ARTH 500(F) Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: The Hudson River School Revisited (Same as ArtH 400)
After a long series of blockbuster and quasi-blockbuster exhibitions beginning with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Paradise (1987) and ending with the Brooklyn Museum's Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007), now is a perfect time to take a fresh look at the Hudson River School and its offshoots. This course provides an opportunity to assess what has been learned over the past two decades and to explore further the influence of new social formations, new cultural practices, and new technologies of vision on American landscape representation in the period 1800-1875.
Format: seminar. Evaluation will be based on class participation, presentation of research, and a term paper.
Enrollment limit: 14, with places for 7 undergraduate [ARTH 400] and 7 graduate students [ARTH 500] assured. Preference will be given to senior majors and graduate students.
Hour: WALLACH

ARTH 500(S) Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Reassessing Modernism: European Modern Architecture between the Wars (Same as ArtH 400)
It is fashionable to render Modernist architecture and design in the plural. Decorative Modernism, Vernacular Modernism, Conservative Modernism, Domestic Modernism, Irrational Modernism have all appeared in the recent literature. Applying pluralism retrospectively to the modern movement in architecture does disservice to the discourses of the 1920s, which generally revolved around a central spine of ideas. To understand the often bitter wrangling over apparently small differences of meaning and architectural detailing, it is better to adopt a model of competing claims to a single and authoritative core of belief. This is more in tune with the times than imagining a free market of brands or ideologies. The problem is that the core ideas were not themselves coherent, leading to contradictory and incompatible conclusions. The strength and endurance of Modernism in architecture and design derived from its capacity, from the outset, to accommodate complexity and contradiction at the core of its doctrine. The course is designed to interrogate these contradictions.
The course divides into two sections. In the first half we explore how the ideas carried forward from the nineteenth century were transformed into the practice of Modernist architecture by 1925-8 in Europe. The focus will be on testing meaning in selected texts against buildings and designs. In the second half of the course, we will interrogate the contradictory ways these ideas were interpreted in different countries in the 1930s, looking especially at France, Italy, Britain and the United States. We will pay particular attention to the means of diffusion and elaboration of ideas and images, through lectures, books, periodicals and exhibitions.
Evaluation will be based on a short midterm paper and a final term paper.
Enrollment limit: 14, with places for 7 undergraduate [ARTH 400] and 7 graduate students [ARTH 500] assured. Preference will be given to senior majors and graduate students.
Hour: T. BENTON