Spring 2012

The course will examine the origins and development of modern art, including painting, sculpture, and architecture, from the time of Manet in the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Its purpose is to help the student gain an understanding of some of the major ideas behind the development of modernism and of the characteristic forms of various art movements and to acquaint the student with some of the important artistic figures who played a significant role in these developments.  This is a history course which is concerned with the evolution and interrelation of ideas about art, history, artists, and visual facts and their application to emerging art forms examined within their cultural-historical context. This course is intended to develop critical thinking and communication skills as well as a knowledge of the subject matter.

On the Rome Campus we will take advantage of Italian museums dedicated to Modern Italian and European art.  Italian contributions to Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, etc. will be given more attention.

Learning Activities:  Lecture, discussion, site visits, etc.

Text:                                                     

•             Arnason, H.H. and Elizabeth C. Mansfield.  History of Modern Art, 6th ed.  Prentice-Hall, 2009. NYU Professor:   http://as.nyu.edu/object/ElizabethMansfield.html

Evaluation methods:

•             Quizzes

•             Exams

•             Class Participation

•             Field Trips

•             Paper(s)

Semester Schedule:

Week 1:               Origins to Impressionism

Week 2:               Visit to Rome’s Museum of Modern Art—Villa Borghese

Week 3:               Post-Impressionism/Modern Architecture

Week 4:               Art Nouveau & Beginnings of Expressionism

Week 5:               Fauvism and Expressionism

Week 6:               Cubism and Picasso                                        

Week 7:               Origins of Modern Sculpture, Early Modern Architecture & F.L. Wright                                   

Week 8:               Early Modern Architecture & F.L. Wright

Week 9                 Futurism, Abstraction, Constructivism, & De Stijl

Week 10:             Fantasy, Dada, New Objectivity

Week 11:             Surrealism

Week 12:             20th Century Architecture

Week 13:             American Art & Abstract Expressionism

Week 14:             American Art & Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Assemblage and Sixties Abstraction

Week 15:             Pluralistic Seventies, Retrospective Eighties

Knowledge Area(s) satisfied:      Artistic Knowledge and Experience

Skill(s) Developed:                          Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions

Values Requirement  satisfied:  The ethics of art sales, forgeries, intellectual property, etc.

The Futurist Manifesto was written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and was published 20 February 1909. It launched the art movement FUTURISM that rejected the past; celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry; and sought the modernization and cultural rejuvenation of Italy.

Learning Objectives: 

Knowledge Area (Artistic Knowledge and Experience):

•          Acquire visual literacy.

Through an examination of the art of the modern period students will become familiar with works of art representative of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will learn to recognize elements of visual language (such as line, form, color, light, texture, space, proportion, composition) and to interpret how ideas are communicated through this formal language in ways that are relevant in their social-historical context.

•          Acquire the critical and technical vocabulary to describe, analyze, and formulate arguments about artistic productions.

Through the study of modern art students will acquire the appropriate artistic terminology and the skills of visual analysis necessary to critically describe, analyze and formulate arguments about these artistic productions.

•          Assess how formal qualities of artistic expression are intrinsically tied to an audience.

This course emphasizes how formal artistic qualities relate to the audiences of their time and how forms reflect different artistic aims relevant to their context. Students will become aware of how art is linked to the social systems and ideologies of particular audiences.

•          Examine multiple interpretive possibilities of art and know that interpretations both reflect the culture that produced them and change over time.

In this course we will interpret art objects within contexts appropriate for their particular historical moment and place. Students will learn that aesthetic interpretations vary between artists and audiences both within particular periods and between periods of time.

•          Evaluate works of art in light of aesthetic and historic precedent.

By examining the development of modern art over time, students will learn how art works relate to their aesthetic and historic precedents, reflecting influences from and reactions to those precedents.    

•          Recognize and participate in the artistic-cultural life of the community.

Through the paper project and field trip(s) students will utilize artistic resources in Chicago to study original works of art in person and to become familiar with cultural institutions in Chicago.

“To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”                                                                                                                          Charles Baudelaire (1857)  

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.  ~Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Picasso

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.

 ~Ernst Levy