New First Year Art History Modules Launched 2012

Art in Europe: From Rococo to Neo-Classicism offers a comprehensive survey of European art and its social and cultural contexts from 1700 to 1800. It explores key issues in the visual arts and material culture within their intellectual and cultural settings and stimulates understanding of a range of cultural forces, such as: the end of the Ancien Régime in France, the rise of Academies in Europe, the beginnings of industrialization, new patterns of patronage and collecting within a period dominated by the Enlightenment and revolutionary change. It aims to acquaint the student with the work of key artists, and histories of institutions, intellectual currents, styles and movements in the visual culture of Europe at the beginning of the modern period.

Art in Europe: From Romanticism to Early Modernism provides a comprehensive survey of European art and its social and cultural contexts from 1800 to 1900. It explores key issues in the visual arts and material culture within their wider cultural contexts and to stimulate an understanding of a range of political, social and institutional forces, such as: challenges to academic institutions and traditions, the professionalization of the artist, the rise of a middle-class art market, the growth of industrial production and new transport and communication systems, the beginnings of a modern consumer culture, the influence of the popular press and the rise of art criticism in a Europe disrupted by war, popular uprisings and nationalistic movements.

Aspects of British Painting 1951-1966 The post-war period in British art was a time of flux and rapid change when styles from Europe in the form of Tachisme and the École de Paris mixed with influences from America such as Abstract Expressionism. It was also a time of political uncertainty - the height of the Cold War, when Britain lived with the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. But a much-heralded New Elizabethan age brought optimism too, and a young Queen ruled during a transitional period of decolonization that brought Commonwealth artists in their hundreds to live and work in Britain. This module introduces students to the rich mix that was the British art world in the 1950s – a time when ‘artists worked without safety nets.’  From Kitchen Sink to the London School and British Pop, what emerges is the distinctiveness of so much British art, a style that eventually became a very saleable ‘brand’ in the Swinging Sixties.

Dark Materials: Race, Magic, Deception and the Photographic Trace explores an alternative history of photography that involves the occult, pseudo-science, and political manipulation. Adopting a revisionist approach to received wisdom, it examines the power that the photographic image has and continues to wield.

Cultures of Collecting provides an historical and theoretical introduction to museums and collecting from the Merchant-Princes of the Early Modern Period to the Museum in the Modern World. It examines the rationales that underpin collecting as a private or public activity, considering the way that museums and collections have been formed through the activities of the State, Royalty, the Church, artists, art historians, and patrons. It presents an introduction to museums in western Europe, from the Renaissance to present, to examine and challenge the ways in which visual culture has been displayed to reflect art historical canons and the ways in which it has itself formed and influenced those canons. Both traditional and new approaches to museum displays are explored from a historical, theoretical, practical, formal and sociological standpoint. Case studies will be used to examine how specific institutions operate in relation to their audience and formulate policy to meet increasing demands for improved interpretation and access to the collections, and education provision, without sacrificing standards of collection management and care.

Exploring the School of Art Collections provides an opportunity to examine in detail the School of Art’s extensive collections of fine and decorative art, enabling students to make more effective use of these collections in their research throughout their degree. Seminars and lectures centre on varied aspects of the collections, wherever possible involving a hands-on experience of art objects. It will also provide an opportunity to actively participate in research on the collections including an edited, web-based output. (http://museum.aber.ac.uk/image/2925)

Landscape, Nature and Art provides an overview of key themes in the representation of nature and landscape from the Renaissance to the present day. It aims to introduce the student to the contexts for representational modes of nature as well as a wide variety of media used in the representational process: cartography, landscape and garden design, painting, printmaking, sculpture and photography. Although the lectures are arranged in a loose chronological order, the emphasis is upon exploring attitudes to nature in a variety of representational forms, including traditions of topographic and other landscape painting as well as responses in contemporary art practices to ecology and climate change.

Prints and Drawings: An Introduction to Graphic History offers an introduction to an important yet often neglected area of art historical and visual cultural studies, one usually defined by museums and art galleries as ‘Prints and Drawings’ or in art gallery culture as ‘works on paper’. It will survey artifacts, processes and styles from the fifteenth century to the present day and discuss issues around the professional status of artists and their training, technical innovation and experimentation, that among other factors had upon the development of the graphic arts. It also provides students with key critical and historical information to help understand the history of the graphic arts: connoisseurship, collecting, developments in pictorial style and manipulation of materials.

Representing the Body provides the student with an overview of key themes in the representation of the human body from the Renaissance to the present day.  The representation of the body is ubiquitous in Western art and the module will offer theoretical and historical contexts for understanding representational modes and artistic choices and approaches. It aims to introduce the student to the contexts for the ways in which the corporeal is viewed in Western art and the wide variety of media used in the representational process – painting, printmaking, sculpture and photography. The lectures are arranged in a loosely chronological order with reference to styles and artistic movements although the emphasis is upon surveying attitudes to the body, to race, sexuality, gender, and difference.