Curated Guides > Syllabus > Modern Art Syllabus
Modern Art Syllabus
This course looks at art from the late 18th to the mid-20th century. It investigates art that responds to revolution, the growth of cities, and technology. This era saw colonialism and war but also great advances in self-determination and self-expression.
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Collapse AllArt history often seeks to order and define art through time, but art can turn the tables and take on art history itself as its subject. This module also explores art as a vehicle for social and political critique.
Loren Munk, History of Art Timeline, 2004–06, oil on linen (Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska)
- What is art history?
- Why you don’t like art history
- What is art history and where is it going?
- Must art be beautiful? Picasso’s Old Guitarist
- Art and empathy
- Art about art's history
- Ren Xiong, Self-Portrait
- Guerrilla Girls, ‘You Have to Question What You See’ (interview)
- Omar Victor Diop: Black subjects in the frame
- Painting in Mithila, an introduction
- Kehinde Wiley, Rumors of War
- Neoclassicism, late 18th century
- The Formation of a French School: the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture
- Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates
- Jacques-Germain Soufflot, The Panthéon (Church of Ste-Geneviève), Paris
- Why do people study art history?
- How has the definition of art changed over time?
- How has the discipline of art history changed?
- What art gets remembered? What is forgotten?
- How can art help us empathize with people from other times and places?
- Western art and culture
- classical antiquity
- visual analysis
- academic art/academicians
- canon
- Royal Academy
- ism
- Qing Dynasty
- secularized
- Lost Cause
- purdah
- Shanghai School
- neoclassical
- kunqu
Key Questions
Key Terms
Learn to see like an art historian and art will begin to come alive with meaning. These tools will be valuable as we explore the style known as Romanticism, a period when political power becomes a subject of critique and the relationships between humanity, nature, and the spiritual are explored.
Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, c. 1500, oil and egg on synthetic panel, transferred from wood, 67.3 x 86.4 cm (The National Gallery, London)
- Tools of art history
- How to do visual (formal) analysis
- Introduction to art historical analysis
- Art historical analysis with Goya’s Third of May, 1808
- An introduction to iconography and iconographic analysis
- Describing what you see: Sculpture, Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure
- Romanticism, early 19th century
- A beginner’s guide to Romanticism
- Germany
- Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea
- England
- J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps
- France
- Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
- Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
- United States
- The Radical Floriography of Sarah Mapps Douglass
- Mexico
- José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range
- How can describing what you see in words help you interpret a work of art?
- How can spending time with a work of art impact how you see it?
- How can formal issues such as pictorial space help us to interpret a work of art?
- How can you use iconography to read a work of art?
- What is the difference between form and subject?
- genre
- subject matter
- historical context
- formal analysis
- iconography
- curvilinear
- patron
- Romanticism
- sublime
- Phrygian cap
- Revolution of 1830
- Antebellum
- tricolor
- Quaker
- daguerreotype
Key Questions
Key Terms
The invention of photography, rapid industrialization, and advances in transportation changed how artists depicted the world, but it also changed how we see.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, c. 1826–27, heliograph on pewter, 6.57 x 8 inches (Harry Ransom Center, Austin)
- Early photography
- France
- Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras
- England
- Anna Atkins and the cyanotype process
- Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth
- India
- Photographic views of nineteenth-century India, an introduction
- United States
- Wendy Red Star, 1880 Crow Peace Delegation
- Mali
- Photographic postcards of West African masquerade
- Realism
- Daumier, Rue Transnonain
- Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Life as an Artist
- Édouard Manet, Olympia
- The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
- A beginner’s guide to the Pre-Raphaelites
- Sir John Everett Millais, Isabella
- Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England
- How was photography used as a tool of subjugation?
- What is the distinction between naturalism and Realism?
- What did the word Realism mean to Courbet?
- How did the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood challenge academic standards?
- natural history
- coup
- camera obscura
- bitumen
- heliograph
- lithograph
- cyanotype
- picturesque
- John Ruskin
- Salon juries
- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
- courtesan
- Napoleon III
- bourgeois
Key Questions
Key Terms
The rapid growth of cities in the 19th century was an issue of concern for many, but also a new subject for artists who transformed how we understand urban and rural environments even today.
John Constable, The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon), oil on canvas, 130.2 x 185.4 cm (The National Gallery, London)
- Nature and nationhood
- England
- John Constable, The Hay Wain
- France
- Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais (or The First Dressing)
- Puerto Rico
- Francisco Oller y Cestero, The Wake
- Labor and the city
- England
- Ford Madox Brown, Work
- Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless
- United States
- Seneca Village: the lost history of African Americans in New York
- France
- Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
- Urban (and suburban) leisure
- How to recognize Monet: The Basin at Argenteuil
- A summer day in Paris: Berthe Morisot’s Hunting Butterflies
- Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette
- Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day
- Mary Cassatt, In the Loge
- How did the meaning of nature and the countryside change in the 19th century?
- What new systems of representation did artists develop to represent the modern city?
- Urban life afforded new freedoms, but also restrictions. How were these conveyed by artists?
- Are there parallels with how the city and country were portrayed in the 19th century and your ideas of these places?
- Pont de l'Europe
- boulevard
- en plein air
- optical realism
- Franco-Prussian War
- Japonisme
- navvies
- Georges-Eugène Haussmann
- Industrial Revolution
- bohío
- jíbaros
- Commissioners' Plan
- linear perspective
- subjectivity
- contour
Key Questions
Key Terms
While Europe’s colonies, international missionary work, and overseas trade benefited Europe economically, it also impacted the metropole (the imperial home nation) transforming its culture and its understanding of the world.
Plaques from Benin City on display at the British Museum (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- Africa
- The Benin “Bronzes”: a story of violence, theft, and artistry
- The Reception of African Art in the West
- Oceania
- Paikea at the American Museum of Natural History
- Gottfried Lindauer, Tamati Waka Nene
- Asia
- Cashmere shawls
- Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
- The Americas
- Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832
- Gauguin and Laval in Martinique
- Black American artists in Europe
- A dream of Italy: Black artists and travel in the nineteenth century
- Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free
- Importing the world
- Museums and politics: the Louvre, Paris
- Assyrian Lamassus in Victorian Britain
- Should contemporary museums be responsible for moral wrongs perpetrated in the past?
- What is the responsibility of museums to the cultures that created works in their collection?
- How did colonialism, increased global trade, and technological developments impact traditions in art making?
- What is the value of the universal museum and how can these responsibly adapt?
- Should we seek to recognize connections between works of unrelated cultures of the same century?
- Oba
- Punitive Expedition
- Aotearoa
- ariki
- moko
- pashm
- ukiyo-e
- Tongva
- mendicant
- porteuses
- Arcadian
- abolitionist
- Ojibwa
- orientalism
- Secession
Key Questions
Key Terms
European art at the end of the 19th century sought new formal solutions to accommodate a growing interest in subjects that were less rooted in the visible world, such as myth and music. This is a moment of rebellion and experimentation, the foundation upon which 20th century abstraction will be built.
Maurycy Gottlieb, Christ Teaching at Capernaum, 1878–79, 209 x 271.5 cm (National Museum, Warsaw)
- Academic art
- Maurycy Gottlieb, Christ Teaching at Capernaum
- Aestheticism
- James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
- Post-Impressionism and Symbolism
- France
- Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884
- Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables)
- Vincent van Gogh, Irises
Getty Conversations - Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele
- Auguste Rodin, The Gates of Hell
- Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Austria
- Broncia Koller, Sitting (Seated Nude Marietta)
- Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze
- The Wiener Werkstätte
- Art often depicts the external world, what might prompt an artist to look inward instead?
- How is Post-Impressionism different from Impressionism?
- What makes Van Gogh’s Irises different from the work he had done in Paris?
- How does Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire reimagine the representation of space?
- How did Klimt translate musical forms into visual forms?
- art for art's sake
- Pont-Aven
- British East India Company
- Paris Commune
- Dante
- Wiener Werkstätte
- atmospheric perspective
- nocturne
- oeuvre
- complementary contrast
- Provençal
- Symbolism
- Les Vingt
- Gesamtkunstwerk
- Gorgon
Key Questions
Key Terms
Even the avant-garde artist Henri Matisse was angered by Picasso’s painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The art that preceded WWI seemed to anticipate the destruction of the old order. The art created during and after the war, critiqued society for its failures and celebrated new possibilities.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 243.9 x 233.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- France
- Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
- Henri Matisse, The Red Studio
- Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning
- Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss
- Italy
- Umberto Boccioni and the Futurist City
- Russia
- A new world after the Russian Revolution: Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White
- Germany
- Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
- United States
- Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
- Georgia O’Keeffe, Radiator Building—Night, New York
- Brazil
- Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporú
- Netherlands
- Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
- What is the relationship between Kandinsky’s work and music?
- Is the term Synthetic Cubism useful for the work Still Life with Chair Caning, how so?
- What social and political circumstances inform Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife…?
- How does Duchamp use both intention and chance in his art?
- How was Suprematism’s formal simplicity seen to further the aims of the Russian Revolution?
- abstraction/abstract
- Pictorialism
- chiaroscuro
- steerage
- utopia
- New Woman
- Dada
- Neo-Plasticism
- Iberian
- avant-garde
- Synthetic Cubism/Analytic Cubism
- simultaneity
- Cannibalist Manifesto
- Weimar Republic
- readymade
Key Questions
Key Terms
The 1930s saw authoritarian regimes consolidate power around the world but especially in Europe. The unit examines art as a political tool of the state, and for individual artists, as a tool for exploration.
Joaquín Torres-García, Composition, 1931, oil on canvas, 91.7 x 61 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) © estate of the artist
- Uruguay
- Joaquín Torres-García, Composition
- Russia
- Varvara Stepanova, The Results of the First Five-Year Plan
- Italy
- Murals and Public Art in 1930s Rome
- Germany
- Paul Troost, House of (German) Art
- Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air
- George Grosz, Remembering
- Mexico
- Diego Rivera, Man Controller of the Universe
- Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas)
- China
- Lang Jingshan and early Chinese photography
- United States
- Stone Mountain, Georgia
- Aaron Douglas, Aspiration
- Switzerland
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- How did the pictograph further the aims of Torres-García?
- What was the role of art and architecture in National Socialist ideology?
- Why was Man Controller of the Universe re-envisioned, retitled, and repainted?
- How does Kahlo go beyond likeness in her self-representation?
- How can we, in the 21st century, responsibly explore the Fascist murals and architecture in Rome?
- pictogram
- fascism
- manifesto
- propaganda
- Entartete Kunst
- Blut und Boden
- Opium Wars
- Sino-Japanese War
- Surrealism
- apocalyptic
- Constructivism
- composite photography
- Lost Cause
- Middle Passage
- Jim Crow
Key Questions
Key Terms
In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s art criticism focused on male artists in New York City. This unit explores instead the art of six women and six men from varied heritage to tell a wider, more inclusive, but equally powerful story of art in the postwar era.
Dame Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos, 1946, elm and string on oak base, 43 x 46 x 38.5 cm (Tate Britain, London)
- England
- Sheltered by the sea, Barbara Hepworth’s Pelagos
- United States
- Gordon Parks, Off on My Own (Harlem, New York)
- Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm
- Sari Dienes, Star Circle
- Joan Mitchell, City Landscape
- Hedda Sterne, Number 3—1957
- Ruth Asawa, Untitled
- Puerto Rico
- Rafael Tufiño, La Plena
- Switzerland
- Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II
- Brazil
- Lygia Clark, Bicho
- Ethiopia
- Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight
- Germany
- Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi
- What are some of the formal issues that Hepworth’s sculpture addresses?
- How do Ralph Ellison’s texts and Gordon Parks’ images interact in Off on My Own?
- What are some of the ways we might find meaning in Mitchell’s work?
- What are some of the innovations found in the work of Sari Dienes and Hedda Sterne? Why are they less well known than Jackson Pollock?
- How is Skunder Boghossian’s Night Flight of Dread and Delight relevant to his aspiration for post-colonial Africa?
- Cornwall
- Pelagos
- Invisible Man
- Harlem Renaissance
- Holocaust
- Cold War
- Masonite
- Constructivist
- Betty Parsons Gallery
- Black Mountain College
- Neoconcrete
- biomorphic
- Afrofuturism
- Social Realism
- Capitalist Realism
Key Questions
Key Terms
Art had existed apart from the brash commercial world until Pop made mass culture its subject. This unit looks at the ways that mass media, mass production, and mass culture has shaped and been critiqued by artists in the 1950s and 1960s.
Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 x 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)
- England
- Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
- United States
- Garry Winogrand, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960
- Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola [3]
- Running in sneakers, the Judson Dance Theater
- Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs
- Marisol, The Party
- Carl Andre, Lever
- Romare Bearden, Three Folk Musicians
- Alma Thomas, Lunar Rendezvous—Circle of Flowers
- Mali
- Malick Sidibé, Nuit de Noël (Happy Couple)
- Japan
- Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden
- China
- Liu Chunhua, Chairman Mao en Route to Anyuan
- Why was Pop Art seen as radical given that it was focused on common subjects?
- How does Nuit de Noël express the changes in Malian society?
- What is conceptual art and how does Kosuth’s work embody the art type?
- What did it mean when Carl Andre stated, “my ambition as an artist is to be the Turner of matter”?
- Why did Alma Thomas reference both the moon and a garden in her painting title?
- Afro-Cuban
- Zapruder film
- semiotics
- Venice Biennale
- Minimalism
- Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
- four olds
- Black Arts Movement
- Harlem Renaissance
- figuration
- Spiral
- Washington Color School
- Pop Art
- conceptual art
- performance art
Key Questions
Key Terms
Unlike painting and sculpture, architecture is inherently useful but every bit as expressive. This unit explores both the uses and meanings of architecture that has shaped the modern world.
Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin, Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben), Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament), 1840–70, London (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- England
- Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin, Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament)
- France
- Charles Garnier, The Paris Opéra
- Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
- India
- F.W. Stevens with Sitaram Khanderao and Madherao Janardhan, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai
- Austria
- Josef Maria Olbrich, The Secession Building
- Otto Wagner, Postal Savings Bank
- United States
- Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building
- Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater
- Anni Albers and modern weaving
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, New York City
- Israel
- The White City of Tel Aviv
- Mexico and Brazil
- International Style architecture in Mexico and Brazil
- Can architecture be emotionally expressive in the ways that other arts can?
- How has the meaning of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus changed in the post-colonial era?
- How is the motto of the Secession expressed through Olbrich’s architectural choices?
- What challenges did Sullivan face on the Bleecker Street lot?
- Why was the International Style successful in so many locations?
- Elizabethan
- Neo Gothic
- gesamtkunstwerk
- voyeur
- polychrome
- Mughal
- peristyle
- Secession
- gorgon
- Jugendstil
- terracotta
- cornice
- colonnette
- ribbon windows
- mullion
Key Questions
Key Terms
With the modern era came a self-consciousness of historical time, and consequently a desire to preserve and protect cultural heritage while simultaneously endangering it in war, colonial repression, and reckless collecting practices. When we visit a museum and look at the art we tend to focus on formal issues, and the artist’s message, but what about the history of the objects themselves? How did they get there, should they be there, and what has been lost?
Cloverfield (still), 2008, Matt Reeves director, starring Mike Vogel, Jessica Lucas, and Lizzy Caplan (Paramount)
- Destruction and theft
- Blow it up: cultural heritage and film
- Making and Mutilating Manuscripts of the Shahnama
- Fact and fiction: The explosion of Reims Cathedral during World War I
- Nazi looting: Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally
- The Gwoździec Synagogue
- Erasing Art: Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning drawing
- Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
- Submerged, burned, and scattered: celebrating the destruction of objects in South Asia
- Protection and reclamation
- Piero della Francesca, Resurrection
- A Landmark Decision: Penn Station, Grand Central, and the architectural heritage of NYC
- Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Moai
- Mesa Verde and the preservation of Ancestral Puebloan heritage
- What is cultural heritage?
- Should art historians privilege one historical aspect of a work of art or architecture if it has changed over time?
- Does the story behind the painting Portrait of Wally change the way you view it, in what ways?
- Can the act of erasing art itself be art?
- What is NAGPRA?
- couplet
- Shahnama
- The Belvedere, Vienna
- kunstschultz
- shtetl
- bema
- SPQR
- Volto Santo
- nihilism
- Baths of Caracalla
- preservation
- performance art
- Rapa Nui
- effigies
- pueblo
- kiva
- sipaqu
- NAGPRA
- Ganesha
- Ravana
- samsara
Key Questions
Key Terms
The assertion of independence from colonial oppression has been an important subject for artists around the world. This unit will explore post-colonial visions from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe.
Ceremonial robe (agbádá ìlèkè), late 19th–early 20th centuries, unrecorded Yorùbá artists; Akúré, Ondo region, Nigeria, velvet, cotton, glass beads, 50 x 104-1/2 inches (Newark Museum of Art)
- Nigeria
- Ceremonial robe (agbádá ìlèkè), Yoruba artist
- Uche Okeke
- Puerto Rico
- Ramón Frade, Our Daily Bread
- South Africa
- Beaded collar (ingqosha), Xhosa artist, South Africa
- Hungary/France/India
- Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian
- Sudan
- Ibrahim El-Salahi, Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams
- Syria
- Mahmoud Hammad, Arabic Writing no. 11
- Ethiopia
- Battle of Adwa
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, Le 30 juin 1960, Zaïre indépendant
- United States
- Superman, World War II, and Japanese-American experience
- Kenya/England
- Magdalene Anyango N. Odundo, Symmetrical Reduced Black Narrow-Necked Tall Piece
- Uganda
- Olubugo (Barkcloth)
- How is the issue of self determination expressed in the work of this unit?
- How have artists used art as political expression?
- How have the artists covered in this unit transformed traditional forms of art to address issues of their own era?
- What are the ways Roger Shimomura references Pop Art, and is Diary Pop Art?
- Yorùbá
- Déjì
- bohío
- Xhosa
- apartheid
- Sikh
- uli
- Khartoum School
- Nubian
- kabaka
- Kufi
- expatriate
- coup d’état
- SWANA
- Minidoka internment camp
