Art and Archaeology
- AAS 244/ART 262/LAS 244: Introduction to Pre-20th Century Black Diaspora ArtThis course focuses on the networks, the imaginaries and the lives inhabited by Black artists, makers, and subjects from the 18th through 19th centuries. It revolves around the Caribbean (particularly the Anglophone Caribbean), North America and Europe. We will reflect on how pre-twentieth century Black artists are written into history or written out of it. We will explore the aesthetic innovation of these artists and the visionary worlds they created, and examine their travels, their writings, along with the social worlds and communities they formed. The course incorporates lectures and readings and, if possible, museum visits.
- AAS 245/ART 245: Introduction to 20th-Century African American ArtThis course surveys history of African American art during the long 20th-century, from the individual striving of late 19th century to the unprecedented efflorescence of art and culture in 1920s Harlem; from the retrenchment in black artistic production during the era of the Great Depression, to the rise of racially conscious art inspired by the Civil Rights Movement; from black feminist art in the 1970s, to the age of American multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally to the turn of the present century when ambitious "postblack" artists challenge received notions of black art and racial subjectivity.
- ANT 328/AAS 396/AMS 314/ART 327: Reckoning: Complicated Histories and Collective IdentitiesHow do we grapple with complicated, violent, and disavowed aspects of our collective histories in contemporary society? This class takes as its central issue how societies chose (or not) to reckon with, redress, and repair their difficult pasts. This course will challenge students to take on the difficult work of grappling with violent and otherwise negative pasts through the cultural media of memorial, monument, museum, and collaborative heritage practice. See "Other Information" below about a possible Break Trip to a memorial to the victims of racial terrorism in the U.S. South, located in Montgomery, Alabama.
- ARC 308/ART 328: History of Architectural TheoryThis course offers a history of architectural theory, criticism, and historiography from the Renaissance to the present, emphasizing the texts, media and institutions that have supported architecture's claim to modernity since the late 17th Century. Architectural thought is examined in its social and cultural context as it relates both to the Western philosophical tradition and to design method and practice.
- ARC 548/ART 585: Histories and Theories of 19th-Century Architecture: Architecture and TravelThe seminar studies selected architectural projects, buildings, and writings from the nineteenth and late-eighteenth centuries in the context of their critical and historical reception, and their active influence on the theory of modern and contemporary design. Each year the seminar focuses on a specific topic, such as the relation between architecture and geology, ecology and material science, travel, or the building projects and theoretical writings of an individual nineteenth-century architect examined in conjunction with the histories of art, culture, and science of the same period.
- ARC 571/ART 581/MOD 573: Research in Architecture: Architecture in the Age of PandemicsArchitecture and medicine have always been tightly interlinked. Every age has its signature afflictions and each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases gave birth to modern architecture. The twenty-first century is the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, burnout syndrome and allergies-the 'environmentally hypersensitive' unable to live in the modern world. With COVID-19, a virus is completely reshaping architecture and urbanism and once again disease exposes the structural inequities of race, class and gender. Will architectural discourse likewise reshape itself?
- ARC 572/ART 582: Research in Architecture (Proseminar)This advanced pro-seminar investigates research methodologies in architectural discourse and practice. Each year the pro-seminar focuses on a specific theme addressing the history of the discipline from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students engage as a group in an in-depth reading of theoretical and historiographic sources on architecture and related fields.
- ARC 594/MOD 504/HUM 593/ART 584: Topics in Architecture: Building Life: Space, Field, TerritoryPart of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological theories and architectural practices in the 19th and 20th c., this course focuses on processes of spatialization, territorialization, and colonization of natural and metropolitan environments on a global scale. Topics include the techniques of fieldwork, mapping, measurement, and classification along the study of building typologies in institutions ranging from natural history and anthropology museums, biological stations, laboratories, zoos and aquariums, to libraries, universities, and prisons.
- ART 100: An Introduction to the History of Art: Meanings in the Visual ArtsIntroduction to the histories of art and the practice of art history. You will encounter a range of arts (including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, prints) and artistic practices from diverse historical periods, regions, and cultures. Faculty members of the Department of Art and Archaeology lecture in their fields of expertise; precepts balance hands-on work, readings, and student projects. In Fall 2021, coursework is designed to encourage students to apply the methods and questions of art history in order to explore the Princeton community. We pay particular attention this year to the various forms of art and engagement.
- ART 203: Roman ArtThe course provides a general introduction to Roman art. It discusses various artistic media--portraiture, historical relief, etc.--and highlights important works. The goal is an attempt to understand the significance of the imagery that the Romans produced, which embellished all aspects of their world - that is, to understand the role of artworks in the Romans' lived experience.
- ART 207/HLS 207/CLA 207/ARC 211: Greek ArchitectureWhat makes a Greek temple ringed with marble columns "classical"? This course offers a historical overview of Greek architecture, case studies of landmark structures, and thematic explorations of how ancient religion, politics, and society shaped the built environment of the Aegean and broader Mediterranean. It also delves into the oldest surviving work of architecture theory and looks critically at the legacies of antiquity, particularly in the making of American self-image(s). Precepts include exercises in observation and experiments with ancient building materials (e.g. carving marble) and technologies.
- ART 212: Neoclassicism through ImpressionismA broad study of European painting and sculpture from the French revolution to 1900 with special attention to social, political, and cultural shifts. Lectures explore a range of themes including art and revolution, imperial conquest, the rise of landscape painting, the politics of the nude, the birth of "modernism" and the avant-garde. Emphasis on major figures including David, Canova, Goya, Vigée-Lebrun, Turner, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Degas, Rodin, van Gogh and Cézanne.
- ART 218/EAS 238: Ten Essential Topics in Chinese Art and CultureWhat was the role of women in Chinese art? How did Chinese people think about this life and the afterlife? Why and how is calligraphy considered an art form in China? These are but three of the questions this course asks and endeavors to explore. Focusing on ten important and provocative topics, this course aims to provide a comprehensive but spotlighted picture of Chinese art and culture. Together the ten point to the interrelated nature of the visual and Chinese philosophical thought, aesthetic values, religious beliefs, social life, political expression and commercial practices.
- ART 233/ARC 233: Renaissance Art and ArchitectureWhat was the Renaissance? This class explores the major artistic currents that swept northern and southern Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries in an attempt to answer that question. In addition to considering key themes such as the revival of antiquity, imitation and license, religious devotion, artistic style, the art market, and the encounter with foreign cultures, peoples and goods, we will survey significant works by artists and architects including Donatello, Jan van Eyck, Alberti, Raphael, Leonardo, Sofonisba Anguissola and Michelangelo.
- ART 268: Contemporary Art in the Middle EastThis course explores the history, aesthetics and discourse framing the art of the Arab world, Iran and Turkey from the late twentieth century to the present. With a focus on building the skills of visual analysis, lectures and discussions will explore the intersection of media, technique, subject matter, artistic discourse and political and social conditions as codetermining factors in art objects. Representing many nations, each with a distinct political and cultural history, the Middle East is multi-ethnic, religious, and complexly interconnected place, whose influence in the art world has steadily grown throughout the last thirty years.
- ART 311/MED 311/HUM 311: Arts of the Medieval BookThis course explores the technology and function of books in historical perspective, asking how illuminated manuscripts were designed to meet (and shape) cultural and intellectual demands in the medieval period. Surveying the major genres of European book arts between the 7th-15th centuries, we study varying approaches to pictorial space, page design, and information organization; relationships between text and image; and technical aspects of book production. We work primarily from Princeton's collection of original manuscripts and manuscript facsimiles. Assignments include the option to create an original artist's book for the final project.
- ART 316/HLS 316/CLA 213: The Formation of Christian ArtArt in late antiquity has often been characterized as an art in decline, but this judgment is relative, relying on standards formulated for art of other periods. Challenging this assumption, we will examine the distinct and powerful transformations within the visual culture of the period between the third and sixth centuries AD. This period witnesses the mutation of the institutions of the Roman Empire into those of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The fundamental change in religious identity that was the basis for this development directly impacted the art from that era that will be the focus of this course.
- ART 323: World Art HistoryThe class surveys connections in art of different cultures and continents throughout the world from the first civilizations to the present. Attention will be paid to distinctive and related forms of culture and their expression in art and architecture that includes trade, migration, gift exchanges, war and economics.
- ART 346/LAS 362: Art, Politics, and the ScreenFrom news streamed on laptops to grassroots organizing on smart phones, screens have become a primary site for the experience of politics in our contemporary world. This course explores the historical genealogy of the political primacy of the screen by investigating how artists have used screens as a means to document, visualize, and enact political processes over the past century. Looking to a range of media such as film, video, and slide projection, the course is divided into thematic units that address issues of oppression, colonialism, and revolution; sexuality and gender; race and its representation; and native peoples' struggles.
- ART 378/AFS 378/AAS 377: Post-1945 African PhotographyThis course examines the role and status of photography in different phases of Africa's political, cultural and art historical experience since 1945. We explore how African photographers used the photographic medium in the service of the state, society and their own artistic visions during the colonial and post-independence eras. Photography's relationship with art and its social function in Africa will underlie our discussion.
- ART 384/AMS 394: Supply-side Aesthetics: American Art in the Age of ReaganThis course investigates the art and the aesthetics of the age of Reagan and Reaganism with an eye toward the present. How did supply-side economics transform the art world and art itself during the 1980s? How did certain period styles propagate Reaganism? Drawing on artworks from the PU Art Museum, art criticism, cultural criticism, political journalism, and an emerging history, we study critically sanctioned as well as controversial artistic movements of the period, including Neo-Expressionism, Graffiti Art, and Commodity Art, asking what this art can teach us about the age, in which an entertainer-turned-politician was elected president.
- ART 398/CLA 398/NES 398: Ancient Egyptian Funerary CultureTomb monuments built for the highest status members of ancient Egyptian society comprise one of the most important sources of information on ancient Egyptian civilization. In this course, we will examine many aspects of elite funerary culture, centering the built stone tombs filled with images and texts, while incorporating as well other forms of religious texts, stelae, statuary, and coffins. We will consider questions of ancient Egyptian religious beliefs and conceptions of the afterlife, the role of ritual practices, the changing relationship between high elite officials and the king, and multiple aspects of ancient social identities.
- ART 400: Junior SeminarThe Junior Seminar is an introduction to the myriad subjects, methods, and strategies of art history. The course examines the different kinds of evidence and methodological tools that have been used to identify, explain, and contextualize works of art as well as other kinds of objects, artifacts, and cultural phenomena. In other words, this seminar considers what art historians do, and how and why they do it. In addition, majors will learn how to use resources such as the library and the museum, and how to undertake substantive written research projects. Students begin their Junior Independent Work in this seminar.
- ART 425/EAS 425: The Japanese PrintART 425 examines Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th - 19th century. We will consider the following: formal and technical aspects of prints; varied subject matter, including the "floating world" of the brothel districts and theatre; Japanese landscape and urban centers; and links between literature and prints, especially the re-working of classical literary themes in popular prints. The seminar will emphasize the study of prints in the university's Art Museum. If travel restrictions and pandemic conditions allow students will research Japanese prints at an art gallery in New York and recommend one for purchase for the Museum's collection.
- ART 430/MED 430/HLS 430: Seminar. Medieval Art: Hagia Sophia: The Politics of Built SpaceOn July 10, 2020 the Turkish government ordered that Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, one of the great buildings of the world, be converted from a museum into a mosque. This building has served as an Orthodox and a Catholic cathedral, a mosque, and a museum. Each iteration can be read as an articulation of changing political and cultural circumstances that inscribe themselves in turn upon the fabric of this building. This course will map this changing history taking students from the fourth to the twenty-first century.
- ART 435: Bernini's WomenThe emphatic sensuality of Bernini's women--sculptures of historical, allegorical, biblical and mythological females--has endured from their 17th-c creation through their reception in the Me Too era. This course explores Bernini's transformation of insensate stone into seemingly carnal existence and its controversial impact on viewers. We will situate the interplay of touch, desire, erotics, and violence that animates his female bodies in early modern contexts, including notions of gender. Moving into modernity, we will study the imitations his women inspired and the critiques that revisit them from aesthetic, theoretical and feminist lenses.
- ART 439/HIS 453/ECS 439: The Invisible Renaissance: Science, Art, and Magic in Early Modern EuropeHow did early modern people depict phenomena they could not see? This course traces attempts to represent the invisible: from angels and the influence of stars and magnets, to microscopic creatures and magical effects. Philosophers, painters and magi puzzled over these unseen forces, beings and structures, seeking to describe them in writings and artworks. We will unpack their arguments and try to reconstruct their practices, including optical tricks and alchemical experiments. The course culminates in a virtual exhibition, curated by students, as we follow in the steps of Renaissance thinkers and artists, and put the invisible on display.
- ART 455/VIS 455/ECS 456: Seminar in Modernist Art & Theory: Alienation in Modern Art & LiteratureAlthough "alienation" might seem passé as a concept, modern art and literature were long steeped in this condition. This seminar will explore its principal expressions by its primary voices--artists, writers, and philosophers--from Baudelaire, Marx, and Manet through Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Gauguin, to Existentialist philosophy and outsider art, and on to "Black Dada" today. Among our themes will be the underground, spleen, dandyism, detachment, primitivism, art brut, absurdity, and objectification.
- ART 481: Egyptian Architecture: The Monumental LandscapeIn this seminar we will examine a variety of forms of ancient Egyptian architecture, primarily from the pharaonic period, through the lense of landscape. We will examine god's temples, funerary temples, and burial monuments within the larger context of their settings, including the surrounding landscape and their relationships to other monuments. A number of themes will be addressed, including the sacred landscape, architecture as microcosm, architecture and performance, ancestry and memory, the temporality of landscape and monument, and locality and community.
- ART 487: RembrandtRembrandt is an artist we feel we know, perhaps because he painted, etched and drew so many self-portraits. His art is characterized by an intense intimacy and humanity. Even in his own day, he was lauded for his ability to depict emotions in his narrative scenes, which elicit our empathy. His portraits are not mere likenesses but manage to imply the sitters' inner life. His technical virtuosity, whether it be with paint, pen and ink, or etching needle, is peerless. In this seminar, we will study all aspects of Rembrandt's art and examine his works held by the PUAM and museums in NYC in order to understand his universal appeal.
- ART 500: Proseminar in the History of ArtA course concerned both with the theoretical foundations of Western art history as a modern discipline and with the methodological innovations of the last few decades.
- ART 502C: The Graduate SeminarThis course is intended to ensure a continuing breadth of exposure to contemporary art-historical discourse and practices. It requires attendance and participation in the department lecture/seminar series. Students must take the course sequentially in each of their first four semesters and take the appropriate letter version of the course (A,B,C, or D) based on their semester of study. The course is taken in addition to the normal load of three courses per semester and is for first- and second-year graduate students only. Topics discussed cover all fields of Art History and address current questions and practices.
- ART 547/ARC 552: Early Modern ArchitectureNew technologies and ancient discoveries inspired a range of creative responses from early modern architects. This seminar explores the tools that architects used as a means to consider relationships between invention and tradition, craft and art, material and form, ancient and modern. We study works by Alberti, Serlio, Philibert de l'Orme, and Michelangelo, among others, and take a transnational and transmedial approach to the study of key developments in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architecture.
- ART 560/AAS 560: Art and the British EmpireThis seminar proceeds through a series of thematic and case studies ranging from Britain's early colonial expansion to the legacies of empire in contemporary art and museum practice. Topics include science and ethnography; the colonial picturesque; curiosity and collecting; slavery and visual representation; art and nationalism and readings are drawn from a range of disciplines.
- ART 564: Seminar in 19th-Century Art: Art and Nihilism: Goya and BlakeThis seminar explores nihilism as an artistic response to social-political upheaval, cruelty, and violence, focusing on the work of Francisco Goya (1746-1828) and William Blake (1757-1827). How have artists found form and language for a nihilistic worldview, and to what ends? How can Goya and Blake's work in various media show us nihilism's power, danger, and emancipatory potential? Anchoring our investigation is close study of works in campus collections and local museums.
- ART 568/EAS 570: Art Production, Consumption, and Collection in Ming-Qing SuzhouSuzhou as a cultural site is the key to many broad and complicated issues regarding how art was produced and practiced in Ming-Qing China. These complexities include artistic regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the codification and edification of literati culture, the urbanization and commoditization of art, and the interrelationship of the global and the local. This seminar aims to examine Suzhou as the nexus that interweaves all of these essential threads of the Ming-Qing artworld and as the lens through which we understand this artworld as multi-faceted and multi-layered.
- ART 583/ARC 583: Textile ArchitectureThis seminar examines the theoretical and practical intersections between architecture and woven materials across time, focusing on three key moments: the imagined origins of architecture in a non-Western, a-historical past: textiles' place in transforming built architecture; and twentieth-century experiments in which the figure of cloth allowed for expressing ideas that often exceeded what standing material realities were then possible for architects.
- ART 599/CLA 597/PAW 599/HLS 599: The Greek HouseA study of the archaeology of the Greek house (Early Archaic huts through Hellenistic palaces). Emphasis on the close reading of archaeological sites and assemblages and the integration of literary with material evidence. Topics include the discovery of houses, the identification of farms, the integration of the house with urban plans and natural landscapes, the organization and use of space, gender, domestic economies, and religious practice. Attention devoted to social, political, and regional dynamics; to the concept of the "private" in ancient Greece; and to questioning the heuristic value of the term "house."
- CLA 547/PAW 503/HLS 547/HIS 557/ART 527: Problems in Ancient History: Naturalism and Anti-NaturalismThis seminar attempts to set the rise of naturalistic depictions in the visual arts (especially the individuated portrait) in the context of literary, philosophical, and medical traditions of the time (6th-4th centuries BCE). The focus and character of the discussions is both historical and historiographic.
- CLA 548/HLS 548/PAW 548/ART 532: Problems in Ancient History: Introduction to Ancient and Medieval NumismaticsA seminar covering the basic methodology of numismatics, including die, hoard and archaeological analysis as well as a survey of pre-modern coinages. The Western coinage tradition is covered, from its origins in the Greco-Persian world through classical and Hellenistic Greek coinage, Roman imperial and provincial issues, Parthian and Sasanian issues, the coinage of Byzantium, the Islamic world, and medieval and renaissance Europe. Students research and report on problems involving coinages related to their own areas of specialization. Open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.
- FRE 350/COM 381/ECS 366/ART 399: France on Display: Shaping the Nation under the Third Republic, 1870-1940This course is a metaphorical visit to Third Republic France (1870-1940) in which we will examine images and public spaces as a language communicating republican ideology. We will investigate how the Republic molded the new citizen in schools and townhalls; served as gatekeeper of culture and advocate of progress in museums and world fairs; and influenced the marketplace. We will consider how writers, artists, architects, and filmmakers contributed to the representation of France and how they critiqued its displays. The seminar will draw parallels with the U.S. at moments of its history when shaping a common sense of nationhood was paramount.
- HUM 450/ART 482/ARC 450/ECS 450: Empathy and Alienation: Aesthetics, Politics, CultureIn 19- and 20-c. debates that crossed borders among disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy, and political theory, empathy and alienation emerged as key terms to describe relations among human beings, works of art, and commodities. This seminar addresses the dynamics of empathy and alienation across a range of discourses and artifacts in European culture. Our explorations of how relationships between empathy and alienation were variously conceptualized in psychological aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory will aim to open up new perspectives on recent debates about identity and affect.
- LAS 325/ART 381/ANT 325/SPA 397: Muertos: Art and Mortality in MexicoFor two millennia, the peoples of Mexico have lived in close proximity with the dead. When in the 16th century uninvited Europeans arrived in Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City, offering a path to "eternal life", Mexicans were decidedly uninterested. In this course, students will journey down the road to Mictlan, the watery Mexican underworld, to learn from artworks an ancient, alternate approach to understanding the social construction of death. Three quarters of the course will consider arts of the Native pre-Hispanic context, with equal time dedicated to Teotihuacan, the Maya, and the Mexica ("Aztecs").
- SLA 303/HUM 306/ART 330: Seeing Health: Medicine, Literature, and the Visual ArtsThis seminar explores representations of health and illness through the literary and the visual media. From death and dying to epidemics, from disability to care giving, we will examine how these universal conditions are conveyed through literary texts, public health campaign posters, graphic novels, paintings, illustrations, and photography. Most of the meetings will take place at the Princeton University Art Museum to engage in depth with the items in the collection. Students will have the option to submit creative projects for the midterm and the final assignments.
- VIS 373/AAS 398/ART 372/GSS 440: Curating Within Obscurity: Research as Exhibition Structure and FormHow can posthumous research on a curatorial subject influence the structure and form of an exhibition or a new conceptual artwork? This course retraces the steps taken to produce McClodden's 2015-2019 artistic and curatorial work centering the lives of three Black gay men - poet Essex Hemphill, writer/poet Brad Johnson, and composer Julius Eastman - in order to examine key concepts central to research-based practice. Students will be expected to produce a research/exhibition study of an artist whom they feel has been obscured posthumously.
- VIS 392/ART 392: Artist and StudioA required seminar for Art and Archaeology Practice of Art majors and Program in Visual Arts certificate students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas. The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, performance and installation. It includes readings and discussions of current contemporary art topics, a visiting artist lecture series, critiques of students' work, and an artist book project.