"ART 213 takes up the many ways in which European artists responded to both the delights and the disasters of 'modern life.' That life involved new industries, technologies, and media, and inspired new perceptions, passions, and philosophies. Traditional forms of art were radically revised, and novel ones created. A continual question for us will be: What persists of this manifold modernist project, and what doesn't? How are we similar, how are we different?"

- Professor Hal Foster

ART 213 "Modernist Art: 1900 to 1950" undertakes a critical study of the major movements, paradigms, and documents of modernist art from Post-Impressionism to the “Degenerate” art show. Topics will inclulde: primitivism, abstraction, collage, the readymade, machine aesthetics, photographic reproduction, the art of the insane, artists in political revolution, anti-modernism.