Freshman Seminar 31m

In Pursuit of the Ordinary: Genre Painting in Boston-Area Museums
Joseph Koerner
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
This course focuses chiefly on “genre” pictures: that is, depictions, mostly painted on canvas or panel, of everyday life.   Examining closely key examples in different Boston-area collections, we investigate the changing nature and context of this type of image from its rise as a specialty product in early modern Europe through its complex development in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, to its rejection in Modernist art practice. Renewed fascination with the ‘ordinary’ in contemporary art and in recent museology (that is, museum history, theory and practice) features in this course, as well.  Today’s icons of the everyday (for example, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box of 1964 boxes) obey a modern imperative that artists represent everyday life in suitably banal ways. Eschewing figural anecdote, artists dismantle art’s traditional claims of occupying some special “higher” sphere; they confront viewers with estrangements of the things of the world we unthinkingly inhabit.  Such works illuminate our pursuit within this course:  We study how artists of the past pictured everyday life; but we also consider what people do with art in their everyday lives.  And we explore what the discipline of art history, in its practices of scholarship, criticism, collection, preservation, and display, imagines the ‘ordinary’ to be.  This focus—our own image of the ordinary—takes us to museum spaces that intend to simulate everyday life.  The gallery becomes itself a genre picture to stroll through. Although the course is structured around broad themes and historical developments, the emphasis of the classes will be on close visual analysis of objects and critical evaluation of key art historical texts.