On Pictures 2

Display Schedule

Subject guarantor

Petr KOLESNIKOV

Name of lecturer(s)

Petr KOLESNIKOV

Contents

Looking at Art — An Exploration of the Formal and Thematic Developments in Western Painting from Late Antiquity to Present Day

This is a two-semester course. Our meetings will be grouped into thirteen one-and-a-half hour weekly meetings in the first semester and twelve in the second (25 meetings total for both semesters), alternating between classroom lectures and field trips. Lectures will take place on the FAMU campus on Thursdays between 10:40 AM and 12:15 PM. Field trips will take place at pre-arranged times at various locations of the Prague National Gallery.

Week 1- 4 — How to Read Art

This unit will cover artwork analysis (pre-iconography, iconography, iconology), introduce you to various formal analysis terms and familiarize you with some of the more common methodologies used by art historians to analyze works of art.

Week 5 and 6 — The Middle Ages

This unit will cover the emergence of Christianity and its influence on the development of art during Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Romanesque and Gothic periods.

Week 7 — National Gallery Visit

Week 8 and 9 — The Renaissance

This unit will cover the effects that the philosophy of humanism and the mania for all things ancient had on the development of art throughout the Renaissance, the Northern penchant for textural differentiation and its effect on artists in Italy, and the effects that the development of new media, like oil painting and printmaking, had on art production and consumption in Europe.

Week 10 — National Gallery Visit

Week 11 and 12 — The Baroque and Rococo

This unit will cover the role of the Post-Tridentine Catholic Church in the development of the Baroque style, and the age of excess and frivolity that followed the Baroque era known as the Rococo.

Week 13 — National Gallery Visit

Week 14 and 15 — Neoclassicism and Romanticism

This unit will cover Neoclassicism, a period style tied up with the desire to establish governments based on the rational Greco-Roman model, and Romanticism, a movement based on turning away from the rational and embracing the emotional, the individual, and the sublime.

Week 16 — National Gallery Visit

Week 17-19 — Modernism

This unit will cover the effects that nineteenth-century advances in science and technology had on the development of movements like Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism, and the effects that the First World War had on the development of movements like Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism.

Week 20 — National Gallery visit

Week 21 and 22 — Postwar Painting

This unit will cover the relocation of the center of the Western art world from Europe to the United States in the wake of the Second World War and the development of the first uniquely American art movement—Abstract Expressionism—as well as Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Postmodernism.

Week 23 and 24 – Contemporary Art

This unit will cover developments in art since the last decades of the 20th century.

Week 25 – Exam

Learning outcomes

This course will have three objectives. The first will be for you to learn to analyze a work of art. To meet this objective, you will build a vocabulary of terms relevant to art analysis and become familiar with some of the more common critical methodologies. The second objective will be for you to become familiar with the major periods of Western art, identify the stylistic characteristics of each period, and understand the philosophical, historical, and cultural context behind the development of distinct period, regional, and personal styles. The ultimate goal of this course is that learning about the rich artistic heritage of the Western world will inform and enrich your work as filmmakers.

Prerequisites and other requirements

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Literature

There will be no required reading for this course; however, should you be interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in class, the following is a list of titles you might find useful. These titles are all very approachable and include general surveys of art history, a survey of critical methodologies, and a few publications on the formal elements of art. Should you at any point want to know more about any of the topics discussed in class, do not hesitate to ask.

Gardner, Helen, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner’s Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective, Vols I and II. Fourteenth edition. Australia; Boston, MA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2014.

Kemp, Martin. Art in History: 600 BC-2000 AD. Ideas in Profile. London: Profile Books, 2014.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1974.

Arnheim, Rudolf. The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1982.

Itten, Johannes, and Faber Birren. The Elements of Color: A Treatise on the Color System of Johannes Itten, Based on His Book the Art of Color. A Basic Color Library. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1970.

D’Alleva, Anne. Methods & Theories of Art History. London: King, 2005.

Evaluation methods and criteria

After each visit to the National Gallery, you will be asked to write a short ekphrastic paper on a work of art of your choice. This paper should be a minimum of three double-spaced pages. At the end of the year, you will be given a multiple-choice final exam. Should you miss more than four meetings in one semester, you will not receive credit for the course.

Note

I have an undergraduate degree in English, a post-graduate credential in secondary education from California State University, a master’s degree in art history from a university in Missouri, and I am currently a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of York. I am an associate editor for the University of York art history journal Aspectus and an editor and content contributor for the Volunteer Steering Committee Newsletter at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums where I also volunteered in the works on paper department for three years. I taught studio art and English at the high school level for twelve years and essay composition at a community college for eighteen months.

I am researching the role of gender play in the works of the Antwerp Mannerist Bartholomeus Spranger, but my interest in art spans all eras. I am endlessly fascinated by the degree to which works of art become performative and compel us to perform when we view them, the degree to which we transfer living qualities onto inanimate objects, and the degree to which these inanimate objects transform our mental states.

Schedule for winter semester 2023/2024:

• Week view
• List

Schedule for summer semester 2023/2024:

The schedule has not yet been prepared

The subject is a part of the following study plans

• Cinematography_1920 (required subject)
• Cinematography_3_2021 (required subject)
• Animation - Master_2021 (required optional subject)