Modern Art

Overview:

What makes modern art modern? Is it the subject matter (factories and airplanes), the formal language (geometric shapes and brilliant colors), or something else? This course will argue that, if there is a defining feature to modern art, it is the tension between the urge toward melodrama and the urge to escape it.

Required Reading:

Fred S. Kleiner, Christin J. Mamiya, and Richard G. Tansey. Gardner’s Art Through The Ages, vol. II (Harcourt, 2001), Chapters 28, 29, 33, and 34.

Classes, Exams, and Grading

This class will consist primarily of a series of lectures. However, one class, at the end, will be reserved for discussions. Questions are welcomed at any point in the lectures (though not too many during any given lecture).

There will be two exams, a mid-term (on Monday, October 27) and a final (on Wednesday, December 17). The mid-term will consist of slide identifications and brief essay questions. The final will include at least one long essay, as well as slide identifications.

Grades will be based approximately 70% on exams and 30% on your research paper.

Research Paper

Writing this paper should offer you an opportunity to experience the pleasure of looking hard at a work of art, the challenge of thinking about larger intellectual issues, and the pain of doing actual research. A research paper is not merely a summary of other people’s ideas and discoveries. It is, ideally, a kind of feedback loop in written form. You should begin by looking through the relevant chapters of Art Through The Ages for an image (painting, sculpture, print, photograph, work of architecture) that excites you. Having selected an image, your goal is to uncover relevant information and ideas. The ideas you bring to bear on the image should enrich your experience of it; but, at the same time, you should test these ideas against your own perception of the image, and against whatever factual information you can discover. Watch out! Don’t believe everything you read in books.

You might start your research by looking through the texts listed in the notes on pp. 1139-1143 of Art Through The Ages and in the bibliography on pp. 1164-1177. You should also look in Bobcat for books and exhibition catalogues discussing the artist you have selected. Do NOT rely on Google or Yahoo! to do your research. These search engines will turn up many web pages with false or—at best—predigested information. You can, however, find a great deal of useful material by consulting the “Internet Reference Tools for Art History” listed on the next page of this handout.

Research material falls into three broad categories.

“Primary” sources consist of the art works themselves or of contemporary documents related to the art works (letters or statements by the artist, contracts with dealers, newspaper reviews, etc.). You will not have the time to search for unknown primary sources buried in archives, but primary sources of this type are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues or catalogues raisonnés (catalogues listing and reproducing all the works by a given artist), and in anthologies such as Herschel B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art: A Source Books by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)—a good book to buy, incidentally.

“Secondary” sources consist of books on individual artists (“monographs”) or the essays and catalogue entries written by scholars for exhibition catalogues. These typically summarize information gathered from primary sources and then go on to offer a particular interpretation of the particular art work or of the artist’s work as a whole.

“Tertiary” sources (to coin a phrase) would include books on larger art movements, or on particular issues in the interpretation of art. Textbooks like Art Through The Ages, encylopedias, etc. also fall into this category, or maybe these should be called “quaternary” sources. Usually, by the time you get to this level, the information has been so thoroughly chewed over that it has been reduced more or less to pap, devoid of intellectual sustenance. Avoid “quaternary” sources.
You should consult at least two or three secondary and tertiary sources in order to learn about different interpretations of your chosen artist. You should then consult as many primary sources as possible in order to find information supporting or disproving these interpretations. Your paper (7-10 typed, double-spaced pages) should be written in an “A-B-A” structure:

A: Begin by describing your art work and any information directly related to it.
B: Summarize different possible interpretations of the art work.
A: Return to the primary sources and to your own reaction to the work, and show how they support one interpretation or another.

Please remember the basic rule of academic writing: give credit where credit is due. Credit for information can be given simply in a footnote. Credit for ideas should be given briefly in the text (“As Linda Nochlin has written…”) and more fully in a footnote.1 Quotations must be indicated by quotation marks. Once in a while you will find a genuine piece of scholarship on the Internet (say, in a museum web site); this must be cited like any other source: “As noted in an entry in the Metropolitan Museum’s web site,” with a footnote to the web address. Readers of your paper will assume that anything not footnoted is your original research, observation, or idea. Make sure this is true.

1Linda Nochlin, ‘Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting,’ in Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 39.

Important additional link:

Internet Reference Tools for Art History