Professor Nancy Marshall will be teaching ART HIST 350 19th C. Painting in Europe: Empire and the Emergence of the Modern World MWF 12:05–12:55PM during the Fall 2024 semester. Sophomore Standing | Honors Optional | Humanities Breadth | L&S Credit. Enroll here.
Description: Explore the century that gave us the world as we know it now: light-bulbs, steam engines, reproductive technologies, the mass media, phonographs, telegraphs, telephones, factories, the middle class, globalization, condoms, antisepsis, even computers! How did artists respond to and participate in an era of rapid change not unlike our own? A time of paradigm shifts in Western ways of understanding the world, the nineteenth century in Europe saw the emergence of new ideas like the equality of all humans preached by the French Revolution, the concept of childhood, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, animal rights, and Darwinian evolutionary theory, among other new ideas. The nineteenth-century legacy also includes darker aspects of modernity related to its privileging of white middle-class men, such as colonialism and racial and sexual inequalities.
This survey course situates the important artists and artworks of the period in their cultural and historical contexts. Topics include French, British, and German art movements, focusing on Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and photography, with a thematic focus on issues of gender, race, and the important political and philosophical questions of the era.