Freshman Seminar 61v
Dada and Bauhaus: 100 years
Benjamin Buchloh
Tuesday, 1-3pm
This seminar takes its departure from the fact that Dada and Bauhaus, two of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century, have been recently celebrated and rediscovered, and newly researched by a number of scholars and curators, partially in response to their respective centennial. Dada was founded in Zürich in 1916, the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, and both formations were intensely international from the very beginning, unifying artists from many different European countries (Austria, France , Germany Hungary, Rumania, Russia, Switzerland), to engender two astonishingly complex group formations. All the more amazing is the fact that these two groups were pursuing utterly opposite goals in their practices, in fact one could consider them the extreme poles of the twentieth century. Dada’s goals were primarily anarchist and anti-aesthetic, yet politically often radical and progressive, and Dada was not accidentally the first avant-garde movement to include a large number of female artists in its midst. The Bauhaus, by contrast, while having its own political perspectives ranging from Social Democratic and Socialist positions to a more affirmative production- oriented liberal democratic orientation, aimed for the improvement of everyday life for the social collective as a result of design and production of consumer goods and transformed architectural conditions. The course will focus on individual practices as much as it will develop a critical comparative reading of the various features of the group identities. Throughout the semester, we will be reading original documents and manifestoes, as much as the writings of the artists, complemented obviously with key critical essays that make up the most important recent art historical literature on both subjects. The final two meetings of the course will also address the tremendous impact that both formations had on American art of the 1950s and 1960s, ranging from the foundation of the Chicago Bauhaus / Institute of Design, and Black Mountain College both institutions which explicitly modelled themselves on the Bauhaus and brought former faculty members from the Bauhaus to the United States, as much as we will trace the enormously important influence that the rediscovery of the Dada legacies had on the development of artistic practices after Abstract Expressionism such as Pop Art and Fluxus in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Humanities 10b
Joyce to Homer
Melissa McCormick
Tuesday, 10-11:30am
2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10b is open only to students who completed Humanities 10a in Fall 2017. Humanities 10b includes works by Joyce, Nietzsche, Shelley, Rousseau, More, Machiavelli, Murasaki, Bai Juyi, Augustine, Plato, Sophocles, and Homer. One 90-minute lecture plus a 90-minute discussion seminar led by the professors every week. Students continue to receive instruction in critical writing one hour a week, in writing labs and individual conferences. Students also have opportunities to visit cultural venues and attend musical and theatrical events in Cambridge or Boston.
HAA 11
Landmarks of World Architecture
Joseph Connors
Tuesday/Thursday, 1-2pm
Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various periods and such diverse cultures as modern and contemporary Europe and America, early modern Japan, Mughal India, Renaissance and medieval Europe, and ancient Rome. Sections will develop thematically and focus on significant issues in the analysis and interpretation of architecture.
HAA 53p
Looking Back: The Western Tradition
Jeffrey Hamburger, Joseph Koerner
Tuesday/Thursday, 10-11:30am
The history of western art, like any story, has a plot (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, etc.), protagonists (Michelangelo, Picasso, Pollock), and a climax (Modern Art). By looking backward instead of forward, beginning with contemporary works and ending in the Middle Ages, this introduction to western art considers how the past continuously informs an ever-changing present. Combining the canonical with the critical, this course introduces both the western tradition and the practice of art history itself.
HAA 56g
Truth and Deceit in Spanish Golden Age Painting
Felipe Pereda
Monday/Wednesday, 12-1pm
Description TBD
HAA 58m
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael
Cammy Brothers (Northeastern)
Monday/Wednesday, 10-11am
A painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci recently fetched the highest price on record for a work of art, a staggering 450 million dollars. The price speaks to the tremendous fascination certain Italian Renaissance figures still hold, 500 years after the fact. The Renaissance had many protagonists, but few loom as large as the three contemporaries and rivals who will form the focus of the course. In many regards, they shaped the notion of “genius” that we have inherited around themselves. The course builds out from these specific figures to a broader understanding of the Renaissance as an artistic and cultural phenomenon.
HAA 96a
Architecture Studio I: Transformations
Megan Panzano
Wednesday/Friday, 1-4pm
This course introduces basic architectural concepts and techniques used to address issues of form, function, ornament and material. This course provides instruction in project analysis, visualization, communication, and fabrication using both physical and digital modeling. Students proceed through a series of progressively complex investigations of transformational processes, context, program and material assemblage. As an introduction to architectural design, we will explore comprehensive and foundational design principles, skill sets and critical thinking and making. The course material will be presented through a series of presentations, exercises, workshops, reviews and discussions. This course fosters the development of a design methodology founded on thoughtful, creative and rigorous work practices in service of exploring meaningful expressions of the constructed environment.
HAA 96b
Architecture Studio II: Connections
Lisa Haber-Thompson
Tuesday/Thursday1-4pm
Architecture, as an act of design, is about placing objects the world. But architecture also fundamentally asks us to continuously engage with, and re-conceptualize, the world for which we are designing. As such, architecture as a discipline requires us to challenge our own positionality with regards to the world we all occupy.
This studio takes on the challenge through a series of design exercises focused on understanding, engaging with, and reimaging the urban condition. In this course, we will be mobilizing the autonomous architectural transformations mastered in HAA 96A to intervene with a programmed architectural project designed for a specific site in Harvard Square. Students will produce projects that address existing site conditions, and will develop designs in response to a determined program. Students will be expected to take into account projected occupants and other users of the site. Throughout the course, we will approach architectural design as both a method of producing urban environments, and also as an avenue through which to understand our cities. We will be directly confronting the social, environmental, and cultural contexts that are necessarily implicated in any design process.
The studio centers on three progressive design assignments, culminating in an architectural project for a site in Harvard Square. Design exercises will be supplemented with a series of short readings. Technical workshops will allow students to further develop skills in mapping, rendering, and simple animation.
HAA 100R
Sophomore Excursion Seminar: Berlin
Benjamin Buchloh, Patricio del Real
Monday, 3-5pm
This course introduces sophomore concentrators to on-site study of art and architecture through the case study of a particular geographic and cultural area. This year: Germany.
HAA 153m
The Art of Death: Funerary Monuments in the Mediterranean
Felipe Pereda
Tuesday, 1-3pm
Funerary art is a type of monumental sculpture that was systematically produced around the Mediterranean since Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern –Renaissance and Baroque—period. From medieval royal tombs to the Escorial, this is a story about some of its most spectacular creations. This seminar will look into the continuities and discontinuities of this “long story” within the geographical frame of the Mediterranean, but focusing on some particular examples, mostly from the Iberian Peninsula. The seminar will explore the relation of art history to memory, and the ways the artistic imagination both reflected and also articulated ideas of the afterlife.
HAA 161v
Rome Eternal City
Joseph Connors
Wednesday, 3-5pm
An architectural history of Rome from the empire through the early Christian and medieval city, the Renaissance revival of antiquity, Baroque planning, and early archeology to Fascism and modernism, including the imperial fora, aqueducts, fountains, medieval basilicas, the piazza, villas, gardens, St. Peter's and the Vatican complex.
HAA 171x
Architecture and Authoritarianism in the 20th C.
Patricio del Real
Wednesday, 1-3pmIn this pro-seminar, we will explore architecture in totalitarian regimes, paying particular attention to fascism as a political ideology and historical frame. The course will examine how architecture in its expanded field produced the ideological apparatus of fascist and totalitarian dictatorships, and shaped its systems of thought and forms of social organization in Europe, Africa and the Americas. We will focus on architectural case studies to examine contexts where dictatorships have toppled democratic forms of government. We will explore material, spatial and intellectual connections between political power and architecture; examine material techniques, aesthetic sources and organizational strategies through which architecture has established its authority in totalitarian regimes; uncover the ways architects have engaged the sphere of politics, government and national sovereignty in the 20th Century. Our aim is to go beyond the notion of an architecture in the service of the state, and to understand it as a tool of power and a technique of authoritarian rule.
HAA 182k
Japanese Woodblock Prints
Yukio Lippit
Thursday, 3-5pm
A thorough introduction to the history of the Japanese woodblock print, based upon first-hand study of the Sackler and MFA collections. Technical and stylistic change will be studied within the context of the evolving conditions of the publishing industry, theater world, and urban prostitution during Japan's Edo period (1600-1868). Developments in the modern era and various aspects of the Euro-American reception will also be considered.
HAA 184x
Painting of India
Jinah Kim
Monday, 1-3pm
The course explores the history of Indian painting based on the collections of Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We will investigate the theory of pictorial form in India and its relationship to the society at large against the historical currents by probing the development and changes in artistic styles and material culture of painting production. We will pay particular attention to the role of media, such as palm-leaf, birch bark, paper, and pigments, along with consideration of changing symbolic and material meanings of color. Regular visits (sections) to the museums and conservations labs to examine the paintings in person are to be scheduled throughout the semester.
African and African-American Studies 185x
What is Black Art? African American Cultural Production from the Early Republic to Civil Rights
Sarah Lewis
Tuesday, 1-3pm
This course surveys the history of African American Art from the colonial period to the long Civil Rights movement in the context of larger aesthetic and social movements. Taught in the Harvard Art Museums’ study center, this undergraduate seminar (also open to graduates) culminates by students curating their own online exhibition as the final project, presenting it to the class for discussion. Each week, the course will incorporate object study to examine the full range of African American cultural expression and strategies: craft, painting, printmaking, photography, film, and art political collectives. Seminar discussions will focus on works and their key thematics in artistic production—survival, retention, creolization, the politics of “black art” aesthetics and exhibitions, and the question of genre, such as the freedom and costs of abstraction, and politics of racial representation. The dual aim of this course is to give students of all backgrounds and concentrations an understanding of core topics in African American Art and a critical analysis of a work of art that can be developed into larger research projects.
HAA 193s
Cuzco, 1650-1700
Thomas Cummins
Monday, 1-3pm
Cuzco, once the center of the Inca Empire, became a major colonial Peruvian city unlike any other in which the royal descendants of the Inca lived and ruled along with Spaniards. In 1650 an earthquake destroyed most of the city’s buildings. Between 1650 and 1700 most of the city and the surrounding pueblos were re-built. This is in part due to the remarkable efforts of the bishop of Cuzco Mollinedo. At the same time, conflicts between the bishop and the cabildo of the cathedral, and between the bishop and the Jesuits focused upon power and authority as the re-building took place. Still more surprising, perhaps, most of the architects and painters for this renewal were Indians. This pro-seminar will examine both the architectural campaigns and the various genres of paintings that came to fruition within the complex political and cultural struggles over power and its representation. Cuzco will be the focus of this course, but we will put its painting, sculpture and architecture into comparison with other 17th century cities such as Lima, Quito, and Mexico City.
HAA 198m
Books and Things in Spanish America
Thomas Cummins
Wednesday, 3-5pmMovable type and the discovery of the New World occur almost simultaneously. It is perhaps no surprise that one of the first international businesses was the printing press in Mexico. This course will therefore study the impact of the book, and the various relationships between the printed book and the manuscripts and their critical place in the creation of a colonial culture and the European knowledge of that culture. At the same time we shall study how the book/manuscript is both an object of desire and commerce and of fear and loathing. How are book and manuscript illustrations a critical element in the development of colonial visual culture?
Visual and Environmental Studies 215
Critical Printing
Jennifer Roberts, Matt Saunders
Tuesday/Thursday, 10-1pm
Incorporating both studio and seminar instruction, this intensive course will explore printmaking’s history, trace its particular forms of intelligence, and test its future potential. The class will meet for three hours of studio and two hours of seminar/discussion per week. Assignments will include weekly readings, a short scholarly paper, and two studio projects. For the first half of the semester, students will pursue a rigorous grounding in a particular historical technique (etching/intaglio); in the second half students will translate what they have learned to another medium, thus exploring printmaking as an expanded field of practice.
HAA 225p
Early Print Culture: Representations of the Islamic East
Joseph Koerner, Gulru Necipoglu
Thursday, 3-5pm
Explores depictions of the Islamic East by European printmakers circa 1450 - 1600 and reciprocal construction of “Europe” through these and other depictions. Focusses on original objects in Harvard’s collections; classes taught in Art Study Center, Harvard Art Museums
HAA 244w
Illustrating the Word: Images from the Byzantine World
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesday, 1-3pm
The seminar will study illustrated manuscripts that were produced in the Byzantine world from the 9th to the 15th century. Most of them are books, which contain religious texts: Old Testament, Gospels, Psalters etc. Several are treatises on a variety of subjects as well as of a historical nature. Some were produced at the imperial court workshops, many at monastic foundations and others in artists’ ateliers. Many were however for personal use. The type or choice of illustration varied according to period, function and patron. All these questions will be addressed during the course of the semester.
Medieval Studies 250
At Cross Purposes: The Crusades in Material Culture
Eurydice Georganteli
Monday, 1-3pm
Crusading expeditions in the Holy Land, Spain and Eastern Europe from 1096 until the end of the Middle Ages shaped the political, socio-economic and cultural map of Europe and the Middle East. This course explores the multifaceted encounters between crusaders, Byzantines, Jews, Armenians and Muslims through the material traces they left behind: architecture, Byzantine objects dispersed across Western Europe, coins, sculptures, frescoes, and manuscripts from the East and the West.
HAA 256g
Antiquity in Ruins: The Renaissance Imaginary
Cammy Brothers (Northeastern)
Monday, 1-3pm
Why and when did broken things come to be valued as objects of aesthetic appreciation? The seminar begins with Petrarch and his idea of fragments, and follows the trail through the fifteenth and sixteenth century, when artists, sculptors, architects and humanists took a passionate interest in fragments and ruins of all kinds. They fix them, they draw them, they depict them, they reuse them, and they learn from them. The course considers and interrogates each of these manifestations of interest. While the idea of the classicism we have inherited from the 18th century suggests a static and authoritative past, in the Renaissance the interpretation of antiquity was a topic of great contention. As we delve into these debates, we explore what counted as ancient, how artists imitated and competed with the past, and how they remade it.
HAA 271k
Picturing America: Photography, Race, and Citizenship
Sarah Lewis
Monday, 3-5pm
What images have had agency and persuasive efficacy in the contestation of racial inequality and social justice in the United States? This course, open to graduate students as well as undergraduates, examines the way that photography has both solidified and challenged the construction of racial categories and contributed to the work in the long civil rights movement in America. The course will focus have a heavy emphasis on both film photography, closely examining the work of artists including Edward Curtis, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, Deana Lawson, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks, Bradford Young, Carrie Mae Weems, and Joseph T. Zealy.
Classes will include a trip to the Gordon Parks archive and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. The course will also have guest visits from cinematographer Bradford Young and photographer Deana Lawson.
HAA 274m
Minding Making: Art History and Artisinal Intelligence
Jennifer Roberts, Ethan Lasser
Tuesday, 1-3pm
If the artisanal and technical skills behind artmaking are forms of knowledge, how can (or should) that knowledge be integrated into the analytical methods of art history? This seminar will provide a wide-ranging exploration of this question, examining theories of craftsmanship, fabrication, and material reciprocity, debates over the concept of "tacit intelligence" and the value of making or remaking as historical method, issues of skill and deskilling on the part of both artists and art historians, and the challenge of exhibiting making in an art museum context. We will explore the transformative possibilities of rigorous attention to making, such as its potential to create forms of interpretation that cut across the fine, decorative, and industrial arts. The course will include close looking sessions in the Harvard Art Museums, hands-on making exercises, and visits from guest artisans.
HAA 277k
The Contemporary
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Thursday, 3-5pm
Graduate seminar exploring the intersection of the field of art history with the globalized art world. What is "contemporary art" - in theory, in practice, and in history?
HAA 282e
Buddhist Cave Visualization
Eugene Wang
Thursday, 1-3pm
The caves at Dunhuang are among the largest Buddhist cave complexes in the world, spanning the fourth to the fourteenth century. With 492 caves decorated with murals and sculptures, Dunhuang is the largest art gallery in situ in the world. The course explores the visual programs of Dunhuang caves. The disparate textual sources on which the murals are based do not explain their convergence in the same cave. A deep logic of world-making binds them together. Using available digital reconstructions that proffer spatial experience of the Dunhuang caves, we address some key questions: how do disparate murals add up? How does the cave visualize and stage the Buddhist mental cosmos?
HAA 289s
Buddhist Monuments of the World
Yukio Lippit, Jinah Kim, Eugene Wang
Tuesday, 1-3pm
This graduate seminar examines architectural monuments of the Buddhist world, including sites in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. It is intended to develop an introductory lecture course that will be taught the following academic year. Themes for exploration include cosmology, pilgrimage, ritual, materiality, relics, meditation, world-making, and the relationship between Buddhism and local religions.
HAA 310b
Works of Art: Materials, Forms, Histories
Maria Gough
Wednesday, 11-1pm
A series of team-taught workshops designed to sharpen skills in the observation, analysis, and historical interpretation of works of art and architecture.