Art History 510, Fall, 2004
Historiography and Theory of the Visual Arts to 1960
Tuesday Evening, 5:00-8:00
303 Henry Hall
Peter B. Hales, Professor
Office: 208-A Henry Hall
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 3:30-5:00 and by appointment
Phone: Office 413-2461 Home (773)764-9805
email pbhales@uic.edu
Website: http://www.uic.edu/~pbhales
This course has many goals. Primarily, it is meant to be a rigorous introduction to the sorts of thinking that characterize the discipline of art history, defined quite broadly. This means reading dense and demanding materials, applying the ideas and theories therein to works of architecture, art, and visual culture, and developing both a critical and a historical understanding of the discipline of art history as a result. Finally, the course is designed to develop clear, accurate, engaging writing at a highly sophisticated level.
Requirements: There is a great deal of reading for this class, and it's not easy going. Prepare to discipline yourself. Everyone is expected to do all the reading for each class. This is essential; in a small, intensive discussion seminar, the presence of even one ill-prepared student is glaringly obvious, with humiliating effects. You must be at all classes. In addition, each student is "responsible” for presenting the reading for two classes-- to have a clear sense of what you feel are the most important points, to guide discussion, and to propose some practical tests to use to illuminate the readings-- a work of architecture to "tour," say, (in which case you will need to pull the slides from the slide library) or a single interesting painting or work of design. Everyone is expected to participate in discussions in their own particular (or peculiar) ways; I don't expect you to become a different person, but I do expect loquacious students to learn discipline and listening skills, and shy or reticent students to learn assertiveness and something of eloquence, within the limits of the possible.
The writing assignments are of two types. Each week from week 3 through week 14 (8 papers-- you can skip two, AFTER WEEK 6), you are to produce a clear, brief (about 2 typed pages) analysis of the readings-- what constitute the central ideas of each reading, what ideas link the multiple readings if there are such, and what are the most rewarding and problematic aspects of the work.
(A somber warning: I have reached the point where I no longer teach high-school level writing at the graduate level. I will teach the craftsmanship of writing but will simply turn back any paper that has a significant number of mechanical flaws of grammar, punctuation, sentence fragmentation, misuse of language, etc. You will then have a week to go back to writing guides [see below], rewrite the papers, and hand them back. After a week, they are marked as failures. No exceptions. You of course have the self-confidence and dignity not to hand in shoddy work. Art history is a writer’s discipline, and skill with the language, the style and the rhetoric of Standard American English is essential. I’ll teach you craftsmanship, argument, persuasion, voicing, tone. I won’t teach you mechanics.)
In addition, you will produce the "shell" of a research paper-- that is: you will find a topic, do preliminary research, develop a thesis, create a viable bibliography that includes primary and secondary sources, and write an outline and/or an argument map that is sufficiently detailed that you could, for about two weeks, sit down each day and write a solid segment, knowing where it comes from and where it goes in the argument. In other words, you will do everything except write the paper. In this way you will develop comfort with the processes of research.
All the sober, punitive prose completed, I can now say that this is in fact an exciting course, the chance to begin to do what draws us to universities to do: to engage with and learn from each other and from people distanced from us by time, death and change. In addition, we will be looking at how this particular, odd, discipline came into being-- how it became possible to yoke together Art and History, and then say, at parties and in writing: "I'm an art historian."
Books
You will buy buy buy. But that’s necessary.
There are two books that are essential and aren’t usually in a course of this sort. They aren’t ordered as textbooks from the bookstore because they are commonly a part of our libraries. If they aren’t, get them. They are both guides to writing.
Sylvan Barnett, A Short Guide to Writing About Art. This is a book you’ll usually assign to your students. You may already have it. Buy the newest edition. Read it immediately. Keep it by your bed and read it again and again. It’s really quite a biblical little text– interesting, infuriating, enlightening.
The second is a standard College Handbook: Hodge’s Harbrace Handbook, the Bedford handbooks, or the older Harbrace, or the McMillan Handbook. I don’t care which of these you buy, and they’re all available regularly used from Amazon or at Powell’s or the other major used book stores. Check first with Alibris.com on the ‘web and find the cheapest with shipping.
I insist, however, that you have one of these in class the second week. Remember. I will not be tolerant of hasty, loose, flawed writing. You are in graduate school and that is an absolute hurdle. You showed the graduate admissions program that you had that capability when you handed in your writing sample. Now you must live up to and transcend it.
Booklist:
Hans Belting, Art History After Modernism
A.C. Fernie, ed., Art History and its Methods
Vasari, Lives of the Artists (Oxford’s World Classics)
Plato, The Republic
Aristotle, The Poetics
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Heinrich Wolfflin, The Principles of Art History
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
Erwin Panofsky, Meaning In the Visual Arts
Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture
----------------------------------- Schedule --------------------------
August 24. Opening Week: Introduction: Boundaries, Margins and Disciplines
This week we will spend about half the class discussing the methods of art-historical research, and the nature of research work as a real (rather than a required or obligatory) activity.
August31. Conflicts and Paradigms: Art History in the World and in the Academy
This week you will not write; instead, go to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and spend some time considering those institutions as reflective of philosophical paradigms or models for what art's history is and how to present it.
Hans Belting Art History After Modernism, part I (xerox handout)
Olu Oguibe, "In the 'Heart of Darkness'", from Art History and Its Methods (AHM)
September 7. Practicalities: Basics of Research and Scholarship
Reading: Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide
(no papers, please)
Please look ahead to week 9 and bring to me your proposed material, so I can reproduce it; or a valid excuse that will force you to have your material by next week.
September 14. The Philosophical Dichotomy: Idealism and Experience and the Critical Consciousness
Plato, The Republic; Aristotle, Poetics
September 21. Prototypes: Art History, Art, and History
Vasari, Lives of the Artists: Introduction; Part I– all; Part II– Preface, Ghiberti, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Piero, Alberti, Botticelli; Part III– Preface, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, “The Author: To Artists of the Art of Design
September 28. Germans: Idealism and the Search for Order
Johann Winckelmann, "The History of Ancient Art," in AHM;
Johan Goethe, “Of German Architecture,” in AHM;
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” , and “The Critique of Judgement” (both of these can be found on the ‘web, or purchased.
October 5. G. W. F. Hegel, “ Philosophy of Fine Art”. Please read the following sections from the “Lectures on Fine Art” found on the ‘web at www.gwfhegel.org/Aesthetics/
“Development of the Ideal...”, and under it, section I (Of the Symbolic...) II. (Of the Ideal of Classic Art...) and III. (Of the Romantic Form of Art).
October 12. Practicalities: Research and Production of art historical writing
This week is devoted to the most practical elements of art-historical writing: conceiving a topic, following it through, writing and revising, presenting and publishing. After the first hour, we will shift to a larger venue (probably 2nd floor Jefferson) for the MA Symposium, at which students who are nearly done with their theses will be presenting their research, and will then be available for a more general discussion. Please bring at least one work of art-historical or art-critical writing that has seemed to you inspiring, controversial, enlivening, godlike; we’ll talk about them in the first hour.
Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art
Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes A Day
October 19.Art History Conceived as a Discipline: the 19th Century
Jacob Burkhardt, "Reflections on History" in AHM
Alois Riegl, "Late Roman Art Industry" in AHM
This class session will begin by continuing the discussion from last week; at this time, you will be expected to present to the group your at-least-exploratory idea(s) for the larger project you’ll do in the class.
October 26. Architecture: Criticism and Revival
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
William Morris, "The Revival of Architecture," in AHM
November 2. Connoisseurship and Stylistic Analysis
Giovanni Morelli, "Italian Painters," in AHM
Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History
Paul Frankl, Principles of Architectural History" in AHM
Roger Fry, "Vision and Design," in AHM
Henri Focillon, "The Life of Forms in Art," in AHM
Disruptions: Freud, the Unconscious, and Modernism
November 9. Psychoanalysis and the Psychohistorical
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
November 16. Critiquing Freud; conceiving a social and political history of art
Richard Wollheim, "Freud and the Understanding of Art" (on reserve)
Meyer Schapiro, "Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study," Journal of
the History of Ideas XVII, 147-178 (on reserve).
Arnold Hauser, "The Philosophy of Art History", in AHM
Nikolaus Pevsner, "An Outline of European Architecture," in AHM
Clement Greenberg, (on reserve or as handout) “The Newer Laocoon”
Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Struggle, excerpts (xeroxed handout)
This week we will also spend some time discussing each of your research projects, and the steps taken (and left to be taken) to develop it. Please bring in copies for all of a one-page memo that includes a one-paragraph précis and a more informal statement of research sources, library work, and general progress. This is meant as an informal piece for your fellow-students, and as an exercise for you in anchoring your ideas.
Expansions: Art History and/as Cultural History
November 23. Iconographical Analysis, Iconology, and Art History as Cultural History
Erwin Panofsky, Meaning In the Visual Arts
November 30.High Modernism: Architecture as Heroic Humanism
Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style
Siegfried Giedion, (on reserve) from Mechanization Takes Command
December 7. [Finals Week] High Modernism: Formalism and Painting/Respite and Solace
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture
Expect to talk informally about the research project and, most importantly, about the process itself, by which you went from seeking an idea to a (quasi) finished product.