On Pictures 2

Display Schedule

Subject guarantor

Petr KOLESNIKOV

Name of lecturer(s)

Petr KOLESNIKOV

Contents

The course consists of twenty-six forty-five-minute-long academic hours. These are divided into thirteen one-and-a-half hour meetings, alternating between classroom lectures and fieldtrips. Lectures will take place on the FAMU campus on Thursdays between 10:40AM and 12:15PM. Fieldtrips will take place at pre-arranged times at various locations of the Prague National Gallery.

Each class lecture will include a PowerPoint slide show. I will upload narrated versions of these slide shows the day of our meeting. I find recorded lectures are a great way to fill in anything you may have missed. You can pause and rewind, fill in blanks, and come up with questions to ask me at the next class meeting.

Before each lesson, I will email you a document with vocabulary words and art work titles in a table. This is also a convenient tool. This document will list all of the terms and art works we will be covering on that day. If you come to class with a laptop or a tablet, you can take notes directly into the table.

Course Calendar

Week 1 — How to Read Art

This unit will cover art work 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 when analyzing works of art.

Week 2 — The Middle Ages

This unit will cover the rise of Christianity and the role it played in the development of art from Late Antiquity, through Byzantium, the Romanesque, and the Gothic.

Week 3 — National Gallery Visit

Week 4 — The Renaissance

This unit will cover the effects that Renaissance humanism and the continent-wide mania for all things ancient had on the development of art throughout the Renaissance, the effects that the Northern penchant for depicting minutia and supreme textural differentiation had 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 all of Europe.

Week 5 — National Gallery Visit

Week 6 — The Baroque and Rococo

This unit will cover the role played by 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 7 — National Gallery Visit

Week 8 — 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 searching for the emotional and the sublime.

Week 9 — National Gallery Visit

Week 10 — 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 11 — National Gallery visit

Week 12 — Postwar Painting

This unit will cover the shift of the center of the 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 13 — Student Presentations

Learning outcomes

This course will have two objectives. The first objective 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 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 own 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 informative. 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 topic discussed in class, don’t 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

There will only be one assignment in this course. You will write and present an analysis of a work you have chosen from the Prague National Gallery collections. This, along with attendance, will determine your final grade.

Note

Your Instructor

My name is Peter Kos, and I am a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of York. I have an undergraduate degree in English and a post-graduate credential in secondary education, both from a California State University, and a master’s degree in art history from a university in Missouri. I am an associate editor for the University of York art history journal Aspectus, and the editor for the Volunteer Steering Committee at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, where I volunteered for several years in the works on paper department. I also taught art and English at a secondary school, and tutored essay writing at a community college for a number of years.

My current research is focused on the Late Renaissance, specifically the role of gender play in the works of the artist 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. All of these are closely bound to an artwork’s formal qualities and thematic content, both of which will be the primary focus of this course.

Schedule for winter semester 2022/2023:

• Week view
• List

Schedule for summer semester 2022/2023:

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)