Courses » » Art and Art History 398. Experimental Courses

Nineteenth Century Architecture

This course will explore the changing roles of architectural design in Europe and the United States, from the visionary projects of the Enlightenment period to the progressive movements of the fin-de-siècle. Style and ornament, new building typologies, and evolving conceptions of urban space will be considered in light of social, political, and economic developments in this period. Buildings on Wheaton’s campus and in Providence will serve as occasional case studies throughout the semester, culminating in a tour of works on Brown’s campus and downtown Providence at the end of the semester. Ultimately, the course will link nineteenth-century design with the advent of twentieth-century modernism.

Ruling Families of the Renaissance

The need to assert power, the struggle to maintain it through different political rules, and the results of visualizing it in effective ways will be the central themes of this course. The students will examine: the establishment of rulership in several Italian city states and duchies; the rise of families and their contiguous visual assertions; the links between commanding European families such as the Valois and the Medici; the creation of absolutist authority through legible media; and the exuberance of rococo as a political and social statement.

This seminar is tied to the New England Renaissance Conference, which will be held at Wheaton College on 12 November 2011. The theme of the NERC (“Expanding Relations: Families in the Renaissance”) will be familiar to students in this seminar and they will therefore be expected to engage with the scholarly discussions of the conference.

Matisse and Methods

This seminar will focus on Henri Matisse (1869-1954) using his work as a lens to explore the methods of art history. The vast literature on Matisse provides us with a range of writers asking different questions of the artist’s work. After a critical consideration of methodologies that have been used to interpret Matisse’s work (formalist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, for example) we will focus in on one question in particular: that of source and influence. How have scholars and curators interpreted Matisse’s studio sources, his interactions with other artists (Cézanne, Picasso) and his appropriation from other media and cultural traditions (African, Islamic, Chinese, for example)? Have these approaches adequately addressed the complex relationships between Matisse’s paintings and sculpture and the ideas that inform them?