"Our time is indifferent to the content of artistic representations as no time has ever been before. For today's artist form itself is the content." These remarks of the German critic Paul Westheim, published in 1919, sound strange today, yet they express an attitude that dominated critical and historical writing on modern art for most of the twentieth century. Although the question of meaning has become more central to the writing of the last four decades, often eclipsing questions of form, there remains in the current phase of intense historiographical self-reflection a surprising dearth of methodological discussion on this issue. No compelling models, comparable to that offered by Panofsky in his classic introduction to Studies in Iconology, have established themselves for modern art, and many interpretations proceed on the basis of anachronistic methodological assumptions. Moreover, the semiotics of twentieth-century imagery-i. e., the examination of how meaning is generated-still remains relatively little studied. This seminar will explore the problem of "meaning" in twentieth century art and examine various models for dealing with the issue, including iconography, semiotics, deconstruction, and reception theory. The first half of the seminar will be devoted to selected readings on the issue as well as to case studies of individual artists-e.g. Picasso, Hoch, Johns, Kiefer. During the second half of the semester students will present case studies on topics of their own choosing. Students will be responsible for leading class discussion on one set of readings, an oral report, to be presented in revised, written form at semester's end, and a 10-minute critical commentary on another student's oral report.

Hour: Haxthausen