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
Alexander Nemerov (203 OAG, 432.8442, alexander.nemerov@yale.edu)
Professors
Brian Allen (Adjunct), 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, Suzanne Boorsch, Georgia Clarke (Visiting), Theresa Fairbanks-Harris, Gillian Forrester, Karen Foster, Kishwar Rizvi (Visiting), Rebecca Zorach (Visiting)
Fields of Study
Fields include Greek and Roman; Medieval and Byzantine; Renaissance; Baroque; eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European; Modern Architecture; 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 (which may be French or German). 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. 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.
The faculty considers teaching to be an important part of the professional preparation of graduate students. Students in the History of Art will teach in their second and third years. They receive a total of one course credit as teaching fellows when they lead a discussion section.
Combined Ph.D. Programs
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. M 3.30–5.20
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-Harris, Catherine Sease. T 2.30–4.20
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 520a, Histories and Critiques of the Art Museum. Timothy Barringer. W 1.30–3.20
Using recent critical literature in the field, this seminar investigates the history of the art museum from 1750 to the present. Issues include the formation of canons, the social role of the museum, museums and the formation of material and cultural identities, imperialism and the museum, the promotion of modernism, and the relation between contemporary art and the museum.
HSAR 575a, Hellenistic Art. Judith Barringer. W 2.30–4.20
This seminar considers major issues and problems in Hellenistic art (sculpture, mosaics, painting, and "minor" arts) and architecture with an emphasis on historical, political, and religious considerations. Topics to be addressed include: Alexander's image and its impact, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, "Graeco-Roman" art, the appeal and function of exotic and erotic sculpture, Athens as a Classical memory and as a Hellenistic reality, and the impact of Rome as conquering power and voracious art collector. Also CLSS 802a.
HSAR 577b, Roman Imperial Art. Björn Ewald. Th 2.30–4.20
A course on Roman Imperial art, comprising the period from Augustus to Constantine (late first century B.C. to fourth century A.D.). The focus is on the so-called historical reliefs which once adorned or still adorn public buildings (like triumphal arches) and monuments (like the Ara Pacis). They are part of an elaborate visual system of official art which served to praise imperial virtues and to imprint the imperial accomplishments on the "collective memory" of Roman society. Also CLSS 844b.
HSAR 579a, Contested Identities: The Making of Architecture in the Modern (Islamic) World. Kishwar Rizvi. T 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 596b, Architecture, Form, and Function in the Eastern Medieval World. Maria Georgopoulou. W 1.30–3.20
Focus on religious and secular architecture in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Analysis of the architectural space and its decoration in terms of function. Special emphasis on liturgy, court ceremonial, and civic ritual.
HSAR 633a, Desire in the Renaissance. Anne Dunlop. Th 3.30–5.20
This course examines the role of desire in the art of Renaissance Italy and France, using the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery. Seminars focus on specific works in the collection, and participants research a Renaissance object from the gallery for their final papers. Discussion topics include wedding rituals and associated objects; beauty and desire; the erotics of looking in the Renaissance; and the place of likeness in pre-modern art and theory.
HSAR 648a, Baroque Art and Its Critical Fortune. Judith Colton. W 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 650b, Rereading Ruskin. Timothy Barringer. W 1.30–3.20
This seminar reconsiders the works of the Victorian polymath John Ruskin in the light of the multiple publications and events of the centenary year of 2001. Ruskin is examined as a literary figure, art critic, artist, aesthetic theorist, social critic, reformer, and educationist. Each week a major text is subjected to close scrutiny and placed in a range of historical and discursive contexts. This seminar also considers works of art of significance to Ruskin, in the Yale Center for British Art and elsewhere.
HSAR 669a, Fontainebleau and the Performance of Meaning. Rebecca Zorach. T 3.30–5.20
This seminar addresses interpretive quandaries related to the school of Fontainebleau and its esotericism (and eroticism) through an examination of the role of humanism and book publishing, the uses of allegory and mythology, displays of royal power (through ceremonial entries and court entertainments), artists' accounts (e.g., Cellini's theatricality), presentation drawings (Rosso's Mars and Venus), and other examples. Aided by theoretical readings on performance and performativity, we reconceive questions of the "meaning" of works, beyond iconography, as the product of practice and performance in which they are/were embedded.
HSAR 698b, Monuments and Other Containers of Memory. Sandy Isenstadt. W 1.30–3.20
Architecture endures in at least two senses. First, it is usually made of hard stuff, which resists erosion over time. More importantly, it can remain meaningful long after those who built it are gone, both containing memories and prompting continued interpretation across generations. This has everything to do with the merits of a particular building, as well as the peculiar predicament of human memory. By looking at buildings and objects designed to preserve or, in some cases, induce memory, this seminar examines the political and cultural life of the built environment.
HSAR 704b, German Art of the Sixties. Christine Mehring. M 3.30–5.20
This seminar examines the art produced in Germany during the 1960s. Themes to be discussed include the traditions of Expressionism and Romanticism, the strategies of anti-art and activist art, nationalism and the question of "German art," the influx of American culture, as well as the rise of consumerism and the art market. We consider prominent artists such as Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys as well as less known ones such as the early Jorg Immendorff, K. P. Brehmer, or Thomas Bayrle; the role of the Fluxus and Zero movements, Capitalist Realism, and various German Pop artists; and the figurative painting of Berlin's Großgorschen 35 and the Muchich Spur group.
HSAR 715a, Cinematic Landscapes in Postwar Europe. Noa Steimatsky. T 11.30–3 (film screenings included)
This seminar traces a trajectory of postwar European film production that privileges actual locations, the landscape of the everyday, as arenas where realist and modernist discourses converge. Focus on the work of Antonioni, Rossellini, Bresson, Godard, Straub-Huiller, and Akerman, among others. Discussion of the periodizing of film history, new articulations of cinematic space and temporality, the tracing of action and affect, the restoration of identity in the quotidian landscape. Also FILM 811a.
HSAR 718a, American Novel 1895–1910. Alexander Nemerov. Th 1.30–3.20
In this seminar we read works by Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederic, Henry James, Jack London, and Frank Norris. We also consult secondary scholarship by authors such as Bill Brown, Michael Fried, Amy Kaplan, and Mark Seltzer. Our aim is twofold: first, to develop skills of literary interpretation; and second, to use the literature to open new ways of understanding the era's visual arts. Also AMST 718a.
HSAR 719b, The Sense of Place in American Art. Alexander Nemerov. Th 3.30–5.20
Place is both ubiquitous and invisible in studies of American art. So many works of American art deal centrally with place—Church's Mt. Ktaadn, Thayer's Mt. Monadnock, Homer's Prout's Neck paintings, Bingham's Missouri pictures, to name just a few. Others concern a sense of place more obliquely: de Kooning's paintings in (and maybe of) the Hamptons, for example, or de Kooning's and Kline's in (and of) New York. Still further, we as art historians routinely speak of paintings being located in certain museums in certain cities, and we travel to see them there: in some way, the actual painting's physical location is also about a poetics of place. Yet for the most part these locations remain unstudied. In this seminar, we theorize the role of place in poetry and painting, and build historically specific readings of certain American meditations on place, dating from the early nineteenth century through the work of the abstract expressionists. Also AMST 719b.
HSAR 737b, Craft and Design in Post-World War II America. Edward Cooke, Jr. W 3.30–5.20
In the two decades after 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. Also AMST 737b.
HSAR 746a, Art and Architecture of Mesoamerica A.D. 800–1000. Mary Miller. M 1.30–3.20
A time of unusual international activity that saw contact range from lower Central America to the U.S. Southwest, the years 800–1000 were also fractious and troubled ones in Mesoamerica. This seminar examines the wealthy cities and enclaves that mounted successful campaigns of art and architecture in this era, particularly Seibal and Chichen Itza in the south, Tula, Cacaxtla, and Xochicalco to the north. Particular attention is given to new architectural forms of the period, particularly as developed in southern Campeche and the Puuc region.
HSAR 778bu, From West Africa to the Black Americas. Robert Thompson. TTh 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. TTh 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. Th 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.
HSAR 781b, Problem and Theory in Afro-Atlantic Architecture II: The Black Americas. Robert Thompson. Th 3.30–5.20
A continuation of HSAR 781a. Also AFAM 739b.
HSAR 818a, The Illustrated Scroll in Japan and Its Theorization. Mimi Yiengpruksawan. W 3.30–5.20
What is the nature of pictorial narrative in classical Japan? How does the illustrated scroll, the emaki, formulate and punctuate this discourse? What are the formal and functional modalities of the emaki, its religious and societal iconographies? The seminar addresses these and related issues in a comprehensive exploration of the narrative scroll for its multiple ramifications, pictorial and textual, in the visual field and as a social project.
Next: History of Medicine and Science
|
