BA Programme: Third Arts
The Arts-III programme in the History of Art is challenging and rewarding. It is designed to bring your knowledge and skills in the subject to a higher level, rigorously building on the robust foundations laid in the first and second years of study. The core courses, HA3015 and HA3016, are text based and focus on questions of historiography, theory, and method. The eight special-subject options?HA3005, HA3006, HA3008, HA3012, HA3014, HA3017, HA3019, HA3020?offer the freedom to shape your final-year programme to suit your individual interests and to investigate particular issues in the context of a skill-based, small-group learning environment. Buttressing the teaching on these courses are study tours and field trips to Berlin, Rome, and the UK. Lastly, the supervised research project, HA3013, will provide the opportunity to undertake a significant piece of writing under the supervision of an art historian from the teaching team. Three pathways are on offer:
Modules on offer in 2006-7:
During the pontificates of Julius II (reg 1503-13) and Leo X (reg 1513-21), ideas about Rome?s majestic past were deliberately revived into an even more glorious present. This course investigates the volatile forces?social, political, cultural?that converged on the ?Eternal City?, generating the heroic vision of the modern Rome of the popes and fuelling the creative endeavour and epic talent of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bramante, whose works in painting, sculpture, and architecture gave visual expression to Rome?s status as the capital of the Christian world and the intellectual centre of the West.
NB a class trip to Rome is planned for November 2006.
This module will examine the impact on art practice of the aesthetic theories of Winckelmann and Burke in relation to Neo-Classicism and Romanticism. The module will focus on key political and social issues such as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the emerging relationship between western and non-western cultures, and will investigate the wide variety of responses made to these issues within the context of academic art.
NB a class trip to Berlin is planned for November 2006.
This module focuses on the changing interface between text and image. The module content includes illustration, decorative layout, and the visual interpretation of texts; text as image; the book as art-object; and manuscript culture.
This module examines the art of the Weimar Republic. In conjunction with the 2005 Dada retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this seminar offers a critical framework with which to understand Dada, its politics and its repercussions for modernism. Situating Dada in its art historical context, we will consider a range of artistic practices and media including post-war Expressionist film, New Objectivity, and left-wing photography and photomontage, and study key texts by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Bertolt Brecht.
NB a class trip to Berlin is planned for November 2006.
The module provides you with the opportunity to develop a particular line of research within the visual arts and to extend your skills of interpretation and analysis. A member of staff will supervise your 8,000-word project, the title of which must be agreed prior to a notified date in the first teaching period and which should be submitted to the Art History office by the last working day in April 2007.
This module explores the impact of the conceptual legacy of Marcel Duchamp in the art after 1960. Focusing on specific works by Duchamp, we examine how each became the starting point for certain preoccupations of postmodern art, including appropriation, the readymade, interventions, installation art; the questioning of boundaries between body and machine; and the nature of identity.
The course engages with a series of specific debates, or better art-historical problems, which provide an opportunity to examine the rich variety of approaches and at times conflicting methods of enquiry that characterise the discipline.
The following values will be investigated according to their interaction with artistic imperatives: visual analysis and pictorial perception; the object and the viewer; form and content; concept and creativity; society, need and autonomy.
This seminar investigates various histories and theories of photography from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, considering the role of photography in contexts ranging from avant-garde experiment to totalitarian propaganda. Using particular historical moments as our case studies, we will explore the relationships between technology and visual theory, politics and form, power and mass representation. Readings draw on both primary and secondary source material, including key essays by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Roland Barthes.
NB a class trip to the UK is planned for 2007.
The following issues will be investigated: the relationship between art and the wider context of cultural discourse, art in relation to the social formation, the role played by art in the representation of social and cultural imperatives.
The module frames Italian art of the early modern era within the context of the tumultuous upheavals and reforms that took place in the church and state following the Council of Trent. Thematic in approach, the seminars examine critically the work of key artists of the period, including Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Gianlorenzo Bernini, vis-à-vis coeval concerns with, and theories of, naturalism, the heroic ideal, and antiquarianism. We will also question the larger terms within which early-modern artists have been discussed, especially in recent scholarly approaches.
NB a class trip to Rome is planned for March 2007.