Tuesday Evening, 5:30-8:30
206 Jefferson Hall
Peter B. Hales, Professor
Office: 208-A Henry Hall
Office Hours: Mondays, Tuesdays, 3:30-5:00 and by appointment
Phone: Office 413-2461 Home (847)866-8106
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 (11 papers-- you can skip one), 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.
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 an 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."
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.
Artjournal Art History Survey Special Issue, 1995/6 (on reserve)
Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? Part I
"Crisis in the Discipline", editorial, Artjournal (on reserve)
Plato, The Republic
Olu Oguibe, "In the 'Heart of Darkness'", from Art History and Its Methods (AHM)
3. Prototypes: Art History, Art, and History
Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Belting, End of the History of Art? Part II
4. Germans: Idealism and the Search for Order
Johann Winckelmann, "The History of Ancient Art," in AHM; plus handout
Hegel, (on reserve)
Goethe, (on reserve)
5. Reaching for Objectivities
Jacob Burkhardt, "Reflections on History" in AHM
Alois Riegl, "Late Roman Art Industry" in AHM
Possible other materials (on reserve)
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.
6. Architecture: Criticism and Revival
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
William Morris, "The Revival of Architecture," in AHM
7. 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
Meyer Shapiro (on reserve)
9. Marxism(s) in Transformation: Orthodoxies to Social Histories
Hadjinicouliaou, (on reserve) from
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)
10. Psychoanalysis and the Psychohistorical
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
11. Critiquing Freud
Richard Wollheim, "Freud and the Understanding of Art" (on reserve)
Donald Kuspit, "Artist Envy" (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.
13.High Modernism: Architecture as Heroic Humanism
Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style
Siegfried Giedion, (on reserve) from Mechanization Takes Command
14. High Modernism: Formalism and Painting/Respite and Solace
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture
15. Expands When Filled: Party!
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.