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
David Joselit (204 OAG, 432.2666, david.joselit@yale.edu)

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

Associate Professors
Christy Anderson, Timothy Barringer, Martin Berger (Visiting), Jonathan D. Katz (Adjunct)

Assistant Professors
Anne Dunlop, Björn Ewald, Sandy Isenstadt, Kellie Jones, Christine Mehring, Noa Steimatsky, Lillian Tseng

Lecturers
Mark Aronson, Karen Foster, Patricia Garland, Susan Greenberg, Katherine Haskins, John Marciari, Julia Marciari-Alexander, Susan Matheson

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 are required to do four terms of teaching. This requirement is fulfilled in the second and third year. They receive a total of one course credit as teaching fellows when they lead a discussion section. In lieu of teaching for one or two terms, students may also serve as a research assistant at either the Yale University Art Gallery or the British Art Center. 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 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. 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, Introduction to the Study of Art History.  David Joselit.
M 3.30–5.20
This seminar introduces first-year graduate students to some of the fundamental concepts and theorists of the discipline of art history. Clusters of assigned texts approach large methodological questions as they developed over time. For instance, in the category of “Form” we read Panofsky on perspective alongside Damisch on the same subject. Questions of history span the thinking of Riegl, Kubler, and Clark as well as Nochlin and Pollock. Semiotics is approached not only through recent theorists such as Derrida but in light of Panofsky's concept of iconography and Warburg's morphologies. Deleuze and Guattari's notions of faciality are judged along with Fried's recent interpretations of Manet.

HSAR 504b, Aspects of Connoisseurship and Conservation.  Theresa Fairbanks.
T 1.30–3.20
A survey of the techniques and materials employed in Western painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from antiquity to the present. Modern examination techniques analyzed as tools for connoisseurship, dating, and authentication, including how age, damage, and restoration change works of art. General concepts of preservation and conservation investigated.

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, Curatorial Training.
By arrangement with faculty.

HSAR 580a, Everyday Romans in Extraordinary Times: The Art and Culture of the Non-Elite in Ancient Rome.  Diana Kleiner.
T 1.30–3.20
Art and everyday Romans in Rome and Pompeii. A study of a half-century of scholarly discourse and its focus on non-elite Romans and their role as unique patrons and viewers. Case study analysis of the interaction between high and low art, the visibility of the “trickle-down” phenomenon, and the distinction between the portrayal of non-elites in imperialistic state-sponsored monuments and their own privately commissioned portraits and narrative scenes. Also CLSS 878a.

HSAR 585b, Iconography of Christian Art: The Image of Christ.  Jaime Lara.
MW 1.30–2.50
Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. His image dominates Western art; and it is not sameness but kaleidoscopic variety that is its most conspicuous feature. Indeed, for most of those twenty centuries there has been little or no concern to represent him as a first-century Palestinian Jewish male. Each successive epoch has “created” him anew in accordance with its own character. This course explores, from the first to the twenty-first century, what it was that each epoch found in Jesus and brought to its visual portrayal of him. Also REL 835b.

HSAR 586b, The House of the Lord: Twenty Centuries of Church Architecture.  Jaime Lara.
TTh 1.30–2.50
This course is a historical survey of religious architecture, primarily the religious buildings of the Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Lectures, assigned readings, and class discussion emphasize architectural iconography and the way in which these buildings functioned for changing social or worship needs over the course of the centuries. After some initial consideration of sacred sites in general, we begin with the Jewish structures of the tent, Temple, and synagogue, and then move onto Christian house-churches, basilicas, monasteries, cathedrals, meeting houses, and mega-churches in Europe and the Americas. The last part deals with contemporary worship spaces designed for the renewed liturgies of the faith traditions. Class meetings are supplemented by visits to houses of worship in the New Haven area, and students may either write a research paper or create a project with scale model. Also REL 847b.

HSAR 600b, Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel.  Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
Th 1.30-3.20
Studies in visual and verbal realism, which take their cue from the nineteenth-century practice of comparing the novel to seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Readings include selected art theory and criticism from Reynolds to the present, and novels by Balzac, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Also CPLT 696b, ENGL 819b.

HSAR 630b, Pontormo and the Florentine Renaissance.  John Marciari.
T 1.30–3.20
This seminar studies Florentine art during the first half of the sixteenth century, using Jacopo da Pontormo as a focal point. Part of the term is spent looking at the frameworks that have been used to write the history of art for the period, ranging from a critical reading of Vasari to an examination of the concept of Mannerism as defined by modern scholars, to a consideration of the successes and shortcomings of style history. We also examine the special character of artistic practice in Pontormo's Florentine milieu. The seminar incorporates close first-hand study of works by Pontormo and other artists including Bronzino, Allori, Salviati, and Vasari, including both drawings and paintings in the Yale Art Gallery and the works shown in the exhibition “Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the winter of 2004–2005.

HSAR 635a, Fiction, Imitation, and Pre-Modern Images.  Anne Dunlop.
Th 10–12
Convincing imitation of the real may be the oldest Western idea of art, yet it has always been an ambiguous one. At least since Plato the visual has been attacked—but also sometimes celebrated—as the realm of the false. Truth needed to be sought “behind” appearances, but images could deceive; and viewers were encouraged to imitate fictive doubles, but also to take pleasure in games of fictive space. This seminar focuses on the linked ideas of fiction and imitation in theories of art before about 1500. Readings are drawn from both modern and pre-modern texts, from Aristotle and Augustine to Georges Didi-Huberman and Dan Brown. Topics include the problem of “true likeness” in images of holy figures, ekphrasis as a mode of response, the shifting relations of animation and illusionism as artistic goals, and the enduring idea that artworks conceal truth behind deceptive veils.

HSAR 639b, Mimesis, Magic, Art.  Christopher Wood.
Th 1.30–3.20
Aesthetic, cultic, and magical practices are structured around symbols that promise a real connection to their objects. Yet art and the discourse on art are at the same time troubled by the power—imagined or real?—of the indexical sign, the relic, the talisman, the emotive gesture, mimicry, pure color or sound. This seminar addresses the myth and reality of the motivated sign from anthropological, philosophical, and art historical points of view. Readings include Benjamin, Adorno, Caillois, Bataille, Kristeva, Frazier, Durkheim, Taussig, Warburg, Yates, Belting, and Didi-Huberman.

HSAR 656b, The English Landscape Garden.  Judith Colton.
Th 1.30–3.20
Study of eighteenth-century gardens against the backdrop of the English Enlightenment. The garden as the setting for, but also an instrument in, political and poetical debates, with links to freemasonry, Neopalladianism, earlier history (England's “gothick” past, Greece and Rome), and landscape painting. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century background, especially Italian and French gardens, comes in for consideration, as do current debates in garden history.

HSAR 692b, Abstraction and Decoration.  Christine Mehring.
M 3.30–5.20
This seminar considers the relationship between decoration and abstract art produced in Western art in the course of the twentieth century. Many modern artists felt ambivalent about decoration, ornament, the applied arts, and design. Abstract artists were often apprehensive about their painting and sculpture approaching “mere” decoration, superficial and superflu-ous. Any suggestion of decoration threatened to undermine abstraction's very identity as art and its new rationales of autonomy and self-reflexivity, of complexity and deep meaning. Yet some of these very same artists embraced these practices. Staples taken from decoration such as repetition, flatness, and bold color facilitated abstraction's departure from mimetic modes of representation. Moreover, the connection of decorative work to the world at large appealed to abstract artists searching for a new motivation and social relevance. Materials and techniques of the decorative arts, such as textiles and weaving, were also appropriated for abstract art. Class discussions revolve around these constantly changing attitudes at different historical moments as well as around various foundational, theoretical texts. Students' research may focus on individuals or groups of artists, themes or theoretical concepts beyond the ones specifically addressed, but should relate to the main questions in class.

HSAR 695b, Toward a Bioaesthetics: Burroughs, Warhol, Deleuze.  David Joselit.
T 1.30–3.20
The vogue for organic forms and biological metaphors that has arisen from the recent discovery of the human genome is only the latest in a wave of “biologisms” in the twentieth century. Rather than tracing their history directly, this seminar approaches three major intellectual figures of the twentieth century, a writer (Burroughs), an artist (Warhol), and a philosopher (Deleuze), in order to lay down the tools for a twentieth-century bioaesthetics. In each of three units the texts (both visual and literary) associated with these figures are explored in depth. Also CPLT 572b.

HSAR 696a, Issues in Performance Art.  Kellie Jones.
W 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. The 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. Feminist performance art is the focus for this term. Also AFAM 768a.

HSAR 699b, Architecture Criticism.  Sandy Isenstadt.
W 3.30–5.20
This course involves the reading and analysis of architectural criticism in an attempt to understand the bases on which buildings have been evaluated both recently and in the past and the way in which language guides judgments of form. Students are asked to read carefully and critique readings in class discussion. Regular writing assignments require students to make their own viewpoints as explicit and well argued as possible. Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor.

HSAR 731a, Depicting Race.  Martin Berger.
W 3.30–5.20
This seminar investigates the construction of blackness and whiteness in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture. With emphasis on how racial groups both promote and resist categorization, the seminar explores the structures, strategies, and representational systems through which race is fashioned. While emphasizing the distinct manner by which visual culture (in this case, painting, sculpture, and film) promotes and delimits personal and group identities, the seminar also considers the role of literature and popular culture.

HSAR 738a, William Morris: The Theory and Practice of Craft.  Edward Cooke.
W 1.30–3.20
This seminar focuses upon the writings and works of William Morris (1834–1896), the legendary British arts and crafts activist. Readings focus upon him as a historian, social critic, designer, craftsman, preservationist, and writer, but will also provide a sense of his context as well as his influence in the twentieth century. This seminar also makes use of a special exhibition of Morris's design work at the British Art Center.

HSAR 747a, Sixteenth-Century Manuscripts.  Mary Miller.
M 1.30–3.20
Aztec artists and scribes prepared pictorial manuscripts for both civil and religious authorities in New Spain from 1521 until about 1586. We work carefully with three major works, from three different periods: the Codex Borbonicus (before 1530), the Codex Mendoza (1541), and Florentine Codex (ca. 1577). Reading knowledge of Spanish required.

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, AFST 778bu.

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, AFST 781a.

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, AFST 781b.

HSAR 790a, History and Memory in Chinese Art.  Lillian Tseng.
Th 1.30–3.20
The seminar explores how art objects shape memory and intervene in history in China. It first focuses on bronze vessels and stone steles, investigating how media, intention, and reception influence the operation of commemorative art. It then tackles painting and calligraphy, discussing how the fusion of personal and collective memory transforms the tangle of the past and the present. Chinese is not required.

HSAR 794b, Chinese Painting under the Mongols, 1260–1368.  David Sensabaugh.
Th 3.30–5.20
Chinese painting has been interpreted as having undergone a major redirection during the century of Mongol rule in China. This has been related to the rise of scholar painting. This seminar examines ways of viewing the history of Chinese painting during the Yuan dynasty, beginning with such artists as Qian Xuan and Zhao Mengfu and ending with the Four Masters of the Yuan.

HSAR 802b, The Textual and Visual Cultures of Heian Japan.  Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Edward Kamens.
W 3.30–5.20
Topics in the study of the Heian period and the city-space/cultural center we call “Heian” explored through close examination of a variety of artifacts—works of art and architecture, historical and literary texts, both secular and religious. Primary documents in Japanese and Sino-Japanese (kanbun) are explored in depth; a reading knowledge of literary Japanese and of kanbun is required. Also JAPN 710b.

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