Art History 510, Fall, 2002
Historiography and Theory of the Visual Arts to 1960
Tuesday Evening, 5:30-8:30
308 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 (10 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 them, 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 these writing guides, rewrite the papers, and hand them back. After a week, they are marked as failures. No exceptions. You should 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. 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-- in other words, 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 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 new edition. Read it immediately. Keep it by your bed and read it again and again.
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.
Here’s the book content.
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
Karl Marx, Capital
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 --------------------------
1. Opening Week: Introduction: Boundaries, Margins and Disciplines
2. 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.
Henri Zerner,“Crisis in the Discipline” editorial,
Oleg Grabar, “On the Universality of the History of Art,”and
O.K. Werckmeister, “Radical Art History, “
all from special issue of Artjournal (xerox handout)
Artjournal Art History Survey Special Issue, Fall 1995 (in grad student office-- read it there only, please!!)
Hans Belting The End of the History of Art, part I (xerox handout)
Olu Oguibe, "In the 'Heart of Darkness'", from Art History and Its Methods (AHM)
3. The Philosophical Dichotomy: Idealism and Experience and the Critical Consciousness
Plato, The Republic; Aristotle, Poetics
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.
4. 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
Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? Part II (xerox handout)
5. 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.
G. W. F. Hegel, “ Philosophy of Fine Art” ( excerpts, xeroxed)
6. Art History Conceived as a Discipline: the 19th Century
Jacob Burkhardt, "Reflections on History" in AHM
Alois Riegl, "Late Roman Art Industry" in AHM
With luck, we will be able to continue our discussion of the practicalities of art historical writing. To this end, please read the ubiquitous Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art
7. Architecture: Criticism and Revival
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
William Morris, "The Revival of Architecture," in AHM
8. 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: Marx/Freud
9. Karl Marx, Capital
By this time, you should have chosen a topic for your research project, and be prepared to present it to me for approval over the next week or so.
10. Marxism(s) in Transformation: Orthodoxies to Social Histories
Arnold Hauser, "The Philosophy of Art History", in AHM
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design
Nikolaus Pevsner, "An Outline of European Architecture," in AHM
Clement Greenberg, (on reserve)
11. Psychoanalysis and the Psychohistorical
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
12. Critiquing Freud
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).
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.
Expansions: Art History and/as Cultural History
13. Iconographical Analysis, Iconology, and Art History as Cultural History
Erwin Panofsky, Meaning In the Visual Arts
14.High Modernism: Architecture as Heroic Humanism
Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style
Siegfried Giedion, (on reserve) from Mechanization Takes Command
15. 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.