Bronze casting, gold work, terracotta and wood sculpture, and monumental architecture - the course takes a multi-media approach to understanding the rich foundations of African cultures and their deep interconnection with the rest of the world before the disruptive interventions of colonialism.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 4400
1 Course Unit
ARTH 4980 Senior Thesis
Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5010 Curatorial Seminar
Curatorial seminars expose students to the complexity of studying and working with objects in the context of public display. With the guidance of faculty and museum professionals, students learn what it means to curate an exhibition, create catalogues and gallery text, and/or develop programming for exhibitions of art and visual/material culture.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5050 Masters in Liberal Arts Seminar
This seminar satisfies a requirement in the Master of Liberal Arts Degree program through the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5070 MLA Proseminar
This MLA Proseminar course in the history of art explores an aspect of Art History and Theory; specific course topics vary. Proseminars are taught by Penn Standing Faculty and fulfill a core MLA Program requirement. Please see the College of Liberal and Professional Studies Course Guide for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5090 African Art Seminar
This seminar covers aspects of the arts and visual/material cultures in Africa, including the global African diaspora, throughout the continent's history. Topics will vary from semester to semester.
Also Offered As: AFRC 5091
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5110 Topics in South Asian Art
This seminar engages topics in the history and theory of South Asian art from antiquity to the present emphasizing global connections and comparisons. Topics vary from year to year and might include the arts of the book in South Asia; Indian Ocean art worlds; and fragments, ruins, and traces in the art of South Asia. We shall explore objects in area collections and incorporate special excursions and programs when possible. A background in South Asian studies or languages is not required. Students from related disciplines such history, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, feminist studies, cinema and media studies, and architecture are welcome.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 5110
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5120 Advanced Topics in Buddhism
This is an advanced course for upper level undergraduates and graduate students on various issues in the study of Buddhist texts, art, and history. Each semester the theme of the course changes. In recent years themes have included: Magic and Ritual, Art and Material Culture, Texts and Contexts, Manuscript Studies. Fall 2013 Topic: Buddhist repertoires (idiosyncratic and personal assemblages of beliefs, reflections, wonderings, possessions, and practices) for a large part, material and sensual. Buddhists are often sustained by their collection, production, and trading of stuff amulets, images, posters, protective drawings, CDs, calendars, films, comic books, and even Buddhist-themed pillow cases, umbrellas, and coffee mugs. Aspirations are interconnected with objects. Beliefs are articulated through objects. Objects are not empty signifiers onto which meaning is placed. The followers and the objects, the collectors and their stuff, are overlooked in the study of religion, even in many studies in the growing field of material culture and religion. What is striking is that these objects of everyday religiosity are often overlooked by art historians as well. Art historians often remove (through photography or physical movement to museums or shops) images and ritual implements from their ritual context and are seen as objets d'art. While art historians influenced by Alfred Gell, Arjun Appadurai, and Daniel Miller have brought the study of ritual objects into the forefront of art historical studies, in terms of methodologies of studying Buddhist art, art historians have generally relegated themselves to the study of either the old and valuable or the static and the curated. This course aims to 1) bring a discussion of art into the study of living Buddhism. Art historians have primarily concentrated on the study of images, stupas, manuscripts, and murals produced by the elite, and primarily made before the twentieth century; 2) study art as it exists and operates in dynamic ritual activities and highly complex synchronic and diachronic relationships; 3) focus on the historical and material turn in the study of images, amulets, and murals in Buddhist monasteries and shrines.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 5501, RELS 5710
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5130 Ukiyo-e: Beyond the Great Wave
In this seminar we will take a closer look at the prints, paintings, and illustrated books produced in the genre known as "ukiyo-e," the "pictures of the floating world." We'll begin by asking how the "Great Wave" became a global icon and we'll bust the myth of prints being used as wrapping paper. As we learn the history of the genre, from 1600 to ca. 1850, we'll also make critical interventions into that narrative, asking how "ukiyo-e" became a genre within a larger artistic sphere; how publishers collaborated with designers to construct artistic personae; how illustrated books contributed to knowledge formations; and how concepts of authenticity and authorship remain critical to its understanding. This course will also consider how internet resources affect our understanding of the work of art. Students need not have any Japanese language skills, but should have taken related courses in art history or East Asian Studies. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students preferred.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 7141
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5140 Utamaro and his Contemporaries
In this seminar we will take a closer look at the prints, paintings, and illustrated books produced by one of ukiyo-e’s most famous artists, Kitagawa Utamaro (1753?-1806), with special focus upon works to be included in an upcoming exhibition. We will begin by surveying the larger history of the “pictures of the floating world” (ukiyo-e) and pay close attention to Utamaro’s teacher and his contemporaries. The status of the artist, the role of the publisher, networks of possible patrons, and Utamaro’s legacy are among the key issues the seminar will address. Our analysis will further attend to the ways in which works by Utamaro and other ukiyo-e artists were evaluated and appreciated in late 19th-century France by such figures as Edmond de Goncourt, Hayashi Tadamashi, and Siegfried Bing, among others. Students will have the opportunity to study works in local and regional collections, including the Kislak Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Freer/Sackler Galleries. Undergraduate students admitted by permission only.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 7142
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5150 Japanese Art Seminar
Seminar in early modern, modern, or contemporary Japanese art. Topics vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 7140
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5170 History of the Book in East Asia
From handscrolls to manga, books play a vital role in East Asian societies. In this seminar we will introduce the spread of book cultures across East Asia and reconsider the role and impact of material texts on societies in China, Korea, and Japan. Among the questions we ll engage are: What is a book, an author, or an edition? How do readers affect books? How do publishers decide when to use illustrations, woodblock printing, or movable type? How has the history of books differed in China, Japan, and Korea from the history of the book in the West? We will consider various media (bamboo, paper, silk, and the digital), formats (scrolls, folded books, bound books, small to oversize), and the tensions between handwritten manuscript and printed pages. Hands-on sessions may include paper-making, bookbinding, and printing. This is an Objects-Based Learning course, using materials from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Penn Museum, with visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Requires no knowledge of any Asian language.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 8301
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5190 Archiving Jazz: Visuality And Materiality In The Phila Jazz Community 1945-2019
This seminar will be organized around three distinct pathways. First, it will serve as an introduction to Jazz Studies and thus be attentive to the ways that jazz music has sparked an interdisciplinary conversation that is wide-ranging and ongoing. Second, we will be partnering with the African American Museum of Philadelphia to consider jazz within the realm of visual art. In light of efforts to map the "black interior," how have visual artists (e.g. painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and photographers) sought to represent jazz? Third, we will endeavor to develop partnerships with the Philadelphia (and beyond) jazz community, especially as it pertains to creating and sustaining an archive that serves as way to understand jazz as an instrument of placemaking and also as a vehicle for jazz musicians to take ownership of their narratives. The seminar will meet at the African American Museum of Philadelphia and be team taught with members of the Museum staff. The course will culminate with a virtual exhibit of visual works and archival materials centering on Philadelphia's jazz community and (if funding is available) a free concert to be held at AAMP. Undergraduates are welcome to register for the course with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5420, URBS 5420
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5200 Aegean Bronze Age Art Seminar
In this class, we will explore the art and cultures of the Aegean Bronze Age in Greece, a period from roughly 3,300-1,100 BCE. From this time, we have the first evidence of complex society in Greece with three geographically and materialistically distinct groups of people located on the Greek Mainland, the Cycladic islands, and the island of Crete. Topics will vary from semester to semester, but may include and not be limited to the examination of the architecture, pottery, wall paintings, stone carvings, jewelry, seals, weapons and other metalwork, and the iconography of these prehistoric arts. We will also delve into issues of the organization of society and the distribution of power, the role of women and men, trade and the unique position of the (rather small) Aegean world as it existed between two huge powerhouses of the ancient Mediterranean: the Ancient Near East and Egypt.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5200
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5220 Ancient Iranian Art Seminar
This seminar will focus on the environmental, archaeological and textual record for settlement in the Persian/Arabian Gulf region from the Neolithic to the pre-Islamic Late Antique. Emphasis will be on the settlement history and material culture. Special attention will be paid to the close interaction of the local communities on the Arabian side of the Gulf with those on the Iranian/Indus valley side. The patterns of sea faring trade and interaction from Mesopotamia, Iran, Indus Valley and beyond will be considered. It is possible that this class will take a site trip to the UAE during the spring break, if the logistics can be arranged.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5220, MELC 5050, NELC 5050
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5230 Narrative in Ancient Art
Art history, and its cousins in religious, social, political and literary studies, have long been fascinated with the question of narrative: how do images engage time, tell stories? These are fundamental questions for ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian and Mediterranean art history and archaeology, whose rich corpus of narrative images is rarely considered in the context of "Western" art. Relations between words and things, texts and images, were as fundamental to the ancient cultures we examine as they are to modern studies. As we weigh classic modern descriptions of narrative and narratology, we will bring to bear recent debates about how (ancient) images, things, monuments, and designed spaces engage with time, space, and event, and interact with cultural memory. We will ask "who is the story for, and why?" for public and private narratives ranging from political histories to mythological encounters. Our case studies will be drawn from the instructors' expertise in Mesopotamian visual culture, and in the visual cultures of the larger Mediterranean world from early Greek antiquity to the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods. One central and comparative question, for instance, is the nature of recording history in pictures and texts in the imperial projects of Assyria, Achaemenid Persia, the Hellenistic kingdoms, and Rome.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5230, CLST 5412
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5231 Archaeological Field Methods
This seminar will prepare students for participation in the excavations at the site of ancient Lagash, modern Tell al-Hiba, in southern Iraq that are scheduled to take place in the fall semester. The topics to be considered are introduction to the recording methods, use of equipment, review of the ceramic sequence, methods of recording, drawing, photography. Permission of the instructor required for participation in the class.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5231
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5240 Mesopotamia 2200-1600 BCE
This seminar style class will focus on two canonical periods of Mesopotamian history from 2100-1600 BCE. It is structured to examine fundamental institutions of kingship, religion, economy, law and literature. Practices well established in Sumer by the end of the third millennium evolved during the first half of the second millennium BCE when Amorite speaking peoples assume central roles in Mesopotamian institutions. The class will be structured around case studies engaging key monuments of art, architecture and literature. It will be team-taught by Prof. Pittman, focusing on material remains and visual arts and by Prof. Steve Tinney who brings expertise to the rich cuneiform textual traditions.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5020, ANTH 5024, MELC 5020, NELC 5020
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5241 Courtly Life in Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Mediterranean
Who could approach and speak with the Sumerian Queen? What rules governed a banquet with the Persian king? What was the most elegant way to drink wine? Where were the women in the Assyrian court? With hundreds of people crammed into a palace, was hygiene important? How were court guests treated? What games were played at court? Is the stereotypical image of the “Oriental” court characterized by lust, backstairs intrigue, flatteries, and secrets sustainable in the light of new evidence and theoretical approaches? The court at the same time is considered as a large amorphous body in a physical location or an institution, or a group of people, or even to particular events. This seminar style course considers Middle Eastern courts from the Sumerians through the Assyrian and Persian empires articulating shared and diverse features. Textual, visual, material and archaeological sources are considered through sociological and anthropological theories and core concepts such as groups, individuals, ultrasociality, proxemics, sociopetal, sociofrugal and purity to name a few. Comparisons with later courts in the Middle East are welcome.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5241, MELC 5054, NELC 5054
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5250 Borderlines: Art and Artifact in the Roman Empire
What made art and artifacts `Roman', or not, in a Roman world? `Roman provincial art` is an active scholarly category. This seminar reframes it, to test productive models to understand visual culture outside the empire’s Italian heartland from the Late Republic into Late Antiquity, in the Roman polity’s interactions with many peoples in situations of diaspora, colonization, hegemony, conflict, economic exchange, and religious interaction. As `Rome’ expanded, cultural relations across many borderlines – social, ethnic, territorial - potentially became cultural politics. A traditional topic for that has been Roman interaction with Greek culture. This seminar extends that range, while tackling `Hellenization’, as we reflect on models of `Romanization’, globalism and identity formation within the imperium’s boundaries in its provinces and client kingdoms, and also at its frontier zones. Various disciplines apply: art history, archaeology, history, and more. Case studies, evolved with students, may range from Britain to Iran, northern Africa to the Black Sea in space and, in time, from interactions with the Hellenistic East and West and with Iron Age Europe, to the age of Germanic, Sasanian and Ummayad conquests of Roman terrain, ca 3rd c. BCE-7th c. CE. The market in art and artifact, the nature and status of makers, and conditions of patronage and viewing are key considerations. Private and public objects, images, architecture and urbanism, and landscapes can all concern us, as we try out disciplinary approaches that take in eg cultural appropriation, translation and hybrity, creolization, discrepant experience, object agency, and communities of taste and style. `Ethnicity’ is a loaded concept in ancient Mediterranean studies, as is `race;’ our course must engage those, and the ways in which things and styles have been made to serve those terms. And who owns, is heir to, the cultural legacies we look at, and how to name them, are problems that tangle with current national identity formation, and academic and museum practice. Our own Museum's holdings can make topics. Students are welcome to bring in interests in language and text cultures, in disciplines outside art history and archaeology, and in other world cultures and epochs.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5250, ANCH 7403, CLST 7403
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5251 Roman Political Art Seminar
This seminar looks at how Roman things, images and the designed environment so often spoke to political and sociological realities. The material world was not just a document of history: it was history. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5251, CLST 7404
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5252 Late Antique Art and Artifact Seminar
What is 'Late Antiquity'? In 312 when Roman emperor Constantine inaugurated a Christian empire, 'Roman' culture was centuries old. The period ca. 200-650 CE saw profound transformations that launched Medieval, Byzantine and Islamic traditions. In this epoch of upheaval destruction was frequent but partial: Rome long survived, Constantine's 'new Rome,' Constantinople flourished, and around the Empire both proto-global visual culture and local forms prospered. Roman cultural models authorized both innovation and passion for tradition: we critique art-historical models for Late Antique 'decline', analyse habits of material reuse and curation, and look at new Christian and Jewish roles for Roman things as well as polytheist visual survival. Foreign allies and enemies interacted with Greco-Roman Late Antiquity; we visit them too, as in the early Islamic palaces. Media discussed include not just 'monumental' painting, mosaic, sculpture, but also silver, ceramic, ivory, figural textile, glass, painted books, jewelry, coins and more. We look too at Late Antique texts on art, objects, space and viewership. This seminar is open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5252, CLST 7405
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5253 Violence in Ancient Mediterranean Art Seminar
Violence, physical and emotional, pervades the images of the ancient Mediterranean. This seminar asks why, how and to what end that occurred; in these and any cultures, why do people look at such images? Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5253, CLST 7406
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5254 Myth Through Time and in Time Seminar
The textual and physical remains of Greek and Roman culture and belief as 'myth' entranced the post-antique European world and its neighbors. Makers, patrons and viewers manipulated those survivals to challenge and speak to a contemporary world. This course focuses on how and why artists and their patrons engaged the mythic and examines the various areas of political and religious life that sought animation through an evocation of narratives from the past. Readings and case studies will examine very late antique through medieval and early modern art. This seminar is open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5254, CLST 7407, ITAL 5254
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5280 Hellenistic Cities Seminar
A new form of city and of urban life developed and spread during the Hellenistic period. The new political social and economic conditions resulting from the victories of Alexander the Great and the emergence of the Macedonian kingdoms deeply affected civic life and form. Hellenistic cities were not independent poleis but subject to absolute monarchs and were open to all residents regardless of their geographical origins. Civic life assumed a cosmopolitan character and the urban setting became an arena for the propaganda of the Hellenistic rulers. This course will examine the architectural and urban developments of the Hellenistic period together with central political institutions and religious and social practices that were associated with them. In studying a diversity of visual, material and textual evidence—such as urban form, architectural and sculptural monuments, as well as literary sources and epigraphic evidence—the course will address both the structure of the urban fabric and the socio-political situation of the Hellenistic polis. The purpose of the course will be to shed light on the principles of urban planning as well as the realities of civic life in the Hellenistic period.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5280
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5290 The Roman Idea of Landscape
Landscape was one of the most prominent themes in ancient Roman culture. The Roman visual and literary representations of natural scenery were adopted and expanded upon many Hellenistic themes. In the Roman period, however, for the first time in Western culture landscape was singled out as a theme in its own right; it was accurately described, its qualities were praised in the pastoral poetry of Virgil, and its idealized and symbolic representations permeated the public and private spheres: the garden paintings from the underground dining room of the Villa of the Livia at Prima Porta and the Odyssey Landscapes from the Esquiline are but two of many examples. This Roman sensitivity of landscape, attested in contemporary literary and visual sources, found an architectural expression in Roman luxury villas. In the realm of villa designs, gardens and landscapes could be represented in wall painting and realized in design at the same time. The villas provided literally a drawing board for Roman lovers of landscape. Late Republican and early Imperial poems, letters, and agricultural treatises read like exposés of architectural design exercises, vis-à-vis natural, cultivated and designed landscape, and how they delineated blueprints of villas – villa rustica, urbana, suburbana and the like. This course will examine literary and visual representations of natural scenery in the Greek and Roman cultures as well as Roman luxury villa architecture in order to address the ways in which Greek and Roman ideas and idealization of landscape contributed to the creation of a novel language of architecture and landscape architecture. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5290
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5291 Greek and Roman Wall Painting
Painting and pictorial realism, as we know them, were invented in the fourth century BCE. Their effects have survived in the Hellenistic tomb paintings at Vergina, and elsewhere in Macedonia and Thrace, and their ideas have been described by ancient authors. This course examines the surviving Greek and Roman paintings together with ancient sources in order to shed light on the deployment of the pictorial repertoire of classical antiquity.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5291
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5292 Delos in Context
Delos was an important cult centre since the archaic period whose activity was inextricably linked to its economic role. Due to its advantageous geographical position in the centre of the Aegean world, Delos commanded a huge cult network that intertwined religious with economic and political activities from the archaic period onwards. Communities competing for political power and leadership exploited the cult network of Delos over time; Ionians, Athenians, the successors of Alexander and finally Romans. This course will focus on three key moments of the island’s history – the first Athenian dominion, the period of independence and the second Athenian dominion – in order to highlight the ways in which the competing powers used art and architecture in order to establish their presence on the sacred island. By studying the presence of the Athenians in the sanctuary of Apollo since the sixth century BCE, which culminated in their administration of the sanctuary during the fifth and fourth centuries (the first Athenian dominion), the course will tackle the cultural mannerisms of the period. By examining the architectural development of the sanctuary and the city of Delos during the period of the independence (314-167 BCE) the course will address the monumentalization of the sanctuary and the extension of the city through the euergetism of the successors of Alexander and the emergence of a new form of urban life in the Hellenistic period. The course will finally examine Delos during the period of the second Athenian dominion (167-69 BCE), when the Roman senate decided to make it a “duty free” port under Athenian suzerainty. By addressing the economic and urban developments of the late Hellenistic Delos the course will look at the contemporary trends in art and architecture, which in effect shaped those of the emerging Roman Empire. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5292
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5293 Topos, Myth, and the Contemporary: Art Pracitices in Archaeological Sites and Mythological Places
The seminar will map the intellectual agenda of contemporary art practices that engage with archaeological sites and important mythological places in Italy and Greece. Over the past two decades there has been an increasing interest of artists in archaeology and the classical past in Italy and Greece resulting in in situ art installations and performances, as well as reflective presentations of their interactions with the sites in a gallery space. These projects / installations /performances present a range of approaches: from investigations of cultural traditions, national norms and stereotypes that seek to tackle learned preconceptions and received histories of the classical, to the use of the archaeological site, mythologically poignant topos and myth as a backdrop for the contemporary – the Documenta 14 in Athens in 2017 may serve as a representative example of this range. The course will assess the intellectual and cultural landscapes of as well as the political strategies behind these contemporary art practices. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5293
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5305 Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome
An intensive exploration of Rome's urban topography during the Republican and Imperial periods (6th c. B.C. through 4th c. A.D.) Using archaeological and textual sources, including the Etruscan and Roman collections of the Penn Museum, the goal will be to reconstruct the built environment and decoration of Rome over the course of a millennium. Of interest to students of classics, archaeology, art history, and architecture. Some familiarity with Rome will be a plus, but is not required.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5305, CLST 5305
Mutually Exclusive: CLST 3305
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5320 The Icon
This seminar explores the Byzantine icon and its legacy. Spanning nearly two millennia, from the emergence of Christian sacred portraiture to the reception of icon painting by the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde, the seminar will introduce you to the history, historiography, and theories of the icon. While our focus will be on Byzantium and the wider world of Orthodox Christianity, especially in the Slavic Balkans and Eastern Europe, the seminar will also engage with fundamental questions concerning the nature, status, and agency of images across cultures. Topics to be addressed include iconoclasm and the problem of idolatry; the social and ritual lives of icons; authorship, originality, and replication; viewer response and the cultural construction of vision; the frontier between art and the sacred image; and the afterlife of the icon in modernity. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5320, RELS 5022
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5321 Art and Text in Byzantine Culture
In Byzantine culture, images and material objects, on one hand, and texts—whether read, spoken, remembered, or inscribed—on the other, were closely intertwined on multiple levels. Debates concerning the role of images in religious devotion during the period known as Iconoclasm generated a huge body of theological writings about art. Descriptions of works of art, either independent or inserted into larger literary compositions, proliferated. In manuscripts, pictures were variously mobilized to complement, illustrate, interpret, or comment on the verbal message. Icons of sacred personages were commonly inscribed not only with identifying labels, but also with special epithets. Moreover, from monumental architecture to personal seals and pieces of jewelry, a vast array of objects bore inscriptions, often in the form of poetic texts, or epigrams. Script, sometimes illegible and nonsensical, also featured as ornament and visual sign. The written word was a source of power and authority as much as a means of communication. The aim of this seminar is to interrogate the interface between art and text in Byzantium. No knowledge of Medieval Greek is required for the course. All the inscriptions and primary sources to be discussed will be available in translation. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5321
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5322 On the Wall: Mosaics and Frescoes
This seminar examines the economy, technology, and aesthetics of monumental paintings and mosaics decorating church spaces in Byzantium and the larger Mediterranean world of the Middle Ages. We will explore these site-specific, wall-bound images in the context of their making and reception by attending to the issues of artistic labor and patronage, materiality and pictorial medium, visual communication and ideological programming, and viewership and ritual action. Special consideration will be given to methodology. We will critically assess the traditional and current approaches to the study of monumental pictorial art and, more importantly, seek to formulate new perspectives and methods. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5322
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5323 The Chora Monastery and the World of Late Byzantium
This seminar is envisioned as a wide-ranging exploration of the art and culture of the Late Byzantine period (thirteenth through fifteenth century), with focus upon a key monument, the church of the former Chora monastery (Kariye Camii) in Istanbul. With its superb and highly original architecture, this church preserves an outstanding ensemble of monumental mosaics, frescoes, stone carvings, funerary monuments, colored marbles and glass, and inscriptions. Additionally, we possess a substantial body of texts illuminating various aspects of the monastery’s history and, in particular, its restoration in the early fourteenth century by the statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites. The seminar will take this rich material and textual record as a point of entry into the world of Late Byzantium. Topics to be addressed include patronage and politics; artistic practice, visual aesthetics, and materiality; monasticism; death, time, and history; the interplay between art and literary culture; and Byzantium’s interactions with the wider Mediterranean world, especially Muslim-ruled Anatolia, the Slavic Balkans, and Italy. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5323
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5330 Material Christianities
What can objects tell us about Christianity? How might a lavish mosaic, a withered body part, a dark crypt, or a pilgrim's oil lamp challenge and complicate visions of the past extracted from texts? This course investigates the first thousand years of Christianity through the lens of material culture. The history of Christianity - from its nebulous beginnings in Palestine to its recognition as the official religion of the Roman Empire and subsequent expansion - is often narrated from a perspective that privileges the writings of elite men. To capture the rich diversity in Christian experience and expression, we will turn to the material practices of religion and explore how things, places, and bodily acts shaped what it meant to be Christian. Building on insights drawn from archaeology, art history, anthropology, and religious studies, we will seek to recover the experiences of diverse and often marginalized subjects and communities, and in the process, will problematize the categories of religion, authority, and identity. Regular visits to the Penn Museum and other collections in Philadelphia will complement lectures and group discussions.
Also Offered As: RELS 5330
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 3330, RELS 3330
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5360 Manuscript Arts in the Islamic World
This hands-on seminar will explore the long tradition of manuscript-making and manuscript-makers in the Islamic world, using the extensive collections of Arab, Persian, Turkish and Indian volumes at the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Philadelphia. These include copies of the Qur'an (Islam's holy text) and other religious, scientific, historical and literary texts. Emphasis will be placed on traditional materials and artistic techniques, specifically calligraphy, binding, illumination and illustration, as well as on production methods and the historical, social, and economic contexts in which manuscripts were made, used and collected from early Islamic times to the early modern period. Also at issue will be the ways that Islamicate manuscripts were transformed over the centuries as they journeyed from their diverse places of origin (Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Iran, India, etc.) to Philadelphia. The goal is to develop the art historical skills involved in the study of Islamicate codices, through close examination, discussion and presentation, and to recognize that every manuscript has a story. Most of the class sessions will be held either at the Kislak Center in Van Pelt Library or at the Free Library on the Parkway.
Also Offered As: MELC 5405, NELC 5405
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5400 Medieval Art Seminar
Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: Facing Fragments. So many traces of the medieval past come to us in fragmentary form, either literally broken, partial and incomplete, or figuratively, having been ripped from its program or findsite and shipped across the world. This course focuses on the strategies art historians and curators adopt to confront the realities of decontextualized museum collections - of how to face fragments. Considering approaches that range from research methodologies, conservation, installation, and preservation, we will also touch upon questions of restitution and ethics. Co-taught between Penn and the PMA, this course will constitute much hands-on learning.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5400
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5430 Topics In Medieval and Renaissance Art
Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: Manuscript Illumination. This course will provide an overview of the history, materials, and techniques of manuscript illumination through the lens of Philadelphia's rich and varied holdings. The course will also chart the sometimes surprising means by which such objects arrived in North American collections from the nineteenth century through to the present. Handling sessions will form a key part of the course. We will begin by examining items at the Kislak Center before venturing to other local institutions including the Free Library and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with possible study-day excursions to New York and Baltimore. Student research assignments will involve the close individual study of a single illuminated manuscript.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5431 Visualizing Science
This seminar focuses on the intersection of visuality and natural knowledge in the pre-modern world. It is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Also Offered As: HSSC 5431
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5500 Pictorial Composition Seminar
This seminar explores the art of composition in two respects: first, composition as the arrangement of words and sentences into prose; second, composition as the organization of visual elements into a painting. Through the writings of key Renaissance writers, we will explore such issues as the mythical origins of the portrait, the role of precious materials in art, the relationship between figure and ground, and the mechanics of describing a painting into words. Open to undergraduate and graduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5501 Caravaggio Seminar
This seminar explores the artistic culture of Baroque Rome, with focus on the life and career of Caravaggio. This course is open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5502 What is Painting Seminar
What is painting? Is it art or mere craft? In this seminar we will explore how artists and critics responded to these questions in the Italian Renaissance, specifically through looking at the work of Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Tintoretto. In addition to reading some of the most recent scholarship on these artists, we will also visit select paintings in PMA as well as local ateliers and galleries where we will gain insight into the enduring practice of such crafts as goldwork, textiles, and glasswork. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5503 Early Modern Art Theory Seminar
Reading and discussion of texts relevant to open problems and key issues pertaining to Renaissance and Baroque art (1500-1800) in Europe and beyond with emphasis on Italy and Brazil.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5504 The Language of Art History
What does it mean to write about art? What are the historical origins of this undertaking? How does language mediate the intellectual, somatic, and cultural rapport between the viewing self and the physical object? As an initial response to these questions we will examine the writings of the Tuscan artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), the biographer of such renowned artists as Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo. We will also read the letters of famous artists from the early modern period, and examine the theoretical forays of artists such as Albrecht DÃ?rer, who attempted to sketch the relationship between the memory and the imagination. Finally, we will look to examples of works of art for how we might read visual images as expressive of theories about what are is and what it can do.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5520 High Renaissance Seminar
One Italian poet called his garden "the blending of art and nature." In a garden, he claimed, "one cannot discern whether a thing is the work of one or the other; whether it is a piece of natural artifice or artificial nature." Around the same time, the Italian humanist Jacopo Bonfadio invented the term, terza natura, for gardens seemed to be a "third nature" somehow in between wild first nature and the second built or man-ipulated world of human endeavor. The history of landscape architecture is a history of man's sometimes misguided efforts to "improve" his surroundings in the search for a beauty that harnessed natural forms through the application of human reason. This seminar will address changing tastes in garden design in Early Modern Europe but will also extend our study further into the past, beyond Europe and forward to the present day. The seminar will introduce themes in garden design and examples from garden history and, in the process, the course will ask the participants to consider different cultural visions of the "beautiful" or "appropriate" landscape and ultimately better understand the history of the gardener's art. Open to undergraduate and graduate students.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5590 Myth Through Time and In Time
The textual and physical remains of Greek and Roman culture and belief as 'myth' entranced the post-antique European world and its neighbors. Makers, patrons and viewers manipulated those survivals to challenge and speak to a contemporary world. This course focuses on how and why artists and their patrons engaged the mythic and examines the various areas of political and religious life that sought animation through an evocation of narratives from the past. Readings and case studies will engage with very late antique, medieval, and early modern art, turning to the modern and contemporary as well. Moving to the modern lets us examine, among other things, how artists address the exclusionary histories of the past, to enable critiques of myths of supremacy by one gender, race, or culture over others.
Also Offered As: AAMW 5590, CLST 7400, COML 5590, GRMN 5590
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5610 Privacy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art Seminar
How do paintings offer occasions for personal reflection, and how do they construct social bonds? The aim of this seminar is to develop a set of critical skills for analyzing the different ways in which seventeenth-century Dutch paintings drew upon shared social values, national identity and economic pride, how they appealed to individual buyer tastes, and how they have engaged and continue to engage poetic minds. We will address these matters by paying particular attention to the representation of space, considering domestic interiors, urban settings, church architecture, imperial arenas, and landscapes both real and imagined. Our discussions of how paintings reflect and shape privacy and society will be informed by visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, by readings from methodologically diverse essays, and by writing frequently, which will provide us with occasions to test our ideas in response to what we see and read. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: DTCH 5780, GRMN 5781
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5611 German Art Seminar
This seminar surveys German art from the early-modern period (Schongauer, DÃ?rer, Grunewald, Holbein) through the twenty-first century (Gerhard Richter, Isa Genzken, Rosemarie Trockel). Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GRMN 5791
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5612 History of the Line
This seminar offers a way of expanding our notion of “graphic art,” from concentrated studies of drawings and print to encounters with dance, design, video art, and urban planning. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: URBS 5610
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5650 Southern Baroque Art Seminar
This seminar focuses on the art of Southern Europe between 1500 and 1800 CE. It is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5680 18th-century Visual Cultures of Race & Empire
This course approaches the Western history of race and racial classification (1600-1800) with a focus on visual and material culture, natural history, and science that connected Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Across the long eighteenth century, new knowledges about human diversity and species distinctions emerged alongside intensifications of global trade with Asia. The course will include case studies of chinoiserie textiles, portraits of consuming individuals, natural history prints and maps, Chinese export porcelain and furnishings, and "blackamoor" sculpture. Objects of visual and material culture will be studied alongside readings on regional and world histories that asserted universal freedoms as well as hierarchies of human, animal, and plant-kind. Keeping in mind that the idea of race continues to be a distributed phenomenon - across color, gender, class, religion, speech, culture - we will explore changing vocabularies of difference, particularly concerning skin color, across a range of texts and images. Knowledge often does not take written or literary form, and for this reason, we will study examples of visual and material culture as well as forms of technology that were critical to defining human varieties, to use the eighteenth-century term. Although we will be reading texts in English, some in translation, we will also account for European and non-European knowledge traditions - vernacular, indigenous - that informed scientific and imaginative writings about the globe. Topics may include cultural and species distinction, global circulations of commodities between the East and West Indies, the transatlantic slave trade, the casta system of racial classification in the Americas, religious and scientific explanations of blackness and whiteness, and visual representations of non-European people.
Spring
Also Offered As: COML 5041, ENGL 5440
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5690 Inside the Archive
What is an archive, and what is its history? What makes an archival collection special, and how can we work with it? In this course, we will discuss work essays that focus on the idea and concept of the archive by Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau, Benjamin Buchloh, Cornelia Vismann, and others. We will consider the difference between public and private archives, archives dedicated to specific disciplines, persons, or events, and consider the relationship to museums and memorials. Further questions will involve questions of property and ownership as well as the access to material, and finally the archive's upkeep, expansion, or reduction. While the first part of the course will focus on readings about archives, we will invite curators, and visit archives (either in person or per zoom) in the second part of the course. At Penn, we will consider four archives: (1) the Louis Kahn archive of architecture at Furness, (2) the Lorraine Beitler Collection of material relating to the Dreyfus affair, (3) the Schoenberg collection of medieval manuscripts and its digitalization, and (4) the University archives. Outside Penn, we will study the following archives and their history: (1) Leo Baeck Institute for the study of German Jewry in New York, (2) the Sigmund Freud archive at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., (3) the German Literary Archive and the Literturmuseum der Moderne in Marbach, Germany, and (4) the archives of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5771, GRMN 5770, JWST 5770
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5710 Modern Architectural Theory Seminar
A survey of architectural theory from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. The discussion of original writings will be emphasized. Open to undergraduate and graduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CPLN 5720
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5730 Topics in Criticism & Theory: Object Theory
Topics vary annually
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5730, COML 5730, ENGL 5730, GRMN 5730, REES 6683
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5760 The Panorama Experience
Painted panoramas were one of the nineteenth century’s signature popular entertainments. Since its invention in 1787, audiences from cities and towns around the world have admired these circular landscape representations of nature, cities, and battles, which provide an opportunity to escape everyday life by witnessing scenes from the past and far-away places from an unfamiliar perspective. In this seminar, we will consider the phenomenon of the panorama, above all, as a political art form. We will examine the ways in which European and American artists since the nineteenth century have turned to panoramic forms to tell and call into question stories about empire and colonialism, enslavement and freedom struggles, the mastery of natural environments, as well as military victory and loss. As we debate the politics of panoramic forms, we will gain familiarity with a set of related topics from visual and material culture, including vedute, transparencies, magic lantern projections, panoramic wallpaper, dioramas, cartographic representation, history painting, illustrated print culture and pictorial journalism, travel literature and guidebooks, accordion folds and gatefolds, stereoscopes, panoramic photography, panoramic shots in cinema, and immersive environments. In addition to enriching your knowledge of nineteenth-century media history and how to conduct media archaeological research in libraries, archives, and museums, this seminar will offer an overview of approaches to visual culture from social history, gender, race, colonialism, museum studies, print history, sound studies, transnational history, and digital art history, which will be of use for work in a number of interdisciplinary fields. Students with a background in disciplines, such as architecture, literature, history, cinema studies, gender and sexuality studies, Africana Studies, and material texts, are welcome.
Also Offered As: GRMN 5760
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5770 Ecological Thinking in Art and Architecture
This seminar will address the diverse narratives of ecological thinking in the history of art, architecture, and urban planning during the 20th century. The course will contextualize and interrogate contemporary disciplinary discourses as well as historical assumptions related to ecological thinking in art and architectural history and environmentally-conscious practices. By mapping received trajectories of Eco Art, Ecocritical Art History, and Ecological Histories of Architecture and Urban Planning, the course will work from a subtly hidden foundation of eco-historical knowledge that connects these fields of inquiry, while also critiquing these trajectories and seeking to provide more focused and robust alternatives for knowledge production in the present. It aims to attract students from the School of Arts and Sciences and the Weitzman School of Design in a discussion on the interconnected histories of art and architecture during the 20th century.
Also Offered As: ARCH 7130
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5780 American Art Seminar
This seminar focuses on special topics in the art of the United States. Recent examples have included: portraiture in the US, Philadelphia as an art center, early mass visual culture, and Abstract Expressionism. It is open to all graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5790 Mass Visual Culture in the U.S.
This seminar will treat the United States as a case study for in-depth examination of the conditions and operations from which a mass visual culture emerged. Our focus will be on the period from 1830 to 1860, when the infrastructure, labor force, institutions, and audiences took shape and when paradigmatic examples of exceptionally successful works were developed. We will compare our empirical findings with some of the influential theories of mass culture developed by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Janice Radway, Lauren Berlant, Stuart Hall, and others. Our investigations will excavate the foundations of the image-saturated culture we experience in the 21st century. The development of a mass visual culture was among the epochal changes in the 19th century that made the United States a modernized nation. This involved the industrialization of picture production and the formation of markets large enough to consume print editions in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Despite the fragmentation of the population and the initial absence of an artistic infrastructure, the U. S. proved a fertile ground for mass art. The country rapidly became an innovative locus for advances in the commodification of pictures and in their instrumentalization for purposes of marketing, political persuasion, the circulation of information, education, and entertainment. This course is open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5791 Globalism and National Identity in the Americas
This course examines the way that issues of universal, global, and national identity have been negotiated and challenged in art and visual culture of the Americas. It also aims to give students an introduction to the various theories and methodological practices that have been used to critique and explain these images and objects since the end of WWII. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5791, GSWS 5791, LALS 5791
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5792 Biography and Art History
Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process. Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture. During the semester we will read art historical texts, watch biographical films, and debate the historical and post-structuralist critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5792, CIMS 5792, GSWS 5792, LALS 5792
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5793 Fake!
This seminar explores issues of fakery, forgery, reproduction, magic, and authenticity in history, art, literature, and film. Students will gain an understanding of these issues within both a historical and contemporary context by reading works of criticism, non-fiction, and fiction; watching both avant grade and popular film; and examining works of art and visual culture. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5793
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5800 Sexuality of Postmodernism
This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists of the postwar generation were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism in American art was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these artists raise the problem of authoriality and its discontents. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of the disclaiming of authoriality in post war American art, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing salience of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. What, in short, is the relationship between the rise of an anti-biographical, anti-authorial theoretical framework, and the lived histories of so many queer authors? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis. (Undergraduates interested in the course should contact Professor Katz.)
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 5780
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5820 Modern and Contemporary Design Seminar
This seminar will provide a brief overview of the history of modern and contemporary design, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to today, and engage students in the hands-on analysis of objects through the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the consideration of the presentation of objects in museums, and the discussion of several important contemporary topics in the study of material culture. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5830 Art, Sex and the Sixties
With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil, Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 5830, GSWS 5200, LALS 5830
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5850 19th Century Art in Europe Seminar
This seminar covers aspects of the arts, visual and material cultures of the long nineteenth century (c. 1789-1914) in Europe in a global context. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Topics will vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5860 20th Century Art in Europe Seminar
This seminar covers aspects of the arts, visual and material cultures of the twentieth century in Europe in a global context. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Topics will vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5870 Topics in Cultural History
Topic for Fall 2021: Making and Marking Time.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5410, ENGL 5410, GRMN 5410
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5871 Topics In Aesthetics
Topic title for Spring 2018: Walter Benjamin. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a philosopher whose writings on art, literature, and politics have had tremendous influence on many disciplines in the Humanities and Social Studies. He has been variously described as one of the leading German-Jewish thinkers, and a secular Marxist theorist. With the publication of a four-volume collection of this works in English, many more of his writings have been made accessible to a wider public. Our seminar will undertake a survey of his work that begins with his studies on language and allegory, and continues with his autobiographical work, his writings on art and literature, and on the imaginary urban spaces of the nineteenth-century.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5800, GRMN 5800, JWST 5800, PHIL 5389
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5910 Cinema and the Museum
Cinema and the museum are both important modern cultural institutions that have global relevance. How do cinema and the museum interact with each other conceptually, artistically, and spatially? In this graduate seminar, we will cross the disciplinary boundaries between film and media studies, museum studies, visual studies, and art history. A wide range of phenomena at the intersection of cinema and the museum will be considered, including the museum in films, the museum as an institution of cinema, video arts and moving images in museums, museum exhibitions that interrogate the cinematic medium, and film museums. Examples will be drawn from diverse historical periods and cultural contexts. This course is supported by Spiegel-Wilks funding and will include at least one class field trip.
Also Offered As: CIMS 5910
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5930 Classical Film Theory
At a moment when contemporary film and media theory has become increasingly interested in how earlier film theories can help us understand our moment of transition, this course will give students the opportunity to read closely some of those key early texts that are preoccupied with questions and problems that include: the ontology of film, the psychology of perception, the transition to sound, the politics of mass culture, realism, and ethnography. Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5930, COML 5930, ENGL 5930, GSWS 5930
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5931 Contemporary Film Theory
In this course, we will dig in to a variety of contemporary film theory debates in the context of earlier texts with which they engage or against which they define themselves. We will also watch films weekly and consider the relationship between theory and practice.Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5931, ENGL 5931, GSWS 5931
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5932 The Place of Film and Media Theory
Taking its title from a recent special issue in the journal Framework, this seminar will engage the where of film and media theory. At a moment when this discourse, often presumed to have roots in Anglo and Western European traditions, is purportedly undergoing a global turn, we will consider how some of film and media theory's key terms and preoccupations including realism, documentary, genre, identity, sound, spectatorship, nation, auteur, and screens are being inflected by expanded geographic, linguistic, aesthetic and cultural frames. We will grapple with some of the logistical challenges, motivations, resistances, and questions that scholars encounter as they attempt to shift film and media theory's borders; compare contemporary efforts to broaden the discourse's geographic horizon with earlier efforts to do the same; and consider what happens to the viewer's sense of space and place in different media environments. Course requirements: full participation in readings, screenings, discussion, and class presentations; 20-25 page research paper + annotated bibliography.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5932, ENGL 5932, GSWS 5932
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5933 Cinema and Media Studies Methods
This proseminar will introduce a range of methodological approaches (and some debates about them) informing the somewhat sprawling interdisciplinary field of Cinema and Media Studies. It aims to equip students with a diverse—though not comprehensive—toolbox with which to begin conducting research in this field; an historical framework for understanding current methods in context; and a space for reflecting on both how to develop rigorous methodologies for emerging questions and how methods interact with disciplines, ideologies, and theories. Students in this class will also engage scholars participating in the Cinema and Media Studies colloquium series in practical discussions about their methodological choices. The course’s assignments will provide students with opportunities to explore a particular methodology in some depth through a variety of lenses that might include pedagogy, the conference presentation, grant applications, the written essay, or an essay in an alternative format, such as the graphic or video essay. Throughout, we will be trying to develop practical skills for the academic profession. Although our readings engage a variety of cinema and media objects, this course will be textually based. No prior experience needed. The course is open to upper-level undergraduates with relevant coursework in the field by permission of instructor only. Course Requirements: Complete assigned readings and actively participate in class discussion: 20%; Reading responses: 10%; Annotated bibliography or course syllabus on a particular methodology: 20%; SCMS methodology-focused conference paper proposal according to SCMS format: 10%; Research paper, grant proposal, or essay in an alternative format using the methodology explored in the syllabus or bibliography: 40%.
Fall
Also Offered As: CIMS 5933, COML 5940, ENGL 5933, GSWS 5933
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5940 Media, Platform, Experience
This graduate seminar explores processes and sites of production, distribution, and consumption of audio-visual contents in the contemporary media environment with a focus on both platform logics and user interaction experiences. While “new” media, such as social media, cellphone apps, streaming platforms, video games, and drones increasingly dominate everyday life, “old” media including film, television, and books do not disappear but continue to be consumed and transformed in a new media ecology. Crossing the old/new divide, this course seeks to delineate a fuller picture of the choices, constraints, and experiences available for contemporary media users situated in both the Global North and South. We will attend to both the infrastructures and platforms shaping the circulatory dynamics of the current global media landscape as well as the phenomenological dimensions of media consumption by combining broad discussions of interface, algorithms, temporality, screen, and post-cinema, etc., with case studies that examine specific platforms (e.g. Netflix, Bilibili) and media forms (e.g. GIFs, reaction videos, etc.).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5940, ENGL 5991
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5960 Contemporary Art Seminar
This course focuses on contemporary art. Open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FNAR 6050
1 Course Unit
ARTH 5970 The Future of Arts Audiences
Demographic, political, social and generational changes in the U.S. have given rise to new and often unprecedented changes in the expectations audiences have for the role cultural organizations should play in society. Extending beyond traditional definitions of purpose rooted in the type of art or experience offered, cultural organizations are increasingly being held accountable to new or different standards of behavior, beliefs and engagement with the world in order to gain the support of the very audiences necessary for their survival. Adding to this complex combination of factors are the ongoing effects of recent health and social justice crises, including changes in technological usage and shifting patterns of social interaction. Using the latest audience research, and highlighted with first-person accounts from cultural leaders who will be guest speakers for this course, The Future of Arts Audiences will pose a series of challenging yet essential questions necessary for navigating the road ahead for arts participation.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6120 Cities and Temples in Ancient India
The wooden architecture of ancient India's cities is represented in relief carvings from Buddhist religious monuments of the early centuries A.D. and replicated in remarkable excavated cave cathedrals. This lecture course will trace that architectural tradition, its transformation into a symbolic vocabulary for a new structure, the Hindu temple, and the development of the temple in India from ca. 500-1500 A.D.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 6120
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6130 Arts of Japan
This lecture course introduces the major artistic traditions of Japan, from the Neolithic period to the present, and teaches the fundamental methods of the discipline of art history. Special attention will be given to the places of Shinto, the impact of Buddhism, and their related architectures and sculptures; the principles of narrative illustration; the changing roles of aristocratic, monastic, shogunal and merchant patronage; the formation of the concept of the artist over time; and the transformation of tradition in the modern age.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 5140
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6180 Art and Architecture in Ancient Egypt
This course will be an introduction to the art, architecture and minor arts that were produced during the three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history. This material will be presented in its cultural and historical contexts through illustrated lectures and will include visits to the collection of the University Museum.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6180, MELC 6105
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6220 Art of Ancient Iran
This lecture course offers a survey of ancient Iranian art and culture from the painted pottery cultures of the Neolithic era to the monuments of the Persian Empire.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6220, MELC 6050, NELC 6050
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6221 The Early Bronze Age
This lecture course offers a survey of ancient Iranian art and culture from the painted pottery cultures of the Neolithic era to the monuments of the Persian Empire. Particular emphasis is placed on the Early Bronze Age.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6221
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6240 Art of Mesopotamia
Visual expression was first developed in Mesopotamia in the same environment as the invention of writing. This lecture class will introduce the arts of the major periods of Mesopotamian History ending with the "cinematic" effects achieved by the Assyrian artists on the walls of the royal palaces. The strong connection between verbal and visual expression will be traced over the three millennia course of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest periods through the imperial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians of the first millennium BCE. The class and the assignments will regularly engage with objects in the collections and on display in the galleries of the Penn Museum.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6240, MELC 6060, NELC 6060
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2240
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6250 Greek Art and Artifact
This lecture course surveys Greek art and artifacts from Sicily to the Black Sea from the 10th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE, including the age of Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms. Public sculpture and painting on and around grand buildings and gardens, domestic luxury arts of jewelry, cups and vases, mosaic floors, and cult artefacts are discussed. Also considered are the ways in which heroic epic, religious and political themes are used to engaged viewers' emotions and served both domestic and the public aims. We discuss the relationships of images and things to space and structure, along with ideas of invention and progress, and the role of monuments, makers and patrons in Greek society.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6250, CLST 5401
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6260 Hellenistic and Roman Art and Artifact
This lecture course surveys the political, religious and domestic arts, patronage and display in Rome's Mediterranean, from the 2nd c. BCE to Constantine's 4th-c. Christianized empire. Our subjects are images and decorated objects in their cultural, political and socio-economic contexts (painting, mosaic, sculpture, luxury and mass-produced arts in many media). We start with the Hellenistic cosmopolitan culture of the Greek kingdoms and their neighbors, and late Etruscan and Republican Italy; next we map Imperial Roman art as developed around the capital city Rome, as well as in the provinces of the vast empire.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6260, CLST 5402
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6269 Classical Myth and the Image
The peoples of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds shared a vast body of stories about human and not-human beings set in a legendary deep past or supernatural present - "Classical myth." Even their neighbor cultures took up those stories (or, sometimes, gave them). The stories as spoken, read, or performed turn up in surviving ancient literature. But from the very point when Greek myth began to be written down, those stories were told with images also. Many arts of the Mediterranean world explored myth at temples and sanctuaries, in civic spaces, theaters, parks, houses and palaces, for tombs and trophies - and even on the body upon weapons, clothes and jewelry. Love and desire and hate, hope and fear and consolation, war and peace, pleasure and excitement, power and salvation, the nature of this world and the cosmos, justice and duty and heroism, fate and free will, suffering and crime: mythological images probed the many domains of being human in order to move the emotions and minds of people (and of gods). Our class samples this story art to ask about its makers and viewers and contexts. What, also, were relations between images and texts and language? What about religious belief vs invention, truth vs fiction? What might it mean to look at this ancient art today, and to represent the old stories in post-ancient cultures? The class introduces ways of thinking about what images and things do; we will read in some relevant literature (drama, epic, novels, etc); and our Penn Museum will be a resource. No prerequisites--no prior knowledge of art history, archaeology, myth or Mediterranean antiquity is assumed.
Also Offered As: AAMW 6269, CLST 5416
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2269, CLST 3416
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6280 Greek Architecture and Urbanism
As the locus of classical architecture and urbanism, the Greek world occupies
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6280
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6290 Roman Architecture and Urbanism
Architecture is the most striking legacy of Rome and the well-preserved
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6290
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6320 Byzantine Art and Architecture
This lecture course offers a wide-ranging introduction to the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium—a Christian, predominantly Greek-speaking civilization that flourished in the Eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years. Positioned between the Muslim East and the Latin West, Antiquity and the Early Modern era, Byzantium nurtured a vibrant and highly sophisticated artistic culture. With emphasis placed upon paradigmatic objects and monuments, we will examine an array of artistic media, from mosaic and panel painting to metalwork, ivory carving, book illumination, and embroidery. We will consider the making, consumption, and reception of Byzantine art in a variety of contexts—political, devotional, ritual, and domestic. Topics include the idea of empire and its visual articulation; court culture; the veneration of images and relics; patronage, piety, and self-representation; authorship and artistic agency; materiality and the sensory experience of art; the reception of the “pagan” Greco-Roman past; and the changing nature of Byzantium’s interactions with neighboring cultures.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AAMW 6320
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6330 Eastern Medieval Art and Architecture
This lecture course examines art and architecture in the Mediterranean, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the Christian Near East between the seventh and the fifteenth century. The focus is upon the Byzantine Empire and neighboring polities, including Bulgaria, Serbia, early Russia, Armenia, Georgia, and the Crusader states. The course introduces students to this immensely rich and multifaceted world through an exploration of key artworks and monuments, addressing in particular issues related to cross-cultural exchange, conflict, and appropriation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6330
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6350 Introduction to Visual Culture of the Islamic World
A one-semester survey of Islamic art and architecture which examines visual culture as it functions within the larger sphere of Islamic culture in general. Particular attention will be given to relationships between visual culture and literature, using specific case studies, sites or objects which may be related to various branches of Islamic literature, including historical, didactic, philosophical writings, poetry and religious texts. All primary sources are available in English translation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6350
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6400 Medieval Art
An introductory survey, this lecture course investigates architecture, painting, sculpture, and the "minor arts" of the Middle Ages. Students become familiar with selected major monuments of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, primarily in Western Europe as well as relevant sites around the Mediterranean. Analysis of works emphasizes the cultural context, the thematic content, and the function of objects and monuments. Discussions focus especially on several key themes: the role of luxury in the medieval west; the theological role of images; the revival of classical models and visual modes; social rituals such as pilgrimage and crusading; the cult of the Virgin and the status of women in art; and, more generally, the ideology of visual culture across the political and urban landscapes.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6400
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2400
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6425 Late Antique Arts
What is 'Late Antiquity'? In 312 when Roman emperor Constantine inaugurated a Christian empire, 'Roman' culture was centuries old. The period ca. 200-650 CE saw profound transformations that launched Medieval, Byzantine and Islamic traditions. In this epoch of upheaval destruction was frequent but partial: Rome long survived, Constantine's 'new Rome,' Constantinople flourished, and around the Empire both proto-global visual culture and local forms prospered. Roman cultural models authorized both innovation and passion for tradition: we critique art-historical models for Late Antique 'decline', analyse habits of material reuse and curation, and look at new Christian and Jewish roles for Roman things as well as polytheist visual survival. Foreign allies and enemies interacted with Greco-Roman Late Antiquity; we visit them too, as in the early Islamic palaces. Media discussed include not just 'monumental' painting, mosaic, sculpture, but also silver, ceramic, ivory, figural textile, glass, painted books, jewelry, coins and more. We look too at Late Antique texts on art, objects, space and viewership. This is an advanced undergraduate lecture course.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6425, CLST 5406
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6426 Narrative in Ancient Art
Cultures of the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean world were fascinated to make images and things tell stories and engage with time. Sometimes that implied a text - and sometimes, not. With case studies from the deep past, this interdisciplinary advanced undergraduate lecture course explores the capacity of visual language to narrate.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6426, CLST 7408
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6427 Roman Sculpture
Survey of the Republican origins and Imperial development of Roman sculpture - free-standing, relief, and architectural - from ca. 150 BC to 350 AD. We concentrate on sculpture in the capital city and on court and state arts, emphasizing commemorative public sculpture and Roman habits of decorative display; genres examined include relief, portraits, sarcophagi, luxury and minor arts(gems, metalwork, coinage). We evaluate the choice and evolution of styles with reference to the functions of sculptural representation in Roman culture and society.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6427, CLST 5405
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6428 Hellenistic Art and Spectacle
Hellenistic usually names art in the age of Mediterranean culture from the 4th century BCE and the rise of Alexander the Great's Macedon, and the Greco-Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire, to Cleopatra of Egypt's defeat by Rome at the end of the Republic. Our course looks also at the age of Augustus and his successors, 1st century CE. While Greek and Macedonian practice in city-states and kingdoms is our launching point, this course also looks at international culture and cultural interaction among peoples from North Africa and Etrusco-Roman Italy, Egypt, Anatolia, the Mideast and Central Asia. We probe art, artifacts, and visual display from a range of settings, from sanctuary to house, palace and parade, and in all media, from marble monuments to pottery and jewelry. Our archaeology of Hellenistic visual culture also looks at the rich body of Hellenistic and Roman texts of art history, art criticism, and the description of objects and image, to better understand the Hellenistic maker, patron, and viewer. No prerequisites.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 6428, CLST 5413
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6435 Islamic Art and Architecture
This advanced undergraduate lecture introduces the major architectural monuments and trends, as well as to the best-known objects of the Islamic world. Istanbul, Samarkand, Isfahan, Cairo and Delhi as major centers of art production in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Attention is paid to such themes as the continuity of late antique themes; architecture as symbol of community and power; the importance of textiles; primacy of writing; urban and architectural achievement; and key monuments of painting and metalwork.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6500 Michelangelo and the Art of the Italian Renaissance
An introduction to the work of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475-1564)-his sculptures, paintings, architecture, poetry, and artistic theory-in relation to his patrons, predecessors, and contemporaries, above all Leonardo and Raphael. Topics include artistic creativity and license, religious devotion, the revival of antiquity, observation of nature, art as problem-solving, the public reception and function of artworks, debates about style, artistic rivalry, and traveling artists. Rather than taking the form of a survey, this course selects works as paradigmatic case studies, and will analyze contemporary attitudes toward art of this period through study of primary sources.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ITAL 6500
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2500, ITAL 2550
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6540 Titian and Venetian Painting
This lecture course examines the art and architecture of the Venetian Republic, with emphasis on the work of the renowned painter, Titian.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ITAL 6540
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6541 Caravaggio
This lecture course explores the artistic culture of Baroque Rome, with focus on the life and career of Caravaggio.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ITAL 6541
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6542 Brazilian Baroque
This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6542
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6580 Early Modern Japanese Art and the City of Edo
Study of the major art forms and architecture of Tokugawa (or Edo) period (1603-1868). In this lecture course, we will consider how the arts of this era occur within an increasingly urban and modern culture, particularly with regard to the city of Edo. Issues of the articulation of authority in the built environment, the reinvention of classical styles, and patronage will be raised. May include some visits to PMA, Penn Museum, or other local collections.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 5141
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6610 Northern Renaissance Art
This course critically examines concepts traditionally associated with the Renaissance by focusing on the exchange of artistic ideas throughout the Holy Roman Empire and across different media, such as the altarpieces of Jan van Eyck, the expressive drawings of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, the peasant studies of Pieter Bruegel and the prints of satirists who wished to remain anonymous. The material is organized thematically around four topics: religious art as piety and politics; antiquity as a source of tradition and imagination; the formulation of a public discourse that exposed social threats; and the distinctiveness of artistic claims of individual achievement. A motif throughout the course is the question of how the survival of fragments may be presented in museum contexts as parts standing in for an absent whole. We will also consider how historians approach designs for works of art now lost or never completed. Encouraging encounters with art and artifacts around the city, assignments focus on objects in Philadelphia collections.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GRMN 5780
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2610, GRMN 1301
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6620 Early Netherlandish Painting: Angels, Demons, Nudes
Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, painting in the Netherlands experienced dramatic technological advancements: the application of oil on panel allowed for an unprecedented richness of color; experiments with optics led to improved illusions of space; artists rendered light and reflections as never before. Did these advancements in depicting the natural world conflict with or enhance the portrayal of spiritual visions? Did realism pave the way for secular art? In this course, we will look critically at the relationship of science and art, tradition and innovation, the imagined and the experienced. The delicate preciousness of Jan van Eyck, the strange spaces of Petrus Christus, the bizarre hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch, and the peasant festivals of Peter Bruegel will guide us through these themes.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6621 Prints and Politics: From the Early Modern Era to Now
This course offers a history of how mechanically reproducible images reshaped the social world. Beginning in the fifteenth century in Europe, these media connected new audiences across geographies by providing access to the same visual information. Prints launched propagandistic missions, fomented rebellion against authorities, and built networks of progressive thinkers who could envision alternative futures. Prints played a key role in developing what constituted news. Mass-distributed images delivered the mistreatment of the “Indians” by the Spanish and portrayed the packing of Africans on a slave ship. Goya’s etchings protested the repression of the Second of May uprising. The silkscreens of Andy Warhol repeated the image of police dogs attacking civil rights activists in Birmingham. Covering a five-hundred-year history, this course will focus on how printed images created communities and acted as exclusionary devices. We will train our eyes on examples from local collections and pay particular attention to Philadelphia activist groups and their places in these histories.
Also Offered As: GSWS 6621
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2621
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6670 Latin American Art
The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 6670
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2670
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6680 Art and Empire in India, 1750-1900
This course surveys transformations in visual culture between the Mughal and British empires in India from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. We shall consider changes in artistic production, patronage, publics, and viewing protocols in the contexts of the court and bazaar. We shall examine the emergence of new technologies and its impact on visual forms, media, and genres, focusing on the interplay of photography, print, and painting. We shall explore the role of institutions -the art school, the museum, and the archeological survey- and the professions and practices they engendered. We shall analyze how architecture and urban planning created new built environments and social relationships in colonial India. We shall view objects first-hand in the Penn Museum, Penn Libraries, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course. Students with a background in related disciplines such as literature, history, religion, anthropology, and South Asian Studies are welcome.
Also Offered As: SAST 6680
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2680, SAST 2680
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6699 Wolf Humanties Lecture
The Wolf Humanities Center is Penn’s interdisciplinary humanities research center based in the School of Arts & Sciences. Each year the Wolf Humanities Center hosts postdoctoral scholars as they conduct research and teach one course on the center’s annual theme.
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2699
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6700 The Modern City
A study of the European and American city in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Emphasis is placed on the history of architecture and urban design; political, sociological, and economic factors also receive attention. The class considers the development of London, St. Petersburg, Washington, Boston, Paris, Vienna and Philadelphia.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6710 Modern Architecture, 1700-1900
The history of western architecture, ca. 1700-1900, when architecture was transformed to serve a world that had been reshaped by political and industrial revolutions. Topics to be considered include the Rococo, the English Garden, Palladianism, Romanticism, neo-classicism, the picturesque, the Greek and Gothic Revivals, and the search for a new style.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6730 History of Photography
A history of world photography from 1839 to the present and its relation to cultural contexts as well as to various theories of the functions of images. Topics discussed in considering the nineteenth century will be the relationship between photography and painting, the effect of photography on portraiture, photography in the service of exploration, and photography as practiced by anthropologists; and in considering the twentieth century, photography and abstraction, photography as "fine art", photography and the critique of art history, and photography and censorship.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6740 Facing America
This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6740
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2740
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6750 Revolution to Realism: European Art, 1770-1870
This course surveys the major trends in the arts of Europe and its colonies in the tumultuous decades stretching from the French and Haitian revolutions in the late-eighteenth century to the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth. Starting with Jacques-Louis David's revolutionary history paintings, we study Napoleonic representations of empire, Goya's imagery of violence, romantic representations of madness and desire, the origins of both nationalist and ecocritical landscape painting, the aesthetics of the industrial revolution, as well as the politicized realism of Gustave Courbet. Some of the themes that will be addressed include: the revolutionary hero, the birth of the public museum, the specters of slavery and colonialism in modern representation, the anxious masculinity of romanticism, the rise of industry and bourgeois culture, the beginnings of photography and caricature, the quest for national identity and, not least, the origins of modernist painting. Throughout, we will strive to recover the original radicalism of art's formal and conceptual innovations at times of profound political and social crisis.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2750
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6760 Impressionism
Impressionism opened the pictorial field to light, perception, science, modernity, bourgeoise leisure and famously the material qualities of paint itself. This course will survey the movement's major contexts and proponents--Manet, Monet, Morisot, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rodin--from its origins in the 1860's to its demise in the 1890's, as well as its subsequent adaptions throughout the world until World War I. Particular attention is paid to the artists' critical reception and the historical conditions which allowed one nation, France, to claim the emergence of early Modernism so firmly for itself. The course also analyzes the effects of the rapidly changing social and cultural fabric of Paris, and its affects on artistic developments. We also look outside of France's borders to Germany and Britain.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6770 The Rise of Modernity: Arts of the 19th Century
The nineteenth century is often considered as fast-paced, politically volatile and new-media obsessed as our own age. This course explores the nineteenth century's claim to have produced the first truly modern culture, focusing on the visual arts and metropolitan spaces of Europe and North America in their intellectual and social contexts. Stretching from the American and French Revolutions to the eve of World War I, topics to be covered include: the rise of capitalist and industrialist culture, art and revolutionary upheaval, global travel and empire, the origins of modernist art and architecture, and new media such as stereoscopes, iron and glass construction, and photography. Major artistic personalities of the age, from Jacques-Louis David and Gustave Courbet to Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh, and from Friedrich Schinkel and, Baron Haussmann to Frank Furness and Frank Lloyd Wright, are discussed. Each lecture will be followed by a brief period of discussion, and regular field trips take students to examine art and architecture first hand, in the museums and on the streets of Philadelphia.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6780 American Art
This lecture course surveys the most important and interesting art produced in the United States (or by American artists living abroad) up through the 1950s. This period encompasses the history of both early and modern art in the U.S., from its first appearances to its rise to prominence and institutionalization. While tracking this history, the course examines art's relation to historical processes of modernization (industrialization, the development of transportation and communications, the spread of corporate organization in business, urbanization, technological development, the rise of mass media and mass markets, etc.) and to the economic polarization, social fragmentation, political conflict, and the cultural changes these developments entailed. In these circumstances, art is drawn simultaneously toward truth and fraud, realism and artifice, science and spirituality, commodification and ephemerality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, individualism and collectivity, the past and the future, professionalization and popularity, celebrating modern life and criticizing it.
Fall or Spring
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2780
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6781 African American Art
This course surveys the most important and interesting art produced in the United States (or by American artists living abroad) up through the 1950s. This period encompasses the history of both early and modern art in the U.S., from its first appearances to its rise to prominence and institutionalization. While tracking this history, the course examines art's relation to historical processes of modernization (industrialization, the development of transportation and communications, the spread of corporate organization in business, urbanization, technological development, the rise of mass media and mass markets, etc.) and to the economic polarization, social fragmentation, political conflict, and the cultural changes these developments entailed. In these circumstances, art is drawn simultaneously toward truth and fraud, realism and artifice, science and spirituality, commodification and ephemerality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, individualism and collectivity, the past and the future, professionalization and popularity, celebrating modern life and criticizing it.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 6781
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6810 Modern Architecture,1900-Present
The architecture of Europe and America from the late nineteenth century until the present is the central subject of this course, but some time is also devoted to Latin American and Asian architecture and to the important issues of modern city planning. Topics discussed include the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Art Deco, the International Style, and Post-modernism. The debate over the role of technology in modern life and art, the search for a universal language of architectural communication, and the insistent demand that architecture serve human society are themes that are traced throughout the course. Among the important figures to be considered are Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. The course includes weekly discussion sessions and several excursions to view architecture in Philadelphia.
Fall or Spring
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2810
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6850 Modern Art in Africa and Europe
The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the self and how to represent it developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the visual practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the birth of photography, colonial masquerade, impressionism, symbols of power in royal arts, cubism, mass marketing and colonial self-fashioning, West African studio photography, world's fairs and the Musee de l'Homme, Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, anti-aesthetics, colonial arts education, National art schools in the age of African independence, humanism and South African photography under Apartheid.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6850
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6860 Modern Art: Picasso to Pollock
Early twentieth-century art in Europe is marked by a number of exciting transformations. This period witnessed the rise of abstraction in painting and sculpture, as well as the inventions of collage, photomontage, constructed sculpture, the ready made and found object, and performance art. Encounters with the arts of Africa, Oceania and other traditions unfamiliar in the West spurred innovations in media, technique, and subject matter. Artists began to respond to the challenge of photography, to organize themselves into movements, and in some cases, to challenge the norms of art through "anti-art." A new gallery system replaced traditional forms of exhibiting and selling art, and artists took on new roles as publicists, manifesto writers, and exhibition organizers. This course examines these developments, with attention to formal innovations as well as cultural and political contexts. This course requires permission from the instructor.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6870 Postwar Art
At a time of seismic shifts in the American polity, postwar art has too often seemed above the fray. Even as New York came to replace Paris as the epicenter of art world in the post war period, the rapid succession of styles and movements from Abstract Expressionism to Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Happenings can seem to have their own internal logic, severed from the historical backdrop of the time. Some of the artists we'll consider include Pollock, Krasner, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Kusama, Martin, Lichtenstein, Bearden, Oldenburg, LeWitt, Chicago and Judd. In this course, we'll reexamine American art and art criticism in the postwar period alive to everything from the Cold War's virulent anti-communism to the rise of progressive liberation movements around race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. In the process, we will repeatedly underscore how art both served, and bit, the hand that fed it.
Also Offered As: GSWS 6870
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6872 Sex in the Museum
This course maps the often fraught intercourse between the history of sexuality and the history of museums, exhibitions, and curation. Bodies have long been the mainstay of art, but the attribution of sex to those bodies is a highly variable social phenomenon that tells us as much about the culture in question as it does about ourselves. Sex is thus in the eye of the beholder, defined by cultural, religious, scientific, and political norms, themselves often defined in and through a politics of visibility and exhibition. Beginning in the ancient world and moving into the present, this course studies the sexual politics of display, inherent but little studied, in the history of art history. From Renaissance battles over fig leaves to Enlightenment Europe’s titillation at what they saw as the unbridled eroticism of the ancient world to the culture wars of today, sex has long been a hidden motor of shifts in the art world. Whether coming to understand the so-called “Free Body Culture” of turn of the 20th century Europe with its very public nudity, to the explosion in nude performance in the 1960s to the culture wars of the 1980s in the USA over an art that addressed queerness, AIDS, and their intersection, we’ll see how often exhibitions have served as proxy for other social and political issues. In this course we’ll also come to understand the distinction between the nude, a category in art, and the naked, a category that was often said to corrupt art. Reading the latest work in queer, feminist and anti-racist scholarship, we will see how easily bodies on display can turn into sex, and conversely, slip as easily back from sex into bodies again.
Also Offered As: GSWS 6872
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2872
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6900 Post War Japanese Cinema
Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, and Kurosawa Akira are recognized today as three of the most important and influential directors in Japanese cinema. In their films of the late 1940s and 1950s, these directors focused upon issues surrounding the human condition and the perception of truth, history, beauty, death, and other issues of the postwar period. This lecture course places their films in period context, and pays particular attention to the connections to other visual media, and to how "art" and "history" are being defined in the cinematic context. How other directors also took up these issues, and referred to the "big three" is also be discussed.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 5340
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6910 East Asian Cinema
This survey course introduces students to major trends, genres, directors, and issues in the cinemas of East Asian countries/regions, including Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Charting key developments over more than a hundred years from the early twentieth century to the present, this course examines films as aesthetic objects, asking questions about film form, narrative, and style. It also pays attention to the evolution of cinema as an institution (e.g. modes of production, circulation, and exhibition) in different cultural and political contexts. Weekly course materials will include both films (primary sources) and analytical readings (secondary sources). By the end of the course, students are expected to gain broad knowledge of East Asian cinema, develop skills of film analysis, and apply these skills to perform historically informed and culturally sensitive analysis of cinema. Prior knowledge of East Asian languages is NOT required.
Also Offered As: EALC 5116
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2910, CIMS 2910, EALC 1116
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6931 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present
What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper.
Mutually Exclusive: AFRC 3932, ARTH 3931, CIMS 3931, ENGL 2970, GSWS 3931
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6940 Art Now
One of the most striking features of today's art world is the conspicuous place occupied in it by the photographic image. Large-scale color photographs and time-based installations in projections are everywhere. Looking back, we can see that much of the art making of the past 60 years has also been defined by this medium, regardless of the form it takes. Photographic images have inspired countless paintings, appeared in combines and installations, morphed into sculptures, drawings and performances, and served both as the object and the vehicle of institutional critique. They are also an increasinglyimportant exhibition site: where most of us go to see earthworks, happenings and body-art. This course is a three-part exploration of our photographic present.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6950 Global Film Theory
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2950, CIMS 2950, COML 2950, GSWS 2950
1 Course Unit
ARTH 6960 Contemporary Art
Many people experience the art of our time as bewildering, shocking, too ordinary (my kid could do that), too intellectual (elitist), or simply not as art. Yet what makes this art engaging is that it raises the question of what art is or can be, employs a range of new materials and technologies, and addresses previously excluded audiences. It invades non-art spaces, blurs the boundaries between text and image, document and performance, asks questions about institutional frames (the museum, gallery, and art journal), and generates new forms of criticism. Much of the "canon" of what counts as important is still in flux, especially for the last twenty years. And the stage is no longer centered only on the United States and Europe, but is becoming increasingly global. The course will introduce students to the major movements and artists since 1980, with emphasis on social and historical context, critical debates, new media, and the changing role of the spectator/participant.
Not Offered Every Year
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2960
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7010 Methods Seminar
This course is designed to build skills of analysis and argumentation essential to the conduct of creative and responsible work in History of Art. Its goals include presenting the history of the field in a manner attentive to the complexities of its institutional and professional formations, purposes, and effects; encouraging appreciation of historiography, specifically the time, place, and political and social circumstances in which a given text was composed; promoting awareness of the ethics of scholarship (inclusive and expansive in every sense); familiarizing students with the strengths and weaknesses of distinct methodological traditions that have shaped the field; considering the audiences served by art historical scholarship (the academy, the museum, local and global publics) and the forms scholarship might take to effectively reach those audiences. The course is required for first-year graduate students in History of Art and open to others with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7110 Indian Art Seminar
This course focuses on art in India. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 7110
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7140 East Asian Art Seminar
Graduate seminar in East Asian art. Topics vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 8100
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7141 Twentieth-Century Art in East Asia: Modernity and Confrontation
This seminar considers modern and contemporary art in China, Japan and Korea over the course of the twentieth century. What does it mean to make modern art and whom should it serve were essential questions in this century in East Asia. In this course the confrontations between modernity and tradition, state and self, the colonizer and the colonized, and collecting and the market are all issues under consideration. We begin with a study of the way “modern art” was defined at the turn of the century, its place in the nation state, the promotion of oil painting in Academic styles, and the call to preserve “national” styles. We also consider how the avant-garde pursuit of individuality constituted a confrontation over state-sponsored “modernism,” and how these confrontations played out in world’s fairs and expositions (and continue today). We will further engage how Japan’s imperialist actions against its neighbors had an impact on artistic development in territories it controlled, and the place of the work of art as propaganda in Japan’s war effort. Turning to the postwar era, we will study how China’s Communist Revolution, the Korean War, and the Occupation in Japan likewise established new paradigms for the production and reception of art, as well as more recent confrontations between art and politics in recent decades and the place of Chinese, Korean and Japanese art in the contemporary market.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 8102
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7150 Japanese Art Seminar
This seminar engages specific topics in Japanese art history from 1600 to the present, with the specific focus varying from year to year. Previous topics have included: the concept of the artist; gender and its representation; the visualization of place from the early modern to the present; collecting, the market, modernity, and the construction of the field; print cultures; among others. Sessions will be conducted on site, in museums, galleries, and libraries, as available. Assignments vary depending upon the focus of the seminar. Japanese language ability useful but not necessary; curiosity and engagement required.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 8140
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7200 Aegean Bronze Age Seminar
This graduate seminar will focus on the art and archaeology of the Aegean Bronze Age, circa 3,300-1,100 BCE. Topics vary from semester to semester and may include: issues of trade, manufacture, and iconography including the development of iconography and pictorial motifs, the nature of Minoan and Mycenaean society, the structure of Aegean Society, and how our interpretation of the Aegean Bronze Age has changed since the early work in the field in the late 1800s and 1900s by prominent scholars.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7200
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7220 Art of Ancient Iran Seminar
This graduate seminar will address various topics in the visual and architectural arts of ancient Iran from the Early Bronze through the Sasanians. Topics may include: Elamite Art and Architecture, Hasanlu and its neighbors, and The Bronze Age of Exchange. This course is only open to graduate students
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7220
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7230 Topics in the Art of the Ancient Near East
Topic varies. Fall 2019: During the short period of the Neo Sumerian Empire at the end of the third millennium BCE, Mesopotamian concepts of kingship were crystallized through images, buildings, and textual creations. This seminar will examine this central institution from many points of view that invite cross historical and cross-cultural consideration.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7230
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7240 Ancient Art of Mesopotamia Seminar
This graduate seminar will address various topics in the visual and architectural arts of ancient Mesopotamia. Topics include: Assyrian Reliefs, Art and Archteicture of the Old Akkadian period, Early Dynastic art and architecture, and The Rise of first cities in Mesopotamia and Iran. This course is only open to graduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7240, MELC 7060, NELC 7060
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7320 Medieval Art History and Theories of the Object
The recent turn to the object across the humanities and social sciences has brought to the fore concerns with the nature of material things, their operation in the world, and their entanglement with humans. This seminar will introduce you to some of the key theoretical writings on the object and material culture and will ask you to interrogate their relevance for the discipline of art history. Our focus will be on the Mediterranean and Western European Middle Ages, but depending on the specific interests of the seminar’s participants, we may venture into other historical periods and cultural domains. Topics to be addressed include the social life of things; agency; materiality; the relic; the gift; the miniature; and the question of the human/nonhuman divide. This course is only open to graduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7320
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7350 Islamic Art Seminar
This course focuses on art of the Islamic world. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7350, MELC 7560, NELC 7560
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7370 Islamic Architecture Seminar
This seminar will address the problems of studying architecture in the Islamic world. Considered will be issues of architectural design, regional and trans-regional constructional traditions, structural know-how and innovation, patronage and use. The examples discussed will be mainly religious and social service complexes. Attention will be paid to the manner of transmission of architectural design knowledge and constructional skill. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7370, MELC 7561, NELC 7561
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7380 Islamic Archaeology Seminar
This seminar will address the problems of studying architecture in the Islamic world. Considered will be issues of architectural design, regional and trans-regional constructional traditions, structural know-how and innovation, patronage and use. The examples discussed will be mainly religious and social service complexes. Attention will be paid to the manner of transmission of architectural design knowledge and constructional skill. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 6550, NELC 6550
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7400 Medieval Art Seminar
Alternating specific topic from year to year, this advanced graduate seminar surveys methodological issues concerning the art of the European Middle Ages, broadly conceived. Seminars take advantage of the rich resources of the Philadelphia area. This course is open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7400
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7401 Medieval Art Now Seminar
Where is the study of medieval art today? This advanced graduate seminar surveys the questions and issues relevant to the study of artistic production, both East and West, from 300 to 1500. New methodologies will be placed in their historiographic contexts, and students will read deeply into the problems with which medieval art historians are wrestling with today. The seminar will take advantage of excellent local collections to animate discussions, and focus research papers.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 7401
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7430 Illuminations: Manuscript / Medium / Message
This seminar will explore the cross-fertilization between manuscript illumination and other media such as wall-painting, panel painting, architecture, sculpture, and stained glass across the early modern world, 1300-1600. We will consider such topics as: intermediality, artistic transfer, miniature vs. monumental, workshop practice, patronage, and the nascent art market. Students will have the rare opportunity to see and handle manuscripts held in area collections such as the Kislak Center and the Free Library of Philadelphia. This course is open to all students who are interested in artistic practice, the historical dimensions of media, and the social function of art. This course is only open to graduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7600 Early Modern Art Seminar
This seminar takes a thematic approach to the study of European art produced between 1400-1800. Topics, which change annually, include such offerings as "Art and Law;" "Spectacle, Punishment, and Surveillance;" "Prints and Politics" and "The Subject of Nature." In a given year, we will approach a corpus of objects, images, and performances through a study of three kinds of text: primary sources, secondary art-historical scholarship, and critical theory. Discussions will convene around local museum and library collections. Assignments will develop skills in writing abstracts, preparing conference papers, and developing strong and publishable written work.
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7610 Nature and Labor in Early Modern Art Seminar
In the sixteenth century, the notion of nature as fecund spawned not only images of lushness but also analogies to the artist's mind as a fertile place. The idea of "natural law" was also appealed to as a presumably primal condition, one that established how the earth's resources were to be distributed among its people. Yet the taste for artistic objects in gold, silver, wax, and wood--materials that could be worked into shapes attesting to the owner's dominium over land--led to harvesting processes which met the awareness that nature's resources could run low or even run out. Untappable nature was a functional metaphor, but scarcity was a reality. As a collective effort to write the other side of the story of Renaissance abundance, this seminar will proceed by addressing the question of how the history of art might be told as a description of materials and their potential for the expenditure of natural and human resources. We will address this question by focusing on primary texts, theoretical interventions, and a selection of objects, images, and early books from collections near at hand. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: DTCH 6610, GRMN 6850
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7620 Baroque Art Seminar
This seminar critically examines a style that emerged between 1600 and 1800 and has often been associated with luxury and excess to investigate both the motivations behind the formal developments and the darker political histories that underpinned them. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7650 Northern Baroque Art Seminar
This seminar will consider major themes in Northern art of the 16th and 17th centuries, essentially from Bruegel to Vermeer. The premise is that the Reformation altered certainties in knowledge and even in perception, especially in the wake of wars, newly discovered lands, changing science and collecting of Wonders. Among new imagery topics would include: melancholy, vanitas, witchcraft, travel images, and the status of the emblem as well as allegory. Students will select a topic for semester-long investigation and co-present a class with the instructor. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: DTCH 6650
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7710 19th Century Architecture Seminar
This seminar will explore the exhilarating architectural environment of the period ca. 1750-1900, when a ferocious appetite for artistic invention was let loose in kitchen filled with new knowledge about the entire history of human architecture. Focusing on French, German, and English architecture, the seminar will examine major texts and study important monuments, all considered in their cultural and political contexts. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7750 19th Century Art in Europe Seminar
This graduate seminar covers aspects of the arts, visual and material cultures of the long nineteenth century (c. 1789-1914) in Europe in a global context.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7770 The Long Nineteenth Century: Literature, Philosophy, Culture
The present course will discuss German literature and thought from the period of the French Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century, and put it into a European context. In regard to German literature, this is the period that leads from the Storm and Stress and Romanticism to the political period of the Vormärz, Realism, and finally Expressionism; in philosophy, it moves from German Idealism to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and neo-Kantian thought. It is also the period that saw the rise of the novel, and new forms of dramatic works. Painting moved out of the studio into plein air; the invention of photography made an imprint on all arts, and the rise of the newspaper led to new literary genres such as the feuilleton. Economically, Germany experienced the industrial revolution; politically, it was striving for a unification that was finally achieved in 1871. The nineteenth century saw the establishment of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of the German working class, and the idea of the nation state; it also saw Jewish emancipation, and the call for women’s rights. Readings will focus on a variety of literary, political, and philosophical texts; and consider a selection of art works.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5660, GRMN 5580
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7810 20th and 21st Century Architecture Seminar
This course focuses on architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7860 20th Century Art in Europe Seminar
This graduate seminar covers aspects of the arts, visual and material cultures of the twentieth century (c. 1900-1989) in Europe in a global context. Open to graduate students only.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7880 20th Century American Art Seminar
This seminar examines the history of art, artists, and artistic movements that emerged in the United States during the twentieth century. It may also engage with histories of visual culture, criticism, and the theory of art. Specific topics vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7881 19th Century American Art Seminar
This seminar examines the history of art, artists, and artistic movements that emerged in the United States during the long nineteenth century. It may also engage with histories of visual culture, criticism, and the theory of art. Specific topics vary from semester to semester.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7910 African Film and Media Pedagogy
This graduate seminar offers an intensive, critical, and collaborative study of contemporary African film and media production. The past three decades have seen an unprecedented shift in the African media landscape. Not only has the wide availability of satellite media across the continent made international film and television programing part of African popular culture, but moreover the growing film industries within the continent, most notably Nollywood, have altered how Africans are carving an image of themselves on the big and small screens. In partnership with local, regional, and international film and media centers, we will study a range of films--features, shorts, documentaries, and television shows--paying close attention to the means and sites of production as well as the formal qualities that distinguish these works. Many of the films we will analyze stand out both for their exceptional aesthetic quality as well as their remarkable ability to confront pressing political and social themes. But we will also think about trash: what counts as trashy media, and for whom? Who watches it, where, and why? Other questions we will ask include: What particular indigenous modes of storytelling do African films employ? What categories begin to emerge under the umbrella category of "African film and media," and where do diasporan film and media practitioners and critics fit in this landscape? How are these films tackling some of the urgent questions of our times, including migration and globalization; ethnic, political, and economic polarization; gender and sexuality; and massive urbanization and industrialization sweeping Africa and other parts of the Global South? What role do festivals in various countries play in shaping media production and distribution? How important is the concept of authorship in this context? And how do these films challenge the dominant western trope of Africa as a spectacle, instead offering novel ways of picturing everyday African experiences that we rarely glimpse in western media? To explore these questions, we will visit multiple sites of film production, distribution, exhibition, and education, including Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, Sankofa Films in Washington, D.C., and the College of Performing and Visual Art at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Location and knowledge production are inextricably connected, and by considering African media production from these multiple sites, and collaborating with multiple stakeholders, this course offers a directly engaged pedagogy of the complex artistic, cultural, social, and political dynamics of African audiovisual creation. The travel component of this course entails a day trip to Washington, D.C. during the semester (tentative date: April 2, 2020) and a week-long trip to Addis Ababa at the end of the spring term (students applying for this course should be prepared to travel to Addis Ababa May 30, 2020-June 7, 2020). All expenses for travel, accommodation, and food will be covered, but students will need to hold a passport. Ultimately, this course aims to use film and media production to intervene in a larger discourse on how Africa is figured in the global humanities, not as an absent or passive actor but one actively engaged in producing art and humanistic knowledge that has much to teach us and the world. Admission to the course will be by permission only and students are required to submit a short statement of interest (max. 250 words) to dagw@english.upenn.edu and redkaren@sas.upenn.edu. Students must be prepared to travel to Addis Ababa and Washington D.C. as described in the syllabus, and must hold a passport.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 7910
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7911 East Asian Screen/Bodies
How have screen media interacted with bodies in East Asia? This graduate seminar hopes to use the “/” symbol to bring to light different ways screens have recorded, archived, addressed, and transformed both human and non-human bodies in East Asia. A central narrative thread of the course is the archeology of screen-based media. We will connect the contemporary proliferations of screens of various sizes, shapes, and properties to the television screen, the collective screen of cinema, and the traditional furniture screen. Course readings will be interdisciplinary, bringing into dialogues inquiries and methodologies found in art history, cinema and media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and performance studies. Another focus of the course is reflecting on and developing strategies for grounding broad, theoretical frameworks in the specific geopolitical space of East Asia. Any given screen situation will be examined in relation to both the nation state and transnational forces, as the intersection between the technological, the material, the cultural, and the historical.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 7911, EALC 7301
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7920 Reading Against Racism
This course takes as its starting point Audre Lorde’s 1981 Keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." Lorde, critiquing white feminists, states, "I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness." Eschewing defensiveness, ignorance, and innocence, and opening to meaningful change by engaging the writings of anti-racist and anti-imperialist thinkers, including those focused on the transformation of higher education, this course examines the responsibilities scholars take on when we affirm that "Black Lives Matter," and acknowledges that higher education, including the humanities, is actively implicated in the structures and operations of white privilige Eschewing defensiveness, ignorance, and innocence, and opening to meaningful change by engaging the writings of anti-racist and anti-imperialist thinkers, including those focused on the transformation of higher education, this course examines the responsibilities scholars take on when we affirm that "Black Lives Matter," and acknowledges that higher education, including the humanities, is actively implicated in the structures and operations of white privilege and anti-black racism as well as in other intersectional modes of exclusion, including all forms of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national original, ability, class, sexuality, gender, and beliefs. The course aims to approach these urgent but longstanding issues in ways that help us to understand some of the complexities, practicalities, and temporalities of the work of change; to grapple with what Rosalyn Deutsche in Hiroshima After Iraq (2011) describes as "the inseparability of the social and the psychic"; and to seek out effective alternatives to the tendency of politicized academic writing in time of conflict to regress to what Deutsche calls "heroic masculinism." "Reading Against Racism" is imagined as a way of catalyzing active, collective, and long-term anti-racist, anti-imperialist intellectual work. It seeks to participate in the development of more just and inclusive academic modes and spaces by fostering time and structure for thought and self-reflection, by generating ideas for implementation, and by learning from our readings as well as from each other. All students, white and BIPOC, are welcome to participate, but we will begin this course by working together to establish a community agreement that takes account of the different ways in which such a course is likely to be experienced by white and BIPOC people. For example, recognizing that discussions about race and racism require immense emotional labor from BIPOC people in particular, BIPOC students should not be asked to use their personal experiences to frame questions under discussion or to represent any group. We will establish together other guidelines to create as safe and supportive a space (or spaces) for reading, thinking, and acting against racism as we can muster, including deciding how we would like to include in our process tools like trigger warnings, opt-out mechanisms, smaller subgroups, etc. Requirements: Weekly reading; weekly journal for self-reflection (required, but not for submission); participation in discussion; design a syllabus for an introductory course in your field. Thanks to all the students who have generously participated in developing this course and to the scholars who have written the materials we will read.
Also Offered As: CIMS 7920
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7940 Contemporary Art Seminar
Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2021 semester, the topic will be: Portraiture Now. This graduate seminar examines approaches to portraiture by contemporary artists in the United States and beyond, with a focus on artists of color. We will consider painting, sculpture, photography, prints, drawings, time based media, and conceptual portraiture.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ARTH 7941 Contemporary Art and Theory Seminar
This seminar focuses on special topics in the history and theorization of art and visual culture made (mostly) after the 1960s in, and about, a range of places around the world. Topics might include but are not limited to “The Aesthetics of Solidarity”; “What is Contemporary Form?”; “Decolonization and Decoloniality in History and Practice;” “Temporality and Timeliness in Recent Art”; “What is a Photograph?“; and, “Writing Art Writing Now.” When they are not focused on problematics or theoretical frames of this sort, courses might also be dedicated to the study of individual artists, movements, exhibitions, or territories. When possible, classes will align with local/regional art exhibitions, and it is also possible we may travel to conduct on-site research as the situation allows. Open to all graduate students.
1 Course Unit