History of Art

56 High, 432.2668
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Edward Cooke, Jr. (102A AG, 432.2670, edward.cooke@yale.edu)

Director of Graduate Studies
Christopher Wood (202 OAG, christopher.wood@yale.edu)

Professors
Brian Allen (Adjunct), Walter Cahn, Judith Colton, Edward Cooke, Jr., Diana Kleiner, Mary Miller, Alexander Nemerov, Jock Reynolds (Adjunct), Vincent Scully (Emeritus), Robert Thompson, Christopher Wood, Mimi Yiengpruksawan

Associate Professors
Christy Anderson, Maria Georgopoulou

Assistant Professors
Judith Barringer, Timothy Barringer, Anne Dunlop, Björn Ewald, Sandy Isenstadt, Kellie Jones, Christine Mehring, Noa Steimatsky

Lecturers
Mark Aronson, Theresa Fairbanks, Karen Foster, Pamela Franks, Alice Hyland (Visiting), Julia Marciari-Alexander, Joachim Pissarro, Kishwar Rizvi (Visiting)

Fields of Study
Fields include Greek and Roman; Medieval and Byzantine; Renaissance; Baroque; eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European; African; African American; American; British; Pre-Columbian; Chinese; Japanese; and film.

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Students in the history of art must pass examinations in German or French, and one other language pertinent to their field of study. One examination must be passed at the beginning of the first term, the other not later than the beginning of the third term. German is required for students in Western art. Students of Chinese art must qualify in Chinese, Japanese, and either German or French, and they have an extra year in which to do so. During the first two and a half years of study, students normally take thirteen term courses. Students receive one course credit as Teaching Fellows when they lead a discussion session. 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. By the end of the first term of the third year, the student is expected to have established a dissertation topic. A prospectus outlining the topic must be approved by a committee at a colloquium. During the spring term of the third year the student is expected to take the qualifying examination. The candidate must demonstrate knowledge of his or her field and related areas, as well as a good grounding in method and bibliography. Students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. upon completion of all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus and qualifying examination. Admission to candidacy must take place by the end of the third year of study, unless prior, noncumulative registration has been granted.

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 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 Graduate School requirements. Alternatively, the Department of the History of Art offers, in conjunction with the Medieval Studies program, a joint M.Phil. degree. 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, Introduction to the Study of Art History. Christine Mehring. Thursday 1.30-3.20
This class introduces students to the methods of the discipline of art history, such as, for example, connoisseurship, iconography, feminism, and social art history. The class is reserved for incoming graduate students in the History of Art department.

HSAR 504b, Aspects of Connoisseurship and Conservation. Theresa Fairbanks, Catherine Sease.
Combines four-week internships in curatorial departments with seminars to address the history of museums, current trends, and future challenges. Enrollment limited to ten.

HSAR 506a or b, The Teaching of the History of Art.
History of Art graduate students only. By arrangement with faculty.

HSAR 512a or b, Directed Research.
By arrangement with faculty.

HSAR 514a or b, Curatorial Training.
By arrangement with faculty.

HSAR 574b, Greek Vase Painting. Judith Barringer. Wednesday 2.30-4.20
A detailed study of Greek vases-their fabric, ornament, artisans, market, function, and social context-from the Geometric through the late Classical period, c. 750-340 B.C. Although the focus is on Attic vases, i.e., those produced in Athens, the course also examines vessels from elsewhere in the Greek world. Using both traditional and more theoretical methods, the course considers such issues as the relationships between image, shape, and context; variations in depicting the same myth or scene; the meaning and function of "genre" scenes and their relationship to myth; the use of repetition on a given vase; the relationship between Greek vase painting and other ancient media, including metalware and monumental wall painting; the impact of the portability and the three-dimensional nature of vases on their imagery; the relationship between artist and patron; and how vase painting can illuminate our knowledge of Greek religion, gender roles and sexuality, social hierarchy, and politics. Readings include both ancient authors and modern scholarship. The course draws heavily on the Yale University Art Gallery's collection, and field trips are scheduled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also CLSS 806b.

HSAR 578a, Death in Rome: Myths and Monuments, Rituals and Viewers. Björn Ewald. Monday 3.30-5.20
An introduction to Roman funerary art from Republican times to c. 300 A.D., in a broad cultural and anthropological context. Topics include burial customs and grave rituals, funerary speeches and inscriptions, as well as the spatial contexts in which the monuments were seen. Special emphasis on Roman sarcophagi, perhaps the most significant body of images from the Roman world. Also CLSS 835a.

HSAR 579b, Contested Identities: The Making of Architecture in the Modern (Islamic) World. Kishwar Rizvi. Tuesday 2.30-4.20
This course studies the ideas and concepts that inform the making and reception of architecture in Islamic Asia, with a focus on Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The encounter with Western powers has now been sublimated to the degree of global theories of design; nonetheless these countries are in search of an indigenous aesthetic expression. In the Islamic world, new fundamentalisms and shifting religious trends have created an environment in which each country must renegotiate its part and reconsider its collective future. Whether through suppressing their Islamic roots, as in the case of Republican Turkey, or through reinventing them, as in the case of Pakistan, these countries create their national image. And it is through their public architecture that they convey their political and religious ideology. This course analyzes cases of colonial and nationalist architecture in Islamic countries, by situating them in the context of their social and religious history.

HSAR 585b, The Art and Culture of the Crusades. Maria Georgopoulou. Thursday 1.30-3.20
Study of the architecture of the crusaders based on archaeological material, museum objects, and medieval chronicles. Special emphasis is placed on cross-cultural encounters and artistic exchanges.

HSAR 589b, Romanesque Sculpture. Walter Cahn. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
Sculpture of medieval Europe from the eleventh to the end of the twelfth century, its sources, development, and significance. Emphasis on issues and open questions. General knowledge of medieval art desirable.

HSAR 594a, Medieval and Renaissance Book Illumination. Walter Cahn. Thursday 10.30-12.20
Introduction to the study of illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with practical exercises in various aspects of the art of the book, making use of the holdings of the Beinecke Library and other collections nearby.

HSAR 595a, Mediterranean Cities in the Middle Ages. Maria Georgopoulou. Friday 10.30-12.20
Investigation and assessment of the existing models for the study of cities through the eyes (and the concerns) of art historians. Focusing on the architecture and urban planning of specific cities (Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Rome, Venice), the course asks how meaning is generated in the urban environment, how space is sanctified, and how the urban fabric embodies varied social relationships.

HSAR 601a, Replication Technology and Renaissance Art. Christopher Wood. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
Investigation of the new technologies of the mechanical replication of images, in two and three dimensions, that emerged in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. The powerful impact of the invention of movable type in the mid-fifteenth century is generally acknowledged, but the replication of images is usually dealt with as a secondary topic even within the discipline of art history. This course tries to take the measure of the technological revolution that brought pictures into every European home. The course also looks at the history of Renaissance art from the point of view of replication technology and media theory. The premise of the course is that the mechanical multiplication of forms was a crucial factor in the shaping of the modern concepts of the work of art, the artist-as-author, and the beholder. The seminar involves close work with woodcuts and engravings, books and book illustration, cast sculpture, medals and coins, and copies of paintings, at the Art Gallery and other museums.

HSAR 630b, Gender and the Construction of Italian Renaissance Art. Anne Dunlop. Thursday 3.30-5.20
This seminar focuses on recent work on gender issues in Italian Renaissance art history. Topics to be covered include: the distinction between sex and gender, if any; the links between theories of creation and procreation; identity and the portrait; and the problem of defining the erotic in images of this period.

HSAR 641b, Poussin and the French Royal Academy of Painting. Judith Colton. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
Topics of interest in Poussin's painting, including his early interpretation of mythological subject matter, his treatment of history and allegory, his attitude toward religion, and his treatment of landscape. Equal attention is paid to the uses to which Poussin's art was put by the Academicians of the later seventeenth century and their successors.

HSAR 648a, Baroque Art and Its Critical Fortune. Judith Colton. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
The seminar begins with an overview of Italian Baroque art, using as its point of departure the recent treatment of it in such major exhibitions as "The Genius of Rome," held in London and Rome in 2001. This is followed by selected studies in the reception, especially the rejection, of the Baroque from the seventeenth century to our own day. Students interested, for example, in Neoclassicism, in Pugin and the Gothic Revival, in Ruskin and such American "Ruskinians" as James Jackson Jarves and Charles Eliot Norton, or in Italian neorealist cinema, will be encouraged to look at ways in which these movements or individuals reacted to the Seicento in general, or to individual artists of the Seicento (e.g., Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa, Bernini).

HSAR 649a, British Art and Its Critical Fortune. Timothy Barringer. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
The seminar examines aspects of the diverse visual culture of the British Empire, utilizing recent developments in critical theory and imperial history. Special emphasis on representations of colonial landscape and the body of the colonial subject; empire and material culture; the display of colonial objects; Orientalism in British art; imperial pageantry and invented traditions.

HSAR 680a, Impressionism: Painters, Writers, and Critics. Joachim Pissarro. Thursday 3.30-5.20
This course examines the relationships between the artistic production of the Impressionist group and the art criticism generated by "art critics" who were better known in the literary world as writers of fiction or poetry. Examples of literary and critical texts by Baudelaire, Zola, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Mirbeau, Laforgue, and Verhaeren are studied in relation to works by the Impressionists.

HSAR 695b, Abstraction. Christine Mehring. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
This seminar considers the abstract art produced in Western art in the course of the twentieth century. Guided by three major themes-Why Abstraction?, Modernism's Nightmares, and Beyond Modernism-the class explores different models for understanding abstract painting and sculpture. Such models include political utopias, phenomenology, decoration, the ready-made, appropriation, and iconographies of form. Artists discussed include El Lissitzky, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse, and Damien Hirst. Prerequisite: familiarity with twentieth-century art.

HSAR 696b, Issues in Performance Art. Kellie Jones. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
Wedged between the rudiments of theater and the gestures of visual art, performance art came to prominence at the end of the twentieth century. This course concentrates on artists and practices after 1960. However, we also consider the roots of this form in the first part of the twentieth century as well as in earlier periods. Central to our investigations are discussions surrounding performance as catalytic process, as temporal art, and issues of the body as form. African-American performance art is the focus for this semester. Also AFAM 768b.

HSAR 697b, Material Vision. Sandy Isenstadt. Thursday 2.30-4.20
This course focuses on recent theories regarding the visual construction of meaningful artifacts. Sustained reference is made to architecture as an irreducibly material practice in the context of a society increasingly oriented toward visual experience.

HSAR 723b, Language and Landscape: Rhetorics of American Painting 1848-1870. Alexander Nemerov. Thursday 1.30-3.20
In the middle of the nineteenth century, American landscape painters sublimated the dark energies of earlier artists, notably Thomas Cole. They also helped make landscape a "national" art ostensibly more expressive of the country than, say, the genre painting of the late 1830s and 1840s. This sublimated imagery-of smooth fields, sunny days, and distant mountains-grew in tandem with the era's bourgeois art criticism, and more broadly with the middle-class American novel in these years. This course studies not just the interrelation between landscape and language in mid-nineteenth-century American painting-the role of Ruskin, of The Crayon, and of art criticism generally-but more precisely whether or not the era's paintings may be felt to be "written" or "spoken." Did mid-century landscape painters understand the structures of their paintings in terms of the era's smooth, polished, and unperturbed prose? Did they see painting mountains instead of saloons or pumpkin patches as an avoidance of "dialect" in favor of polite middle-class speech? If so, what to make of paintings that speak in both tongues, that use the language both of the cabin and the grand sublimatory view out the cabin's window? Also AMST 723b.

HSAR 730a, The Home Front: American Visual Culture 1941-1945. Alexander Nemerov. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
During the war years, Hollywood made many propaganda films, and painters made many pictures aiming to benefit the war effort; in this seminar, however, we examine films and paintings which manifestly have little to do with the war-films such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Shadow of a Doubt, The Ghost Ship, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Body Snatcher; paintings such as Gorky's Liver is the Cock's Comb and One Year the Milkweed-in order to understand something of a "home front culture": a culture of diversions and distractions that is yet haunted by a pathos, a deep awareness, of the bloodshed all around. Also AMST 730a.

HSAR 740b, Pre-Columbian Art in the Yale University Art Gallery. Mary Miller. Mon/Wed 1.30-3.20
Recent Pre-Columbian acquisitions of the Yale University Art Gallery. Preparation of essays for the YUAG Bulletin.

HSAR 746a, Mexican Art of the Sixteenth Century. Mary Miller, Jaime Lara. Mon/Wed 1:30-3:20
Works from both Aztec and Christian traditions are explored, with special attention to the patronage by Franciscans, Augustinians, and Dominicans of indigenous artists. The seminar considers the monumental building programs of the religious, as well as manuscripts, paintings, and sculpture. Issues of survival, resistance, acceptance, and syncretism are all examined. Also REL 846a.

HSAR 778bu, From West Africa to the Black Americas. Robert Thompson. Tues/Thurs 11.30-12.45
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. Also AFAM 728bu.

HSAR 779au, New York Mambo: Microcosm of Black Creativity. Robert Thompson. Tues/Thurs 11.30-12.45
Rise, development, and philosophic achievement of the world of New York mambo and salsa. Emphasis on Palmieri, Cortijo, Roena, Harlow, and Colon. Examination of parallel traditions, e.g., New York Haitian art, Dominican merengue, reggae and rastas of Jamaican Brooklyn, and the New York school of Brazilian capoeira. Also AFAM 729au.

HSAR 781a, Problem and Theory in Afro-Atlantic Architecture I: Africa. Robert Thompson. Thursday 3.30-5.20
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-Ituri Forest and Namibian spatial solutions, Berber casbah architecture and its interactions with the Jews on Djerba isle and in Morocco, the concept of the Muslim assatayah creolized into the Iberia azotea and the spread of this terrace-roof style throughout Latin America. 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 Colombia; Ganvie, the Venice of West Africa, and its mirror image among the tidal stilt architectures of blacks of the Choco area in Pacific Colombia. The seminar ends with the shrine architecture of New World adherents of the classical religions of Dahomey. Also AFAM 739a or b.

HSAR 781b, Problem and Theory in Afro-Atlantic Architecture II: The Black Americas. Robert Thompson. Thursday 3.30-5.20
A continuation of HSAR 781a.

HSAR 804b, Art and Aristocracy in Kyoto 1000-1200. Mimi Yiengpruksawan.
The eleventh and twelfth centuries in Japan saw the emergence of stylistic and technical innovations in the visual arts that were generated in a matrix of aristocratic patronage and palace politics and in effect established a set of norms for what came to be understood as "Japanese" art. These innovations have been instrumental in the definition and analysis of what is Japanese about Japanese art. They include the yamato style in painting, the Jocho mode in statuary, and architectural practices such as shinden-zukuri. This seminar critically examines both the context in which these innovations occurred and their broader ramifications for the study of premodern Japan. Participants in the seminar study visual materials, literary and historical resources, and critical theoretical readings where appropriate. Particular emphasis on the artistic and intellectual circles that emerged around Fujiwara no Michinaga in the early eleventh century and around the retired emperors Shirakawa and Toba in the early twelfth century.

HSAR 805b, The Literary and the Visual in Taisho Japan. Mimi Yiengpruksawan, John Whittier Treat. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
The Taisho period (1912-1926) was one of intense ferment for both Japanese writers and painters, many of whom closely collaborated. This seminar examines prominent figures of the day who contributed significantly to Taisho Modernism in either the plastic or the literary arts or both. These figures include the White Birch School (Shirakabaha) writers and painters; "I-novel" practioners such as Chikamatsu Shuko; masters of oil self-portraiture such as Kishida Ryusei; and high modernists such as Kawabata Yasunari and Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Guest lecturers address special topics throughout the semester. Prerequisites: fluent reading ability in modern Japanese and basic familiarity with the history of modern Japanese art; or the permission of the instructors. Also JAPN 870b.

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