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.
Freshman Seminar 36x
Money Matters
Evridiki Georganteli
Wednesday, 12-2:45pm
Money Matters aims to engage first-year students with the economics, politics and aesthetics of one of the most fascinating and enduring aspects in human history. The seminar is a study of money in all its manifestations from the early agrarian societies to the first financial crisis of the 21st-century global market. How have individuals and societies reacted to and used money in business, politics and religion? What are the factors that shaped the metallic content and iconography of coins from the 7th century BC to the end of the Gold Standard in the 20th century? Why are early modern American and European banknotes so important for the study of social history? What are the links between art, literature, theatre, cinema and money? Seminar meetings will take place at the Harvard College, the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums, introducing students to the world-class Harvard Coin Collection and offering them the opportunity to handle research and discuss priceless artifacts. Money Matters is intended for students with an interest in history, art history, archaeology, political science, economics and the study of world religions. Handling sessions, group discussions and a short essay on a choice coin from the Harvard Coin Collections will offer students a sense of immediacy and accessibility of Harvard?s splendid numismatic holdings and the opportunity to understand why money makes indeed the world go round.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 40
Monuments of Islamic Architecture
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar and David J. Roxburgh
Tuesday/Thursday 9-10:15am
An introduction to ten iconic monuments of the Islamic world from the beginning of Islam to the early modern period. The course introduces various types of building-mosques, palaces, multifunctional complexes-and city types and the factors that shaped them, artistic, patronal, socio-political, religio-cultural, and economic. Each case study is divided into two lectures. The first presents the monument or city by "walking" through it. The second is devoted to themes elicited from the example, developed in light of comparative monuments, sites, and/or written sources, and to problems of patronage, production, audience and meaning as they pertain to architectural history.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 58
Modern Art and Modernity
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Maria Gough and Benjamin Buchloh
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-11:45am
The course examines the defining moments in the development of modern European and American art from the eighteenth- through to the twentieth-century. Anchored by a significant date, each lecture focuses on the relationship between a major artistic event and the social, political, cultural, and technological conditions of its emergence. A wide range of media, from painting, sculpture, and print-making to photography, photomontage, video, installation, and performance art, will be considered. Situating the key aesthetic transformations that defined art's modernity in a broader historical context, the course explores the fundamental role of advanced forms of artistic practice in the formation of modern culture and society.
Ethical Reasoning 37
Adam & Eve
Joseph Koerner and Stephen Greenblatt
Monday/Wednesday 1:30-2:45pm
What is the power of a story? For several thousand years Adam and Eve were the protagonists in the central origin myth of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds. That myth was the arena for ethical reasoning about transgression and innocence, sexuality, gender roles, labor, suffering, and death. Jointly taught by History of Art and Architecture and English, our course focuses on this enigmatic story and its spectacular elaborations in theology, philosophy, literature and art. Above all, looking closely at some of the greatest achievements of European art and literature--from Durer, Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Milton's Paradise Lost--we will compare the possibilities of the verbal and visual arts in portraying human being.
African & African American Studies 199z
Majesty and Mythology in African Art
Suzanne Blier
Monday 12-2:45pm
This course serves as an introduction to key themes in Africa art framed around both questions of rulership and the array of mythological forms that define these and other arts. The course also examines what these arts reveal about the nature of power, society, and religion in Africa more generally. The diverse ways that Africans have employed art and architecture to define individual and group identity will also be examined. Among the topics that will be discussed are palace and community architecture, regalia, women, divine kingship, cosmology, enthronement ceremonies, history, and the importance of art in diplomacy and war. The importance of broader art and architectural connections between Africa and other world areas will be engaged as well, bringing into play issues of colonialism, the global economy, questions of display, and current concerns with art appropriation and return.
HAA 17v
Introduction to Modern Architectures
Patricio del Real
Tuesday/Thursday 1:30-2:45pm
This undergraduate survey course traces developments in architecture from the late nineteenth-century to the twentieth and beyond. We will focus on the consolidation of modernism as a global phenomenon in the 20th Century, engaging projects and architects who had a direct hand in its shaping and those who opposed it. We will look at key works of architecture and urban planning as laboratories of modernity fraught with tensions between tradition and innovation, form and function, art and technology, creative genius and teamwork, nationalism and internationalism. As modern architecture developed throughout the world, architects, planners and designers refashioned the built environment to serve the needs of growing populations, emerging nations, political ideologies, international markets and industrial modernization. The course will present how architects aimed to fulfill the promises of industrial modernity and need to be 'modern.' We will focus on case studies in the Americas and the Europes that launched global debates and international actors. The course highlights a simultaneous modernity and a dynamic international architecture culture that prepared the grounds for contemporary globalization.
HAA 18j
Introduction to Japanese Architecture
Yukio Lippit
Monday/Wednesday 10:30-11:45am
A survey of the diverse architectural traditions of the Japanese archipelago from the prehistoric era through the twentieth century. Various building types-including the Shinto shrine, Buddhist temple, castle, teahouse, palace and farmhouse-will be studied through representative surviving examples. Issues to be explored include the basic principles of timber-frame engineering, the artisanal culture of master carpenters, and the mixed legacy of the functionalist interpretation of Japanese architecture.
HAA 18x
Introduction to the History of Chinese Art
Eugene Wang
Tuesday/Thursday 12-1:15pm
This course surveys Chinese art from antiquity to the recent avant-garde. Though the introduction follows a chronological order, it is also thematically motivated. We will see how visual artifacts_paintings, sculptures, architectural monuments_both consciously encode different pragmatic agendas and circumstantial exigencies and unconsciously betray cultural anxieties and tensions. The purpose is to enable students to look at Chinese history in visual terms and to view visual objects in historical terms, with a critique of the perception of Oriental art as static aesthetical objects suspended in a timeless vacuum.
HAA 92r
Design Speculations: Senior Design Tutorial
Megan Panzano
TBA
This seminar will serve as a design platform for inquiry, documentation and analysis in relation either to the thesis
topic or capstone project of interest to each student. Thesis students will be responsible for selecting a Thesis Advisor (or Advisors) with whom they will meet regularly to develop specific intention, substance and methodology of the thesis research and paper. This seminar is a support of independent thesis and/or independent project research, extending methodological inquiry of the project topic to design where students may convene to collectively discuss and experiment with design speculations – design tests that explore research through the visual and spatial language of architecture. The course will cover topics general to design research with discussions, assignments, and readings focused on three main themes in relation to architectural design: Discourse, the development of a proposition for the role
and significance of architecture relative to the project topic of interest; Method, the design steps/process of working through a design application/inquiry of those ideas; and Context, the relationship of the project topic of study to broader surroundings which include but are not limited to the discipline of architecture, cultural contexts,
technical developments and/or typologies. The seminar will emphasize and support the translation of ideas emerging from independent research into visual forms of representation including, but not limited to, drawings, diagrams, images, study models, and short
animations. The techniques of representation reviewed will be catered to the project topics of individual students, but will also form a part of the general discussion of the course.
HAA 96A Transformations or HAA 96B Connections design studios is a pre‐requisite to the Design Speculations course.
HAA 99
Senior Thesis Seminar
Jinah Kim
Monday 3-5:45pm
In the fall term, HAA 99 includes several group tutorial meetings with the senior honors adviser, where assignments are aimed at facilitating the writing of a senior honors thesis; spring term consists of independent writing, under the direction of the individual thesis adviser. Part one of a two part series.
HAA 101
The Making of Art and Artifacts: History, Material and Technique
Francesca Bewer
TBA
To what extent do the availability of materials and development of material technology influence artistic choice and innovation? How was a particular work of art made, and why does it look the way it does? The course will explore these and other questions of materiality through a combination of close looking at objects in the Harvard Art Museums' collections, hands-on experimentation with a range of artist's materials and techniques, and discussions of related readings. Among the goals of the course are for students to gain a better understanding of the dynamic relationship between makers and the materials and techniques they use; to be able to better recognize traces of artistic processes in works of art; and consider the implications of alterations that can occur in objects over time. The course will be taught by the Harvard Art Museums' research curator for conservation and technical studies in collaboration with staff of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies - professionals who routinely consider questions of materiality and how they effect the way we understand, interpret, preserve and present works of art.
Japanese Literature 124
The Tale of Genji in Word and Image
Melissa M. McCormick
Monday 3-5:45pm
Introduces students to The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel, authored by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu around the year 1000 CE. In addition to a close reading of the tale, topics for examination include Japanese court culture, women's writing, and the tale's afterlife in painting, prints, drama, manga, and film.
HAA 138m
From Byzantium to the British Isles: The Materiality of Late Antiquity
Evridiki Georganteli
Monday 12-2:45pm
This course explores the extraordinary cultural transformation Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East underwent from Diocletian's reorganization of the Roman Empire in the late third century to the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. Monuments and sites, sculpture, mosaics, frescoes and ceramics, icons and relics, textiles, coins and seals chart the movement of people, commodities and ideas along routes of warfare, pilgrimage, trade and diplomacy. Was the world of late antiquity still bearing the hallmarks of Roman connectivity, administration and culture? Were Ireland and Anglo-Saxon Englans really the edge of the known world? What was the extent of the Eastern Roman Empire's cultural power in late antique Europe, Africa and the Middle East? How did religious changes influence urban topographies, geographies of power and artistic choices?Close-up inspection of works of art in the Harvard Art Museums, the Harvard Business School and the Boston Fine Arts Museum; art making in the Harvard Art Museum Materials Lab and the Harvard Ceramics Studios; and study of archaeological records of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis offer participants a rare insight into one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of art and architecture.
HAA 144m
Hagia Sophia: Architecture, Space and Ceremony
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
This course will look into the history of construction and embellishment of Hagia Sophia, built by Justinian in the 6th century. This extraordinary building, with its dome and open spatial interior stood as a marvel of architecture throughout the middle ages. In this great space, many rituals and ceremonies took place, which will also be studied during the semester.
HAA 161g
Francisco de Goya : Art as Testimony, the Artist as Witness
Felipe Pereda
Thursday 3-5:45pm
Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) signals the beginning of a new understanding of the power of art as a historical testimony. Sometimes considered the “patriarch of war photographers” Goya gave a new image of war in which anonymous victims take over the protagonism traditionally held by national heroes. This course will be a general introduction to Goya’s art, from the popular imagery of his early years to his late Black Paintings, but it will also look into Goya’s “modernity” from the standpoint of art´s reflection of contemporary history.
HAA 172g
Romanticism Revisited: Gericault
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
Held in conjunction with an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, Mutiny: Works by Géricault, this seminar explores the social and political role of art in the Romantic period. Focused on the most influential Romantic artist, Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), the exhibition tells a new story of this socially and politically engaged artist across a range of media. Including approximately 40 drawings, watercolors, lithographs, and paintings from the Harvard Art Museums collections augmented by loans from three Boston-area collectors, the exhibition will offer students an opportunity to work closely with the objects and present on them in the exhibition space. Students will also be encouraged to address at least one object in the exhibition as part of their final paper. Examples of other works by Géricault in the collection, and works by his contemporaries, will also be examined during the course in the Harvard Art Museums Art Study Center. A visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a class excursion to New York to see an exhibition about Géricault’s contemporary, Eugène Delacroix, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are also planned. (Enrollment limited)
HAA 179x
Tectonics Lab: Material and Form
Andrew Plumb
TBA
HAA 194m
The Museum
Suzanne Blier
Monday 3-5:45pm
This course explores a vital cluster of themes around museums and the relation between objects, knowledge, culture and society. The focus is at once contemporary practice, historical, and theoretical. A key aim is to move beyond Euro- American geographies to think about constructions of the universal and the global, and the relationship between works of art, museum displays, and the construction of meaning. Since the early twentieth century, scholars, artists, and activists have closely questioned the movements of objects and the role of museums, particularly in relation to socio-political developments. Why do individuals and societies collect, conserve, and display objects? How has this practice changed over time and space? What role do culture and taste play? These are some of the questions we will be addressing alongside practical experience designing programs for an exhibition of African art at Harvard Art Museums.
HAA 222n
Early Ottoman Architecture
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
Examines architectural cosmopolitanism in the early Ottoman polity straddling Asia and Europe, by focusing on artistic interactions with neighbors (Byzantium, Latin West, Anatolian principalities, Mamluks in Syria-Egypt, Timurid-Turkmen Iran). Ottoman urban centers (including Iznik, Bursa, Edirne, Amasya, Konya), monuments, and architectural ornament considered from a connective transregional perspective.
HAA 229p
Word and Image in Persian Painting
David J. Roxburgh
Monday 3-5:45pm
Texts of the Persian literary tradition that were illustrated constitute our focus, including Firdawsi's Shahnama and Nizami's Khamsa. Study of word and image is staged through key examples to open new lines of inquiry.
HAA 241p
Diagram Paradigm
Jeffrey Hamburger
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
In a networked age, diagrams are everywhere. From philosophy, semiotics and computer science to the burgeoning field of graphics, diagrams visualize knowledge in critical ways. This seminar will look at diagrams and the diagrammatic mode in medieval art — and beyond — as tools for thinking and for creating knowledge.
HAA 270w
Historiography of Modern Architecture: In Search for a Global History
Patricio del Real
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
This graduate seminar traces the development of architectural modernism as a discursive practice. It explores the construction of a cohesive narrative that enabled modernism to become the hegemonic embodiment of modernity in the mid-20th Century and led to its critique in the 1960s and beyond. We will interrogate foundational texts by architectural historians—such as Hitchcock, Giedion, Benevolo and Tafuri and Dal Co—and address the challenges to these histories with the development of modernism beyond Europe and the United States. We will focus on 'other' modernisms as sites of enunciations, both formal and discursive, that will challenge these foundational histories. The aim is to gain a greater understanding of modern architecture as a global endeavor, as well as to examine architecture history as an operative and critical practice. In examining the historiography of modernism, the course aims to address contemporary historiographic critiques and explore the present need of a global history of architecture.
HAA 272v
Cubism and its Others: Art in Paris, 1907-1937
Maria Gough
Monday 12-2:45
Emergence, development, reception, and legacy of Cubism in Paris between 1907 and 1937, focusing on Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris, the four major artists of the pioneering Galerie Kahnweiler. Having analyzed the fundamental role of primitivism, tradition, mass culture, and the commodity form in Cubism's genesis, our major endeavor is to unpack its ever-shifting relation to its aesthetic Others, namely, abstraction, decoration, the ready-made, realism, and monumentalism. Crucial to this endeavor is a thorough examination of the problem of medium in Cubism, considering not only drawing, easel painting, collage, and constructed sculpture, but also mural painting, architecture, photography, and film.
HAA 277y
From Posada to Isotype: International Progressive Political Print Culture, 1900-1945
Benjamin Buchloh
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
This seminar, open to Graduates and qualified undergraduates will trace the developments and exchanges between presumably regressive and anti-technological media such as the woodcut and the linocuts in the first half of the twentieth century, in its various geo-political contexts from Mexico and Germany to the Soviet Union and China. Key figures to be studied will be Käthe Kollwitz and some of the German Expressionists, José Posada, Leopoldo Mendez, Elizabeth Catlett and the Taller de Grafica Popular, Frans Masereel, Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath. The debates around and against photography and technological media will be one of the theoretical challenges of the seminar, and the internationalization and interactions through major critics and historians travelling to the Soviet Union and subsequently in exile in Mexico, such as Hannes Meyer , Paul Westheim and Anna Seghers will form its historical horizons.
HAA 282k
Indian Esoteric Buddhism
Jinah Kim
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
This seminar explores the art of Indian Esoteric Buddhism from various interpretive vantage points. After a brief historiographical introduction, the discussion will focus on unpacking recent scholarly discourses on Esoteric or Tantric Buddhism in relation to the artistic productions in medieval South Asia (ca. 800-1200CE). The two main topics for this semester will be 1) Saiva-Buddhist interactions as manifested in iconographic (and artistic) articulations, and 2) trans-regional connections across Asia. Students will engage in case studies exploring a historical relationship between ritual practices and artistic outputs in various Esoteric Buddhist contexts, which include comparative examples from outside the Indian sub-continent.
HAA 291r
Topics in Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art
Thomas Cummins
Thursday 12-2:45pm
Topics to be determined in consideration of interests of students.
HAA 310a
Methods and Theory of Art History
Jeffrey Hamburger
Friday 10:30am-1:15pm
A team-taught course led by the DGS based on exemplary readings designed to introduce students to a wide range of art-historical methods.