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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine the history of museums in Europe and America, focusing on historical traditions and current expectations affecting institutional operations today. Historical tradition and current practice as they relate to museum governance and administration, architecture and installation, acquisitions and collections, and cultural property issues as well as the many roles of exhibitions in museum programming will be addressed, along with museums' social responsibility as scholarly and public institutions in an increasingly market-driven, nonprofit environment.
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3.00 Credits
This is a seminar in the intellectual history of the history of art, with some concentration on the ways in which this disciplinary tradition has been challenged by recent critical theory. It will begin its study with the "founders" of the field and end with issues and problems that generated the "new art history" twenty years ago and "visual studies" in the last couple of decades. Topics to be covered include: style, iconography/iconology, semiotics, identity politics, formalism, deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, gender studies, post-colonialism, and thing theory. Resident Clark Fellows will occasionally talk to us on perspectives of their choice.
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3.00 Credits
This thematically based course explores depictions of the artist and the studio from (roughly) Velazquez into the present. Such representations often constitute a privileged arena for the development of reflexive concerns--concerns by artists about the nature and terms of the artistic enterprise. Precisely for this reason, that arena has also attracted a substantial body of ambitious art historical writing. Accordingly, much of the class will be devoted to exploring problems of interpretation raised by such "representations of representation," along with the art historical literature they have spawned. Artists include (but are not limited to) Velazquez, Vermeer, Delacroix, Courbet, Matisse, and Picasso; readings by Michel Foucault, Michael Fried, Svetlana Alpers, Daniel Arasse, and Leo Steinberg, among others. We might also read Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece and other works of art fiction.
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3.00 Credits
A common and depressing consequence of too much education is how our writing tends to devolve, as the task of saying what we mean is complicated by new anxieties: trying to impress our potential employers, intimidate our competition, claim our place in an intellectual community, and generally avoid looking like fools. In many professions, bad prose tends to proliferate like some disgusting disease, as scholars, trying above all to avoid mistakes, become tentative, obscurantist, addicted to jargon, and desperate to imitate other bad writers. In this course we will try to relearn the basic skills of effective communication and adapt them to new and complicated purposes. In class we will go over weekly or bi-weekly writing assignments, but we will also look at the essays you are writing for your other courses, to give them an outward form that will best display their inner braininess. Among other things, I am a fiction writer, and part of my intention is to borrow the techniques of storytelling to dramatize your ideas successfully.
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to acquaint students with observation and examination techniques for works of art, artifacts, and decorative arts objects; give them an understanding of the history of artist materials and methods; and familiarize them with the ethics and procedures of conservation. This is not a conservation training course but is structured to provide a broader awareness for those who are planning careers involving work with cultural objects. Sessions will be held at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, Williams College, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany. Examination questions may be formulated from exhibitions at these locations. Six exams will be given. Exam scores will be weighed in proportion to the number of sessions covered by the exam (e.g., the paintings exam, derived from six sessions of the course, will count as 25% of the final grade).
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to assist qualified fourth-semester graduate students in preparing a scholarly paper to be presented at the annual Graduate Symposium. Working closely with a student and faculty ad hoc advisory committee, each student will prepare a twenty-minute presentation based on the Qualifying Paper. Special emphasis is placed on the development of effective oral presentation skills.
Prerequisite:
Successful completion and acceptance of the Qualifying Paper
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3.00 Credits
"Once upon a time," noted the historian, Randolph Starn, "the Renaissance set its clocks and calendars to keep modern time." So what time is kept in today's Renaissance? This thematic course proposes an investigation of the subject of temporality and Renaissance art. Our focus will include, but certainly not be limited to, issues of periodization and the role of the Renaissance in historical narratives. We will consider the historical construction of the High Renaissance, for example, but we will also investigate the relationship between early 16th-century conceptions of time (typological, millenarian, etc.) and the visual world. And in addition to thinking about time as internal to works of art, we will consider the temporal implications of the experience of objects. Specific topics will range from the perennial question of the Renaissance individual to newer concerns such as Renaissance anachronism and the emergent global history of the 16th century.
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3.00 Credits
In this seminar we will consider the life and art of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). With the most rigorous academic training available, employment at the strongest art schools in the country, and an adherence to the traditional genres of portraiture and subject painting, Eakins yet managed to lead one of the most thwarted of professional careers. He wrote with justice in 1894: "My honors are misunderstanding, persecution and neglect, enhanced because unsought." The critical tide turned after his death, although much recent scholarship has sought to complicate that mid-20th-century tale. Consideration of his career will encourage us to think about questions of biography, regionalism, portraiture, and the relationship of painting to photography.
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3.00 Credits
In this seminar we study the rich and often provocative critical literature focused on the French Impressionist movement, from its emergence in Paris in the 1870s up to the present day. Our focus will be on essays, books, and exhibition catalogues that address Impressionism as a whole, rather than studies of the work of individual artists. We will address a variety of critical and historical issues: How do we define Impressionism? Which artists can be included under the term "Impressionist?" What were the first critical responses to Impressionism in the 1870s? Is Impressionism a matter of technique or subject? How has our understanding of Impressionism changed along with the discipline of art history? Readings will draw upon early critical reviews of the eight Impressionist group shows held between 1874 and 1886; formalist critiques of the first half of the twentieth century (and later); biographical approaches; studies of technique and artistic practice; and social histories of art. We will pay special attention to the role played by exhibitions and exhibition catalogues in our evolving understanding of Impressionism.
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3.00 Credits
The art of Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter has been the subject of critical and scholarly engagement and reconsideration from its inception to today. Exploring the primary documents of the German Expressionist movement, both artist- and critic-generated, the course will question how these formative texts conflict with current definitions and perceptions. The seminar will consider recent scholarship that has documented and investigated market and exhibition practices. Both Brucke and Blaue Reiter artists worked collectively. How did these communal artistic projects succeed or fail? This seminar will address the multi-faceted production of German Expressionism, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, architecture, film, and literature. The course will use the collections at the Clark and the Williams College Museum of Art.
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