A critical study of the major movements, paradigms, and documents of postwar art--abstract-expressionist, pop, minimalist, conceptual, process and performance, site-specific, etc. Special attention to crucial figures (e.g., Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Felix-Gonzalez-Torres) and problems (e.g., "the neo-avant-garde", popular culture, feminist theory, political controversies, "postmodernism").

In twelve weeks this course will examine major art works from the period ca. 300-1200 CE. Presenting works from Europe and the Middle East, and working with the Princeton collections in precept, the course will introduce students to the art of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam; the great courts of the Eastern- and Holy Roman Empires, and the roving Vikings, Celts and Visigoths. Students will not only be invited to consider how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power, but will also come to understand how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous.

Transit structures consist of tunnels and waiting zones, elevators and turnstiles, stairs and highways. Such architecture can perform social organization, exercise the work of the state, or equip subjects with "cultural techniques" (Siegert). We will study the spatial treatment of bodies in architectural literature, art, film, media, and critical theory: How do perspective and motion in art shape architectures of transit? In what way do such spaces function as media apparatuses? When do art and film produce tools of transit theory? What are the political dimensions of the organization of movement? How can transit enforce or undermine control?

This course offers a history of architectural theory, criticism, and historiography from the Renaissance to the present, emphasizing the texts, media and institutions that have supported architecture's claim to modernity since the late 17th Century. Architectural thought is examined in its social and cultural context as it relates both to the Western philosophical tradition and to design method and practice.

This class looks beyond traditional archival approaches to explore the postconquest history of Latin America through an analysis of objects, landscapes, and the human body as "alternative archives". Beginning with the era of European invasions in the 15th and 16th centuries, we will explore the material traces of colonial and postcolonial lives and examine the ways that archaeology, environmental science, forensics, and art history can shed new light on historical actors and narratives that would otherwise remain marginalized or even invisible.

This course focuses on the genre of landscape in Chinese painting, prints, and photography from the tenth century to modern times. Landscape was the most revered genre of painting in pre-modern China; it has shaped most of the discourses on art in later Chinese history and still features prominently in contemporary artistic creation and theory. This course examines the issues associated with landscape art, including the tradition and global relevance of ink landscape painting, the relationship of painting with prints and photography, travel and mapping as landscape themes, and the associations among landscape, place, and territory.

This historical survey considers why photographs of models wearing the latest clothes replaced drawn illustrations starting in the late nineteenth century and how the styles and content of fashion photographs reflect changing camera, lighting, and printing technologies; the structure of the garments themselves; national ideals of beauty and gender presentation; and the economics of publishing and advertising. Topics also include the studio as theatrical space; fashion photography in the developing and non-Western worlds; and the recent expansion of the ethnicities, ages, body types, and gender identities of models in fashion spreads.

The medieval history of the land now called Spain and its Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants is often oversimplified, whether as a model of cultural tolerance, a precursor to colonialism, or a justification of modern antagonisms. This course examines the history of the Iberian Peninsula through the visual traditions of the medieval peoples whose cultures laid the foundations of modern Spain. Highlighting such key issues as the interplay of foreign and local traditions, the expression of religious and ethnic identity, and the reuse of artistic forms and objects, it pursues a more forthright understanding of the Iberian past.

Just as the Internet does today, the picture press of the last century defined global visual knowledge of the world. The pictures gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers were often heavily edited, presented in carefully devised sequences, and printed alongside text. The picture press was as expansive as it was appealing, as informative as it was propagandistic, regularly delivered to newsstands and doorsteps for the everyday consumer of news, goods, celebrity, and politics. Through firsthand visual analysis of the picture presses of both the U.S. and Russia, this course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of images.

Painted pottery constitutes the largest surviving body of ancient Greek pictorial imagery and provides an important window on Greek society. This class offers an overview of Greek pottery ca.750-450 BC, with an emphasis on the style and iconography of Athenian black-figure and red-figure vases. Students will handle and learn from actual vases in a context of guided discussions and shared insights, in the process acquiring a knowledge of different fabrics and regional schools, as well as an understanding of production techniques, evolutions in style, and the role of painted pottery in Greek society.

This course investigates the intertwining of art and nature in the Eastern Roman Empire. Ecocriticism, art, literature, philosophy, and theology will be called upon. Students will consider the correlation of art and the environment; will learn to work between text and image; will work with a range of visual media and literary genres; and will think through the recurrence of ideas in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire; and will consider the role of art outside of major urban centers. Sacredness, spirituality, artifice, and the erotic will be key themes in this course. A class trip to Sicily is planned for the Spring Recess.

Contrary to the notion that the Nazi defeat of 1940 marked the decline of art in France, this course examines how artists in France drew upon the legacies of the avant-garde with a renewed sense of commitment in order to express their wartime experiences, address themselves to the public, contest social norms and engage the political sphere. Through the study of aesthetic experiments across media and readings in existentialist, feminist and Marxist philosophy, artists' writings, art criticism and art history, we investigate how art was politicized by artists and their publics from the Nazi Occupation through the French riots of 2005.

The seminar focuses on Roman historical representations - an innovation of the Romans - and addresses not only the problem of their historical reference but, in many cases, their reconstruction from the fragmentary remains.

During the Renaissance, printmaking emerged as a powerful and pervasive mode of artistic expression that redefined originality and transformed visual communication. Variously experimental, documentary, propagandistic, proto-scientific, and illustrational objects, prints were market-sensitive as well as aesthetically adventurous and often elitist in their content. Centered as much as possible on prints from the collection, this course considers material and technical issues as well as broader historical and interpretive topics. Artists include Schongauer, Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Bruegel, Mantegna, and Raphael.

In this seminar we investigate the interpenetration of aesthetics and politics in the interwar period, structuring our conversation around particular debates, such as the question of violence in Sorel and Marinetti, the problem of sovereignty in Schmitt and Benjamin, the polemics about modernism and realism around Lukacs, the base materialism of the Collège de Sociologie, the rise of factography in the USSR, and the return to dis/order in France and Italy.

This advanced pro-seminar investigates research methodologies in architectural discourse and practice. Each year the pro-seminar focuses on a specific theme addressing the history of the discipline from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students engage as a group in an in-depth reading of theoretical and historiographic sources on architecture and related fields.

Architecture has always been deeply collaborative, like moviemaking or opera where the credits are long and layered. But in architecture there is a huge effort to credit a single figure. Why this pathological need to keep collaboration secret? What is so threatening about the collaborators? What are we afraid of? What is at stake? This seminar explores questions of authorship, the signature, copyright, the anonymous, networks, labor, etc. It also thinks through the ideological implications of this narrative and the implications of its undoing. What would a post-author discourse look like?

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