Academics

Art History


Anne Monahan
Felicity Ratté

The Discipline of Art History:
Art History is a broadly based discipline, which allows a student to combine a critical approach to aesthetics with a knowledge and awareness of patterns of historical change and continuity. A student interested in Art History should study broadly across the curriculum, investigating foreign languages, history, philosophy, as well as science and mathematics. Courses offered in Art History at Marlboro are designed to give an introduction to the major periods of Western art history and the methods of art historical inquiry.

It's important that students get a complete picture of a people and their culture to best understand the art they created. Emphasis in art history courses is on developing the following skills: visual and aesthetic understanding of a work of art or a building and an ability to explain this to others in both written and oral form, an ability to critically assess information and its source, distinguishing between the meaning and value of primary and secondary sources, and the knowledge of historical context and its constructedness.

Felicity Ratté

Research Area: Medieval Italy, painting and architectural practice.
Secondary Areas of Interest: Byzantium, Public Art, Indian Art and Architecture.

My own research into the painting and architecture of thirteenth and fourteenth century Italy combines the study of culture and art with a focus on its interaction with social and religious practice. Although I am a medievalist I am interested in the way in which art and social meaning is produced in all periods and all cultures. I am particularly interested in the relationship between artistic production and power and its multiple manifestations from propaganda to historical revisionism.

Anne Monahan

Research Area: Modern and contemporary art

Secondary Areas of Interest: American art of the nineteenth century, European and Islamic architecture

My scholarship typically focuses on the critical reception of art from the latter half of the twentieth century. I am particularly attracted to cases in which that reception constructs a circuit of meaning at some remove from its object. In that gap between production and reception, I see various social, cultural, and political anxieties take shape.

Starting Points: (Basic and Introductory Courses)

Introduction to Art History I: Survey I and II (HUM 1181 and HUM 816)
These two courses are intended to introduce students to the major periods in art history and its monuments. The scope of the course will cover the arts of Europe, the Middle East and Asia from the ancient through modern periods. Our task will be to examine human production in the arts and built environment and through these monuments explore the values and customs of the culture which produced these works. We will take the premise that art and architecture contain messages to its intended viewer and often elicit responses in return. We will explore these messages and consider the power of art and architecture to shape people's perspectives of their worlds. Required for Plan work in Art History. (Alternate years)

Introduction to Art History II: Art History Questions (ART816) Who made it? For whom did they make it? And Why did they make it? These are some of the longstanding questions that have framed and structured the discipline of art history. But over the last 20 years art history has changed dramatically destabilizing the status of even these most fundamental of the discipline's questions. Many art historians focus on an entirely different set of questions, such as: How was the image or sculpture understood? How was it displayed? Who saw it? In what way does a work's style reinforce a specific cultural ideology? In this course, which will serve as an introduction to the study of art and art history, students will learn a variety of ways of looking at and understanding visual culture. The course will begin by setting up a chronological framework for the study of world art, it will then leapfrog through time stopping to examine works of art in various periods and the ways in which art historians have written about them. The focus of the course will be on paintings, sculptures and various forms of art objects although there will be some discussion of architecture as well. (Alternate years)

Classicism, Neo-Classicism, and the Postmodern (HUM1339) From its invention by the ancients to today, the vocabulary of art and architectural forms associated with Classicism has been mobilized to signal various social, cultural, and political meanings for contemporary viewers. This course aims to identify and understand the specific historical, socio-political, ideological and epistemological contexts for that vocabulary in its culture of origin and subsequent manifestations. In so doing, students will develop their awareness of the development of art and architecture in Europe and the U.S. and a fuller understanding of the network of associations on which art and architecture draw to speak to their audiences.

Pursuing Interests (Intermediate and Thematic Courses)

Classical Art & Architecture (ART520) An investigation of the art and architecture of the Ancient Western world beginning with the palace cultures of the Minoans and continuing up to the founding of Constantinople. We will examine the aesthetic elements of the buildings, sculpture and paintings produced and the context of the secular and religious movements in which they were used. We will also address historiographic questions of the relevance and meaning of classical culture in the context of multiculturalism and contemporary understanding. (Introductory)

Rome & Constantinople: Imperial Iconography, Architecture, & Urban Design (HUM1001) A survey course, beginning with the reign of the emperor Augustus in Rome in the first century B.C.E. and ending with the reign of Sultan Suliman the Magnificent in sixteenth-century Constantinople. From antiquity through the Renaissance and beyond, these two cities alternated with each other as key sites of the concrete manifestation of cultural dominance, displaying in the buildings and urban design, religious and secular, the ideals, aspirations and ideology of the Roman, Byzantine, papal and Ottoman empires. (Intermediate)

Topics in Medieval Art (rotating topics)

The Gothic Cathedral: Structure, Space, Function
This course covers the period known as the "age of the cathedrals," ca. thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. We will study gothic cathedrals from the perspective of the "anthropology of architecture," which means that we are interested in how these monuments shaped and were shaped by people's experiences of the world. Questions to be addressed include: How were cathedrals built? By whom? How did they function as performance spaces for ritual and theater? What social roles did they play in the medieval city? How did they function as a venue for other visual arts? While we will look at examples in England, Germany and Italy, France will be our primary focus. (Intermediate)

Pictorial Space & Structured Sight: Renaissance Art (HUM870)
A cross-cultural examination of the way in which we look at and think about pictorial imagery. While some of the class will be organized much like a traditional survey focusing on pictorial imagery of 15 th and 16 th century Italy, other parts of it will be more theoretical. Students will be asked to think about and come to terms with how their own way of seeing has been structured by the Western artistic tradition and to compare and contrast this with ways of seeing in non-Western cultures. (Introductory)

Issues in Modern Art: Public Art and Protest (ART519)
This course will look broadly and somewhat chronologically at public art in the United States in the twentieth century. Although the class moves from the beginning of the century to its close, our examination will not be comprehensive. Instead, the intent of the class is to introduce students to this under-studied category of American art and to the very complex, yet incredibly important issues that are key to the perception, production, and sometimes the destruction, of public art. It is hoped that the course might serve as a call to action for students who are concerned with contemporary events and their effect on our lives. (Intermediate)

Issues in Modern Art: Popular Culture & the Power of Visual Images (HUM817)
This course focuses particularly on images which are not generally considered within the category of "fine art." We will examine advertisements, news photographs and television, as well as painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance art in an attempt to come to some understanding of the interaction of popular culture and the ideology of "high culture" in America in the twentieth century. (Introductory)

The Historical Avant-Garde: Art, 1900-1950 (HUM1340)
This course considers key Modernist movements and the responses to them that characterized art in the first half of the twentieth century. It traces the rise of Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism in the century's first three decades and the eventual collapse of Modernism in the repressive politics of the 1930s, of World War II, and the Holocaust. Organized as a seminar, the course consists primarily of thoughtful discussion and analysis of texts representing diverse methodological and theoretical models (e.g., formalism, social art history, political theory, psychoanalysis) that currently structure how the field is studied. (Advanced)

Art Since 1950 (ART830)
Extra-aesthetic concerns have influenced the production and reception of art in the latter half of the twentieth century in multiform ways. This seminar, organized loosely as an art historical survey, pays special attention to understanding how Cold War politics, the struggles for Civil and Equal Rights, the AIDS crisis, and protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars have influenced specific artistic projects and their interpretations. (Advanced)

Good Foundation For Plan

Students who wish to pursue a Plan or a partial Plan in art history should think ahead through their four years and plan on taking both the Introduction to Art History and the Methods class. They should study at least one foreign language, take some history and cultural history courses as well as courses in the social sciences, such as Political Science or Anthropology. In addition they will want to take one year of studio art courses to give them a sense of the challenges to the practitioner. Writing a Plan in Art History will require a familiarity with the multiple different historical periods and cultures across the globe and the way art historians approach them so ideally, a student should begin with the art history survey, both semesters, and then follow with courses in at least three different chronological periods. Once this foundation work is done, Art Historical Methods, subject specific seminars and tutorial work should be used to focus in on particular subject matter.

Writing Art Historically
This is a writing based class designed for students who have passed the writing requirement and plan to do advanced work in the visual arts or art history. Although the focus of the class will be on writing and developing skills of visual analysis, we will also read and discuss various methodological approaches to visual culture and art criticism. Offered alternate Spring semesters or as needed.

Art Historical Methods
an upper level reading class that concentrates on reading and critically analyzing different methodological approaches to the study of Art History. Students should speak with the professor before signing up for this class. Offered every Spring semester as needed. Equivalent to a Plan seminar.

Sample Tutorial Topics