UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE SECTION

This course surveys the turbulent decades when rapidly unfolding
developments in American society transformed the US from a
relatively provincial and agrarian republic into an expanding urban,
industrial, and ultimately imperial power.  This climate of
accelerating change and social instability had a profound impact on
art.  By the end of the century, collisions between tradition and
modernity, nativism and cosmopolitanism, and high culture and
popular culture had extensively reshaped the world of American art,
which went from homegrown to high style in little more than a
generation.

In this class we will anatomize that reshaping process by looking in
detail at a number of key “players” (along with various satellites)
whose work most dramatically addressed the critical aesthetic and
social issues of a tumultuous time. These include Winslow Homer,
Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, James McNeill Whistler, John
Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt.  Topics include the art of war,
art in the marketplace, country vs. city, art for art’s sake,
celebrity art, the Aesthetic Movement, artistic self-fashioning, and
the politics of gender and race in the world of art.   The
objectives of the course are to
bring students into close engagement with works of art, modes of
criticism, and issues of
FINA A446  cn 25231
(Undergraduate AND Graduate Course)
MW, 4:00p-5:30p
S. Burnsinterpretation, and to introduce them to scholarship in the
field.

Classes will combine lecture with discussion; course work includes
assigned readings, exams, response papers and other forms of writing.