AHIS BC 1001x Introduction to Art History I

Attempting to offer an introduction to artistic creation on a global scale, this course is team-taught by specialists in a number of different cultural and historical traditions. In the fall semester we will discuss the art of Europe, the Middle East, India, Japan, and China, in periods ranging from the Paleolithic to the Renaissance. Museum trips are an integral part of the course. Note: weekly discussion groups to be arranged.Discussion Section Required. General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL). General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). - K. Moxey
Discussion Section Required.
4 points

AHIS BC 1002y Introduction to the History of Art II

The second part of the Introduction to the History of Art goes from the Renaissance to 2012, circles the world, and includes all media. It is organized around 26 themes (one for each lecture) and approximately 100 works of art. Visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Highline park supplement lectures and discussion sections. Note: weekly discussion groups to be arranged. - A. Higonnet
Discussion Section Required. General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL). General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points

AHIS BC 2005x-BC2007x Painting I and III

This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making. Students acquire a working knowledge of concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor. Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments. Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production. - J. Snitzer
3 points Course Limited to 15 Students. Permission of Instructor. Attend the first Class.

AHIS BC 3123y Woman and Art

Discussion of the methods necessary to analyze visual images of women in their historical, racial, and class contexts, and to understand the status of women as producers, patrons, and audiences of art and architecture. - M. Davis
Not offered in 2012-2013.
3 points

AHIS V 3203x Arts of Japan

Survey of Japanese art from the Neolithic through the Edo period, with emphasis on Buddhist art, scroll painting, decorative screens, and wood-block prints. - J. Reynolds
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

AHIS V 3250y Roman Art and Architecture

Architecture, sculpture, and painting of ancient Rome from the second century B.C. to the end of the Roman Empire in the West.
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

AHIS BC 3626y In and Around Abstract Expressionism

This course focuses on the history of the artistic phenomenon of abstract expressionism in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Japan. To place abstract expressionism within its proper historical context, we will explore the modern, anti-modern, avant-garde, and neo-avant-garde artistic practices that have been elaborated in various ways in different locations from the 1920s to the 1960s, and the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts during these years. - A. Alberro
3 points

AHIS BC 3642 American Art and Culture

An examination of North American painting, sculpture, photography, graphic art and decorative arts from the Colonial Period until World War I. Artists discussed will include Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Lilly Martin Spencer, Harriet Powers, Rafael Aragon, Robert Duncanson, Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, James MacNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Moran, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Eadweard Muybridge. - M. Davis
3 points

AHIS W 3650y 20th Century Art

Major developments in 20th-century art, with emphasis on modernist and avant-garde practices and their relevance for art up to the present.
3 points

AHIS BC 3654x Institutional Critique

Examines precedents for institutional critique in the strategies of early twentieth-century historical avant-garde and the post-war neo-avant-garde. Explores ideas about the institution and violence, investigates the critique and elaboration of institutional critique from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and considers the legacies of institutional critiques in the art of the present. - R. Deutsche
3 points

AHIS BC 3655 The Discourse of Public Art and Public Space

Examination of the meaning of the term "public space" in contemporary debates in art, architecture, and urban discourse and the place of these debates within broader controversies over the meaning of democracy. Readings include Theodor Adorno, Vito Acconci, Michel de Certeau, Douglas Crimp, Thomas Crow, Jurgen Habermas, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Miwon Kwon, Henri Lefebvre, Bruce Robbins, Michael Sorkin, Mark Wigley, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. - R. Deutsche
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). Not offered in 2012-2013.
3 points

AHIS BC 3658x History and Theory of the Avant Garde

This course examines the idea and practice of artistic avant-gardism in Europe and the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century. It explores the changing relationship of avant-gardism to bourgeois society, concepts of democracy, art institutions, political radicalism, and non-art forms of culture, such as mass culture and third-world cultures. It studies theories of the modernist, historical, and neo-avant-gardes.

AHIS BC 3673y History of Photography

This course will survey selected social, cultural and aesthetic or technical developments in the history of photography, from the emergence of the medium in the 1820s and 30s through to the present day. Rather than attempt comprehensively to review every aspect of photography and its legacies in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the course will instead trace significant developments through a series of case studies. Some of the latter will focus on individuals, genres or movements, and others on various discourses of the photographic image. Particular attention will be placed on methodological and theoretical concerns pertaining to the medium. - N. Elcott
Discussion Section Required.
3 points

AHIS BC 3674x Art since 1945

Introduction to the history of art in post-war Europe and the United States from 1945 to the present, emphasizing questions of methodology of modernist studies and the diversity of theoretical approaches.
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). Not offered in 2012-2013.
3 points

AHIS BC 3675y Feminism and Postmodernism and the Visual Arts: The 1970's and 1980's

Examines art and criticism of the 1970s and 1980s that were informed by feminist and postmodern ideas about visual representation. Explores postmodernism as (1) a critique of modernism, (2) a critique of representation, and (3) what Gayatri Spivak called a radical acceptance of vulnerability. Studies art informed by feminist ideas about vision and subjectivity. Places this art in relation to other aesthetic phenomena, such as modernism, minimalism, institution-critical art, and earlier feminist interventions in art. - R. Deutsche
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

AHIS BC 3681y Directions in Contemporary Art

Introduces the history of contemporary artistic practices from the 1960s to the present, and the major critical and historical accounts of modernism and postmodernism in the arts. Focusing on the interrelationships between modernist culture and the emerging concepts of postmodern and contemporary art, the course addresses a wide range of historical and methodological questions.

AHIS BC 3682y Early Modernism and the Crisis of Representation

This course studies the emergence and development of Modernism in all of its complexity. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which Modern artists responded to the dramatically changing notions of space, time and dimension in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. What impact did these dramatic changes have on existing concepts of representation? What challenges did they pose for artists? To what extent did Modernism contribute to an understanding of the full consequences of these new ideas of time and space? These concerns will lead us to examine some of the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts as they were developed between the 1860s and the 1920s. - A. Alberro
Prerequisites: 20th Century Art recommended. General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS). Not offered in 2012-2013.
3 points

AHIS BC 3938y Modern Native American Art in the South West

Traces the impact of new mediums, new audiences and new institutions of production on artists of Pueblo, Navajo and Apache background over the past century and explores how modernity and postmodernity intersect with indigeneity in a contemporary artist' work. Course includes visits with artists and curators and examination of objects - E. Hutchinson
4 points Undergraduate Travel Seminar limited to 14 Students. Applicaiton due on November 7, 2012

AHIS BC 3971y Rococco and It's Revivials

The useful arts of eighteenth-century France - furniture, interior decoration, clothing etc.. -- have always been considered among the masterpieces of decorative arts history. A revolution in scholarship has made it possible to understand how these objects inaugurated some of modernity's key values: individualism, private home life, consumer culture, women's involvement in the arts, global capitalism, and an orientalist fascination with the Near and Far Easts. Several class sessions will take place in the great decorative arts galleries of the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection, where students will give presentations on individual objects. - A. Higonnet
4 points Undergraduate Seminar Limited to 15 Students with Permission of Instructor. Application required by November 7, 2012.

AHIS W 4089x Native American Art

This introduction to Native North American art surveys traditions of painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography and architecture and traces the careers of contemporary Indian modernists and postmodernists. It emphasizes artistic developments as a means of preserving culture and resisting domination in response to intertribal contact, European colonization and American expansion. - E. Hutchinson
3 points

AHIS W 4110y Japanese Architecture from the mid-19th C. to the Present

Examines Japanese architecture and urban planning from the mid-19th century to the present. We will address topics such as the establishment of an architectural profession along western lines in the late 19th century, the emergence of a modernist movement in the 1920's, the use of biological metaphors and the romanticization of technology in the theories and designs of the Metabolist Group, and the shifting significance of pre-modern Japanese architectural practices for modern architects. There will be an emphasis on the complex relationship between architectural practice and broader political and social change in Japan. - J. Reynolds
3 points

AHIS W 4480y Art in the Age of the Reformation

Explores the ways in which the culture and social functions of artistic production in Germany and the Netherlands were transformed as a consequence of the dissemination of the ideologies of humanism and the Reformation. - K. Moxey
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

AHIS W 4626 Tourism and the North American Landscape

Examines the relationship between 19th-century landscapes (paintings, photographs and illustrations) and tourism in North America. The semiotics of tourism, the tourist industry as patron, the tourist as audience, and the visual implications of new forms of travel explored via the work of Cole, Moran, Jackson, and others. - E. Hutchinson
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

AHIS W 4703y Modern Japanese Architecture
Course Description to Come - J. Reynolds
3 points

AHIS W 4850y Collecting

Graduate Lecture open to undergraduates. This course studies the nearly universal human phenomenon of collecting. We will begin by gauging the range and basic structures of the phenomenon, looking at collections ranging from sock monkeys through anatomical waxes to ukiyo-e cards. These examples will enable us to compare and contrast theories of collecting, of which the most important will be psychological and anthropological. Moving from these general theories to the historically particular, we will next turn to the history of high-end collecting, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and the origins of museum. The history of the art museum will then be studied in some detail, through both analysis of art museum types - principally national or municipal, private, monographic, and geographic - and through case studies of personal collections. Finally, the course will address art-work about collecting. Lectures, readings, and discussion sections will be reinforced by multiple visits to New York City museums. - A. Higonnet
3 points Bridge Course Open to Undergraduates

AHIS BC 3031y Imagery and Form in the Arts

Operation of imagery and form in dance, music, theater, visual arts and writing; students are expected to do original work in one of these arts. Concepts in contemporary art will be explored. - J. Snitzer
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points Enrollment limited to 15 students. Instructor's permission required. Attend the first day of class. Application not required.

AHIS BC 3948y The Visual Culture of the Harlem Renaissance

Introduction to the paintings, photographs, sculptures, films, and graphic arts of the Harlem Renaissance and the publications, exhibitions, and institutions involved in the production and consumption of images of African-Americans. Focuses on impact of Black northward and transatlantic migration and the roles of region, class, gender, and sexuality. - E. Hutchinson
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Barnard Art History seminar application required. See dept. website for application and instructions. www.barnard.edu/arthist General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). Not offered in 2012-2013.
4 points

AHIS BC 3949x The Art of Witness: Memorials and Historical Trauma

Examines aesthetic responses to collective historical traumas, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, AIDS, homelessness, immigration, and the recent attack on the World Trade Center. Studies theories about trauma, memory, and representation. Explores debates about the function and form of memorials. - R. Deutsche
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points Undergraduate seminar course. Course limited to 15 Students with instructor's permission. Application process required. Applications are due in the Barnard Art History office by March 30th, 2012.

AHIS BC 3950y Photography and Video in Asia

East Asia is now perhaps the world's most dynamic region, and its dramatic social and economic transformation has been mirrored in the work of a host of startlingly original and innovative visual artists. The class will explore the ideas and visual idioms that inform the leading contemporary photo artists in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. We will begin with a historical survey of the development of photography in East Asia since the mid-19th century, but we will concentrate on the period from 1960 to the present. Figures whose work will be explored include such Japanese artists and photographers as Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, Tomatsu Shomei, Miyako Ishiuchi, Nobuyoshi Araki, Yasumasa Morimura, Moriko Mori, Naoya Hatakeyema, and Tomoko Sawada. From China, we will examine the work of artists like Zhang Huan, Hong Hao, Yang Fudong, Lin Tianmiao, and Xing Danwen, while Korean artists to be covered include Atta Kim andYeondoo Jung. Since many of these artists work regularly in video as well as photography, there will be regular video screenings throughout the semester. - C. Phillips
4 points

AHIS BC 3951 Contemporary Art and the Public Sphere

Critically examines contemporary debates about the meaning of public art and public space, placing them within broader controversies over definitions of urban life and democracy. Explores ideas about what it means to bring the term �public� into proximity with the term �art.� Considers the differing ideas about social unity that inform theories of public space as well as feminist criticism of the masculine presumptions underlying certain critical theories of public space/art.
Prerequisites: AHIS BC1001 - BC1002 or equivalent. Enrollment Limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. Preference to seniors and Art History majors. General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). Not offered in 2012-2013.
4 points

AHIS BC 3952 Art and Mass/Popular/Everyday Culture: 1850 to the Present

Examines interactions between art in Europe and the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, on the one hand, and non-art forms of culture that are called variously �mass,� �popular,� and �everyday� culture, on the other. Places art/mass culture interactions within the rise of bourgeois society, the invention of democracy, and relations of class, gender, sexuality, and race. Studies major critical theories and debates about the relationship between art and mass culture.

AHIS BC 3957y 1980s Feminism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts

Examination of art and criticism that is informed by feminist and postmodern ideas about subjectivity in visual representation which first achieved prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, exerting a profound influence on contemporary aesthetic practice. Explored in relation to earlier concepts of feminism, modernism, social art history, and �art as institution.� Artworks discussed include those of Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, and Catherine Opie, among others.
Prerequisites: AHIS BC1001 - BC1002 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. Preference to seniors and Art History majors. General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). Not offered in 2012-2013.
4 points

AHIS BC 3959x Senior Research Seminar

Independent research for the senior thesis. Students develop and write their senior thesis in consultation with an individual faculty adviser in art history and participate in group meetings scheduled throughout the senior year.

AHIS BC 3960y Senior Research Seminar

Independent research for the senior thesis. Students develop and write their senior thesis in consultation with an individual faculty adviser in Art History and participate in group meetings scheduled throughout the senior year.

AHIS BC 3961y Winslow Homer and American Realism

Winslow Homer is in many ways the quintessential American Realist. One need only glance at his sunny pictures of women playing croquet or his stunning snapshots of surf breaking on the Maine Coast to recognize the bold graphic energy of his work and its seemingly national subject matter. Homer was promoted as an untrained and naive observer of his time, but in fact he was a sophisticated artists with extensive engagement in the evolving aesthetic and cultural dialogues of the late nineteenth century in America and abroad. In this course, we will get beyond the surface of Homer's art, interrogating how these qualities have come to signal what they do while examining the course of his career in its art historical and historical contexts. Rather than seeing Homer as a realist simply documenting his time, students will come to understand the ways in which his work raises and attempts to address key questions posed in the United States as it recovered from the Civil War and experienced the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the Post-War era. Through the close examination of Homer's output in a variety of mediums, including illustration, painting, watercolor and etchings, we will explore Homer's deep engagement with the international aesthetic developments of Impressionism, Aestheticism and Realism. Class meetings will be augmented by two field trips, one to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other to the Century Club. - Elizabeth Hutchinson
Not offered in 2012-2013.
4 points Seminar course limited to 15 undergraduates.

ACLG BC 3968y Art Criticism II

Contemporary art and its criticism written by artists ( rather than by art historians or journalistic reviewers). Spring section II includes texts by Victor Burgin, Judith Barry, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Yvone Rainer, Juan Downey, Maria Eichorn, Jeff Wall, Mike Kelley, Falkie Pisano, and Melanie Gilligan. We will consider theoretical and practical implications of each artist's oeuvre. Also, considers the art and writing of each artist together. - N. Guagnini
4 points

AHIS BC 3968x Art Criticism I

Contemporary art and its criticism written by artists (rather than by art historians or journalistic reviewers). Fall section I will include Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland, Dan Graham, Ad Reinhart, Daniel Buren, Helio Oiticica, Art and Language, Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, mary Kelly, and Martha Rosler. We will consider theoretical and practical implications of each artist's oeuvre. Also, considers the art and writing of each artist together. - John Miller
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points Undergraduate seminar course. Course limited to 15 Students with instructor's permission. Application process required. Applications are due in the Barnard Art History office by March 30th, 2012.

AHIS BC 3970x Methods and Theories of Art History

Introduction to critical writings that have shaped histories of art, including texts on iconography and iconology, the psychology of perception, psychoanalysis, social history, feminism and gender studies, structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. - E. Hutchinson, J. Reynolds
Prerequisites: Barnard Art History Major Requirement. Enrollment limited only to Barnard Art History majors. General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points

AHIS BC 3976y Japanese Photography

This course will examine the history of Japanese photography from the middle of the 19th century to the present. The class will be organized both chronologically and thematically. Throughout its history, photography has been an especially powerful medium for addressing the most challenging issues facing Japanese society. Among the topics under discussion will be: tourist photography and the representation of women within that genre in the late 19th century, the politics of propaganda photography, the construction of Japanese cultural identity through the representation of "tradition" in photography, and the interest in marginalized urban subcultures in the photography of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the course will be focused on Japan, the class will read from the literature on photography elsewhere in order to situate Japanese work within a broader context.

AHIS BC 3985x Introduction to Connoisseurship

Factors involved in judging works of art, with emphasis on paintings; materials, technique, condition, attribution; identification of imitations and fakes; questions of relative quality. - M. Ainsworth
General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points Undergraduate seminar course. Course limited to 15 Students with instructor's permission. Application process required. Applications are due in the Barnard Art History office by March 30th, 2012.

AHIS BC 3990x Japanese Prints: Images of Japan's Floating World

Ukiyo-e, the "images of the floating world," present a vivid and highly romanticized vision of the dynamic urban culture of Japan during the 17th through 19th centuries. Considers ways in which these images promoted kabuki theater, glamorized life in the licensed prostitution quarters, and represented sexuality and gender. We will study how print designers and publishers dodged government censorship as they ruthlessly parodied contemporary life, literature, and venerable artistic traditions. - J. Reynolds
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. Sophomore standing. General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points Undergraduate seminar course. Course limited to 15 Students with instructor's permission. Application process required. Due by Nov 9, 2011 See Barnard Art History Website www.barnard.edu/arthist

AHIS BC 2001x and y Introduction to Drawing

This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making. Students acquire a working knowledge of concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor. Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments. Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production. - L. Hewitt
3 points Enrollment limited to 15 students. Instructor's permission required. Attend the first day of class.

AHIS BC 2006y-BC2008y Painting II and IV

A continuation of painting I & III, open to all skill levels. Students will further develop techniques to communicate individual and collective ideas in painting. This course will focus on individual and collaborative projects designed to explore the fundamental principles of image making. Students acquire a working knowledge of traditional studio skills and related concepts in contemporary art through class critiques, discussion, and individual meetings with the professor. Reading materials will provide historical and philosophical background to the class assignments. Class projects will range from traditional to experimental and multi-media. Image collections will be discussed in class with an awareness of contemporary image production.
3 points Enrollment limited to 15 students. Instructor's permission required. Attend the first day of class.

AHIS BC 3003x and y Supervised Projects in Photography

Designed for students to conduct independent projects in photography. Priority for enrollment to the class will be Barnard College students who are enrolling in classes at ICP (International Center of Photography). The cost of ICP will be covered by Barnard College. All of the other students enrolling in the course (CC, GS SOA) will be responsible for their own ICP course expenses. - J. Miller
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points Enrollment limited to 15 students. Instructor's permission required. Attend the first day of class.

AHIS BC 3015 Synthesis: An Approach to Mixed-Media

Synthesis: the composition, combination or transformation of parts or elements to form a whole. This studio course will explore the unique position of combining various mediums and techniques in the visual arts platform. What does it mean to use principles of drawing in the making of a photograph? Why explore sculptural forms through the materiality of painting? We will look closely at a select group of contemporary artists who move fluidly through various forms and modes of working. The course consists of the following key areas: material, form, concept, intersection and synthesis. Through out the studio course, students will address conceptual, formal and process-oriented issues related to working across mediums in the visual arts. - L. Hewitt
3 points

AHIS BC 3530x Advanced Studio

An interpretive study of the theoretical and critical issues in visual art. Projects that are modeled after major movements in contemporary art will be executed in the studio. Each student develops an original body of artwork and participates in group discussions of the assigned readings.