LARTS 298 Art History: Europe, 1750 - 1939
Art in History will study the major developments in Western Art from 1750 until 1939. Students will analyze individual art works, considering the place of these works within the context of western culture, studying art not only as aesthetic expression, but as political ideology, as social manifestation and as economic commerce. We will examine the structure of the art world, how artists addressed the political and economic difficulties of expressing their ideas within that world, and the unique challenges faced by women within a powerfully patriarchal model of aesthetics. Art in History will focus not only on major individual works, but on their relationship to the larger world as audience and market; so, for example, we will consider the political goals of Jacques Louis David; the market economics of the first Impressionist Exhibition of 1874; and the épater la bourgeoisie strategies of the Futurists and Dadists of the early 20th century. At the same time, we will explore the reactions of the larger societies to those challenges, most notably expressed in the proscribing of such artists as Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Eugen Delacroix, and Edouard Manet, the scandal of the salon des réfusés of 1863, and the Nazi ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition of 1937.