History of Art
56 High, 432.2668
www.yale.edu/arthistory/
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
David Joselit (102A OAG, 432.2670, david.joselit@yale.edu)
Director of Graduate Studies
Alexander Nemerov (203 OAG, 432.8442, alexander.nemerov@yale.edu)
Professors Brian Allen (Adjunct), Carol Armstrong, Tim Barringer, Edward Cooke, Jr., David Joselit, Diana Kleiner, Amy Meyers (Adjunct), Mary Miller, Robert Nelson, Alexander Nemerov, Jock Reynolds (Adjunct), Vincent Scully (Emeritus), Robert Thompson, Christopher Wood, Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan
Associate Professor Anne Dunlop
Assistant Professors Milette Gaifman, Sandy Isenstadt, Jacqueline Jung, Kishwar Rizvi, Tamara Sears, Lillian Tseng, Sebastian Zeidler
Lecturers Suzanne Boorsch, Jo Briggs, Lisa Brody, Theresa Fairbanks, Karen Foster, Laurence Kanter, David Sensabaugh
Fields of Study
Fields include Greek and Roman; medieval and Byzantine; Renaissance; Early Modern; eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European; Modern Architecture; African; African American; American; American Decorative Arts; British; Pre-Columbian; Islamic; Chinese; Japanese; South Asian; and Film.
Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Students in the history of Western art must pass examinations in German and one other language pertinent to their field of study. One examination must be passed during the first year of study, the other not later than the beginning of the third term. Students of non-Western art must qualify in two languages selected by agreement with the adviser and the DGS. They have an extra year in which to do so. During the first two years of study, students normally take thirteen term courses. Normally by January 20 of the second year, students submit a qualifying paper that should demonstrate the candidate’s ability successfully to complete a Ph.D. dissertation in art history. During the fall term of the third year, students are expected to take the qualifying examination. Candidates must demonstrate knowledge of their field and related areas, as well as a good grounding in method and bibliography. By the end of the second term of the third year, students are expected to have established a dissertation topic. A prospectus outlining the topic must be approved by a committee at a colloquium by the end of the third year. Students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. upon completion of all pre-dissertation requirements, including the prospectus and qualifying examination. Admission to candidacy must take place by the end of the third year.
The faculty considers teaching to be an important part of the professional preparation of graduate students. Students are required to do four terms of teaching. This requirement is fulfilled in the second and third years. They receive a total of one course credit as teaching fellows when they lead a discussion section. Students may also serve as a graduate research assistant at either the Yale University Art Gallery or the Center for British Art. This can be accepted in lieu of one or two terms of teaching, but students may accept a graduate research assistant position at any time after the end of their first year. Application for these R.A. positions is competitive.
Combined Ph.D. Programs
HISTORY OF ART AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
The History of Art department offers, in conjunction with the Program in African American Studies, a combined Ph.D. in History of Art and African American Studies. Students in the combined-degree program will take three core courses in African American Studies as part of the required twelve courses and are subject to the language requirement for the Ph.D. in History of Art. The dissertation prospectus and the dissertation itself must be approved by both History of Art and African American Studies. For further details, see African American Studies.
HISTORY OF ART AND FILM STUDIES
The Department of History of Art offers, in conjunction with Film Studies, a combined Ph.D. in the History of Art and Film Studies. Students are required to meet all departmental requirements, but many courses may count toward completing both degrees at the discretion of the directors of graduate studies in History of Art and Film Studies. For further details, see Film Studies.
HISTORY OF ART AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
The Department of History of Art also offers, in conjunction with the Renaissance Studies Program, a combined Ph.D. in the History of Art and Renaissance Studies. For further details, see Renaissance Studies.
The Center for the Study of American Art and Material Culture
The Center for the Study of American Art and Material Culture provides a programmatic link among the Yale faculty, museum professionals, and graduate students who maintain a scholarly interest in the study, analysis, and interpretation of American art and material culture. It brings together colleagues from a variety of disciplines—from History of Art and American Studies to Anthropology, Archaeological Studies, and Geology and Geophysics—and from some of Yale’s remarkable museum collections from the Art Gallery and Peabody Museum to Beinecke Library. Center activities will focus upon one particular theme each year and will include hosting one or more visiting American Art and Material Culture Fellows to teach a course each term and interact with Yale colleagues; weekly lunch meetings in which a member makes a short presentation centered on an artifact or group of artifacts followed by lively discussion about methodology, interpretation, and context; and an annual three-day Yale–Smithsonian Seminar on Material Culture.
Master’s Degrees
M.Phil. See Degree Requirements. Additionally, students in the History of Art are eligible to pursue a supplemental M.Phil. degree in Medieval Studies. For further details, see Medieval Studies.
M.A. (en route to the Ph.D.) This degree is awarded after the satisfactory completion of one year of course work (six term courses) and after evidence of proficiency in one required foreign language. The student normally petitions for the degree at the time of registration in the fall of the second year.
Program materials are available upon request to the Director of Graduate Studies, Department of the History of Art, Yale University, 56 High Street, PO Box 208272, New Haven CT 06520-8272.
Courses
HSAR 500a, Critical Approaches to the History of Art Tim Barringer
This seminar, compulsory for first-year students and open only to them, offers an introductory survey of the historiography and methodology of the discipline from its origins to the present day. Students engage with a wide range of texts written by art historians, artists, critics, and theorists whose work is significant for the contemporary study of art history. M 1:30–3:20
HSAR 506a or b, The Teaching of the History of Art
By arrangement with faculty. History of Art graduate students only.
HSAR 512a or b, Directed Research
By arrangement with faculty.
HSAR 514a or b, Graduate Research Assistantship
HSAR 524b, Allegory Anne Dunlop
This seminar explores allegory as a visual and hermeneutical model; in both its pre-modern and post-modern forms. M 3:30–5:20
HSAR 581a/CLSS 890a, Roman Painting: Achievement and Legacy Diana Kleiner
Roman mural painting in all its aspects and innovations. Individual scenes and complete ensembles in palaces, villas, and houses in Rome and Pompeii are explored, as are their rediscovery and revival in the Renaissance and Neo-Classical period. Special attention is paid to the four architectural styles, history and mythological painting, the impact of the theater, the part played by landscape, genre, and still-life, the accidental survival of painted portraiture, and the discovery and rejection of trompe-l’oeil illusionism and linear perspective. T 1:30–3:20
HSAR 587a, German Gothic Sculpture, 1200–1450 Jacqueline Jung
Like their counterparts in France, the churches of later medieval German-speaking lands were filled with an abundance of sculpted figures, both free-standing and attached to architecture. Unlike the former, these monuments have received scant attention from Anglophone scholars. This neglect is all the more remarkable in light of the fine state of preservation of many German sculptural programs, their extraordinary level of technical quality and formal experimentation, and the abundant literature they have inspired among European scholars from the very inception of our discipline. This seminar explores the major sculptural monuments of Gothic Germany broadly defined (including Bamberg, Naumburg, Strasbourg, and Prague), as well as the figural types that flourished there and still survive in unusual numbers (such as crucifixes, Pietàs, and tomb effigies). The aim of the course is threefold: to provide students with deep knowledge of the various forms and functions of later medieval sculpture in Europe’s most expansive political territory; to re-evaluate the place of this art in the larger trajectory of medieval and early modern artistic production; and to consider the changing methods by which these objects and monuments have been approached by German scholars from the early twentieth century onward. Readings include classic works by Erwin Panofsky, Wilhelm Pinder, and Wilhelm Vöge, as well as more recent scholarship by Jacqueline Jung, Nina Rowe, Bernd Nicolai, Willibald Sauerländer, Helga Sciurie, Robert Suckale, and Michael Viktor Schwarz. German reading knowledge is essential. Th 1:30–3:20
HSAR 595b, Byzantium and Italy in the Later Middle Ages Robert Nelson
This course concentrates on Byzantine and Byzantinizing art in Italy and Italian colonies from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, with an emphasis on the later rather than the earlier centuries. For research projects, students may explore particular regions and cities (i.e., Venice, Genoa, Tuscany, Rome, southern Italy), consider monumental and minor arts, study the function of imported art and artists in local contexts, and investigate colonial Italian art in the East. General theoretical issues at play are the power of icons, cultural identity, cultural interaction, the social status of the foreign, and European colonialism before its expansion in the sixteenth century. T 1:30–3:20
HSAR 599a, The Kingdom of Cyprus in the Fourteenth Century Annemarie Carr
Can we construct a post-crusader culture from the surviving artifacts of fourteenth-century Cyprus; did the kingdom achieve such a culture? The collapse of the mainland crusader states at the end of the thirteenth century gave Cyprus a new autonomy as the sole Latin state in the Middle East. This reshaped its legacy of crusader multiculturalism in fundamental ways that we have yet to understand well, though investment in self-visualization was vigorous across the ethnic spectrum. Emphasis is placed on the Greek-speaking, Orthodox population and the degree to which it built a culture (or cultures) with, within, or alongside those of the island’s Latin rulers. W 1:30–3:20
HSAR 637a, Andrea del Castagno: Violence and the Male Figure in Quattrocento Florence Anne Dunlop
This seminar explores the role of the male figure in Quattrocento art and art theory through a focus on the Florentine artist Andrea del Castagno (c. 1419–1457). Readings are drawn from both period sources and contemporary writers, and the relations of early-modern art, violence, and crime form a major theme. W 3:30–5:20
HSAR 640b, The Image in Movement Christopher Wood
The seminar tracks a number of related developments in philosophy, art theory, and art history. In representationalist traditions of thought, whether idealist or semiotic, the image stands in for—or masks—something else more stable and real. Cultural studies, mistrustful of spectacle, extend this tradition of skepticism. Some recent theorists, in search of a non-mystified and non-alienated model of the image, have stressed the embodied, affective character of seeing and thinking. This tendency has led some art historians, paradoxically, to bracket the concept of the image and instead speak exclusively of objects and things endowed with person-like powers and agencies. The question of the seminar is: Do recent thought and technologies propose any new models of the image, especially in dynamic, vital, unstable, or metaphysical modalities, that might escape the traditional dialectic of iconophilia and iconoclasm? Other topics addressed include the image in religion, science studies, and psychoanalysis; theories of complexity and emergence; the image as trace, screen, or projection; mimetic, reproductive, or generative models of meaning-production; virtuality. The seminar provides a platform for realizations of new ideas about the image in various research fields. Readings from Deleuze, Damisch, Didi-Huberman, Crary, Tamen, Nancy, Latour, Boehm, Hansen, Mondzain, Gell, Michaud, Belting, Bredekamp. Th 1:30–3:20
HSAR 680a, Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, Socialists Tim Barringer
This traveling seminar examines the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848, and the Aesthetic Movement of the 1860s as offering alternative paradigms for understanding the formation and development of modern art. It further examines the relationship between art making and radical politics in Victorian Britain. The focus is on close analysis of works in their historical and intellectual context, that of British industrialization and global imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. The course concludes with a trip to England, in which students examine key works in public and private collections, and visit major exhibitions of the work of Ford Madox Brown (Birmingham) and Walter Crane (Manchester), participating in a pioneering academic conference on the latter. W 3:30–5:20
HSAR 682a, The Genre of Still Life Carol Armstrong
This seminar concerns the history of still life painting and photography from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century in France. We consider the genre of painting that was the lowest on the old hierarchy of genres as a site of contemplation of the following themes of modernity and modernism: materiality and commodification, medium-specificity, the gendering of the private sphere, fetishism, fantasy and displacement, subject/object relations, relations between the optical and the tactile, and the transformation of the artist’s studio. We also consider the theory of the genres to which this particular genre belonged. T 1:30–3:20
HSAR 684b, Painting Photography Film Carol Armstrong
This seminar, which takes its title from László Moholy-Nagy’s 1925 book of the same name, treats the concept of medium-specificity as it applies to painting, photography, film, and related media. It centers on photography and its historically vexed relationship to painting and the modernist discourses of medium purity, autonomy, and self-reflexivity, but it also takes up the history of those discourses as they relate to other media, and as they are troubled by the hybridity of the photograph. Beginning with the philosophical origins of the distinction between literature and the visual arts, the seminar considers Clement Greenberg’s polemics on painting, sculpture, and collage, and his occasional forays into photographic criticism. It addresses attempts at developing an ontology of the photograph (Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida most particularly), as well as criticisms of those attempts. It also addresses revisions of the definition of photography, as well as multi-media, inter-media, post-medium, and new media discourses. Finally, it looks at declarations and predictions of the death of painting, the end of photography, and the mutation of film into a digital medium, respectively. This is done by setting readings in key theoretical and critical texts in relation to particular practices in painting, drawing, and photography, as well as through discussions, oral presentations, and final papers. T 1:30–3:20
HSAR 690b, World Architecture Today Sandy Isenstadt
Focused examination of recent buildings, new scales of construction, and new urban forms from around the world that have yet to receive sustained secondary or critical study. Students regularly research new built works and prepare frequent, short critiques. Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor. W 3:30–5:20
HSAR 703b, Global Contemporary Art David Joselit
This seminar makes a sustained effort to survey contemporary art (1980–present) from around the world. In recent years biennials and scholarly research have brought a broader range of art practices to the attention of the art market and the art world more broadly. This course is focused not only on these diverse practices, but also on attempting to account for broader international tendencies and market forces. Is there a global art, or merely a mosaic of unrelated local practices? T 9:25–11:15
HSAR 704a, Virtual Street David Joselit
This seminar addresses questions of public space and its disappearance into virtuality in the second half of the twentieth century. The preponderance of the course is devoted to close study of “street photography” in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, informed by readings by authors such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Kristin Ross, and Michael Warner. Following these discussions we explore virtual space online through consideration of such sites as “Second Life.” T 9:25–11:15
HSAR 712a, The Documents Moment Sebastian Zeidler
The Paris journal Documents (1929/30), a magnet for renegade Surrealist artists and critics, gave rise to texts and objects of great complexity. That complexity is usually refracted through the lens of the mind of one man: Georges Bataille. This class duly examines how key terms from Bataille’s lexicon have been brought to bear on visual art, whether by Bataille himself or by art historians writing in his wake. But we also widen the purview to consider figures like Carl Einstein and Michel Leiris as well as their intellectual resources, among them Nietzsche and Freud, Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl; and not just for the sake of completeness, either. For what emerges in their writings, on the Surrealism of Arp, Miró, or Picasso, on non-Western cultures, and on Renaissance art, seems to be a line of thought different from Bataille’s, one that thinks the purpose of the modern work to be not a negation of transcendence—an attack on the “Self”—but an affirmation of immanence: a plea for “subjectivity.” Supposedly a furnace of critical negativity, in which a dominant model of the relation between human subjects and their world (what Heidegger called the “world picture”) was annihilated, Documents may yet turn out to have been a laboratory in which a positive countermodel emerged in art and text. TH 2:30–4:20
HSAR 713b, Soviet Constructivism Sebastian Zeidler
This seminar is designed as an introduction to one of the pivotal moments of modern art: the decade after 1917, when a generation of Russian artists suddenly found themselves empowered to invent a revolutionary art to match a successful political revolution. We consider the spectacular breadth of the efforts by Tatlin, Rodchenko, Klucis, and others to meet that daunting brief, across all media and genres, whether with painting, photomontage, exhibition design, or the new Constructivist “object,” both productivist and laboratory. But we also notice that the term “avant-garde,” once routinely applied to their work, has all but disappeared from the recent literature, and for reasons that need to be taken seriously. Can it be restored to these artists? A look at work usually examined separately—Soviet photography (powerfully on display in the recent Rodchenko shows in Paris and London) and select Soviet films and film theory (invigorated by new studies of Vertov and by Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books)—suggests that perhaps it might. But that may in turn require rethinking the term “avant-garde” itself, specifically the nature and thrust of its politics. What the artists assured their overseers was art produced in the spirit of dialectical materialism may be more accurately called a politics of being, whose visibility, to use a term Deleuze lifted from Foucault, was the artworks themselves. M 1:30–3:20
HSAR 714b, Globalization of Modern Craft Edward Cooke, Jr.
This seminar explores the development of self-conscious craft in the condition of modernity. Emerging from the work of the English designer-writer William Morris, modern craft has been intertwined with issues of identity (national and personal), class, and politics. Its intellectual foundation in the writings of Morris has also permitted modern craft to spread throughout the globe, taking root in different ways and at different times. The seminar investigates this geographic and temporal spread in a comparative fashion. W 3:30–5:20
HSAR 732a, The Material and Visual Culture of New Haven Edward Cooke, Jr.
Local history remains the foundation of all historical inquiry, but it is essential to connect the specifics of place to broader interpretive themes. This seminar uses the built environment and collections of New Haven to explore questions of culture and society, including production, consumption, and distribution; gender, class, and ethnicity; home, work, and leisure; and non-verbal communication, memory, and history. The goal is to build up visual and material literacy in a contextual manner. W 1:30–3:20
HSAR 737a/AMST 737a, Craft and Design in Post-World War II America Edward Cooke, Jr.
In the two decades following World War II, economic prosperity and cultural optimism led to the golden age of American industrial design and the expansion of craft education programs in the universities. The term “designer/craftsman” was a respected label. Yet, by the 1970s, crafts, design, and art were three separate spheres. This seminar draws on period writings and artifactual examination to explore the interconnections of craft and design in the 1950s, their subsequent fragmentation, and recent attempts to build connections. W 3:30–5:20
HSAR 750b, The Legacy of George Kubler in Latin American Art History Mary Miller
This seminar looks at the approaches developed by George Kubler to the study of Precolumbian, Colonial, and Latin American art. Kubler’s own writings are read in conjunction with other writers who addressed the same or similar topics, especially Kelemen, Wethey, McAndrew, Wilder, Covarrubias, and Rowe in the United States, along with Fernandéz, O’Gorman, and Reyes in Mexico, so that his writing is read within the contexts of the larger currents of the time. Each member of the seminar explores the subject more fully by reading original and unpublished materials in the Manuscripts and Archives Collection of Sterling Memorial Library. M 7–8:50 p.m.
HSAR 778bu/AFAM 728bu/AFST 778bu, From West Africa to the Black Americas: The Black Atlantic Visual Tradition Robert Thompson
Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations south of the Sahara—Mali, Asante, Dahomey, Yoruba, Ejagham, Kongon—and their impact on the rise of New World art and music. TTh 11:35–12:50
HSAR 779au/AFAM 729au, New York Mambo: Microcosm of Black Creativity Robert Thompson
Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations of the world of New York mambo and salsa. Emphasis on Palmieri, Cortijo, Roena, Harlow, and Colon. Examination of parallel traditions, such as New York Haitian art, Dominican meringue, reggae and rastas of Jamaican Brooklyn, and the New York school of Brazilian Capoeira. TTh 11:35–12:50
HSAR 781a/AFAM 739a/AFST 781a, Problem and Theory in Afro-Atlantic Architecture I: Africa Robert Thompson
The seminar addresses a new frontier—rebuilding the inner cities. This refers to Latino and mainland black cities within the cities of America. Accordingly, the course focuses on major roots of Latino and black traditional architecture. Topics include the architecture of Djenne, Berber art and architecture, Mauritanian sites, the monumental stone architecture of Zimbabwe, the sacred architecture of Ethiopia, and Muslim-influenced architecture from Rabat to Zanzibar. Then comes a case-by-case examination of some of the sites of African influence on the architecture of the Americas—the Puerto Rican casita; the southern verandah; the round-houses of New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Mexico, Panama, and Columbia; Ganvie, the Venice of West Africa, and its mirror image among the tidal stilt architectures of blacks of the Choco area in Pacific Columbia. Th 3:30–5:20
HSAR 781b/AFAM 739b/AFST 781b, Problem and Theory in Afro-Atlantic Architecture II: The Black Americas Robert Thompson
A continuation of HSAR 781a. Th 3:30–5:20
HSAR 788a, Barbarians, Frontiers, and Otherness in Chinese Art Lillian Tseng
The seminar investigates how pictorial art represented military conflicts and diplomatic negotiations between Han and non-Han regimes in pre-modern China. It is primarily concerned with the visual products that resulted from the discrimination between nomadic “barbarism”and agricultural “civilization.” It also considers how religion, gender, and morality played a role in constructing ethnicity and in shaping the world view. Chinese is not required. Th 2:30–4:20
HSAR 793b, Chinese Painting of the Seventeenth Century David Sensabaugh
The seventeenth century is an epochal phase in the history of later Chinese painting. During the late Ming period and the early reigns of the Qing dynasty, against the backdrop of political collapse and foreign conquest, Chinese painters continued their long engagement with the past but also opened themselves to the world around them in ways that had not been attempted for centuries. The result was an explosion of fresh directions. The painters’ experiments set the course for Chinese painting over the next several centuries and are still being felt today. The seminar examines seventeenth-century painting, beginning with Dong Qichang (1555–1636) and the painters of the late Ming and ending with Shitao (1642–1718), Bada Shanren (1626–1705), and Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715) in the early Qing. The Art Gallery’s holdings of seventeenth-century paintings serve as focal points for relevant sessions. T 2:30–4:20
Next: History of Science and Medicine
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