Liberal Studies & Art History

This course will examine how artists from the mid-19th to the early 21st Centuries conceive of and talk about their own artistic practice. While artists’ works are frequently viewed through the lens of art history or criticism, students will consider how artists present, engage with and develop further levels of inquiry into their work. Topics covered will include artists’ published writings, their notebooks, the artist’s statement versus the manifesto, and their teachings. The course will also offer the opportunity to explore the relationships between artistic identity and art work, ranging from analysis of self-portraits to their performance on screen. Students will discover the extent to which artists’ practice depends upon a critical awareness of the cultural, theoretical, and historical matrix in which they operate. Assignments will include research projects on artists and the preparation of a statement that defines the students’ own self-conception of their studio practice or area of study.

There is little doubt that the “classical” and classicism constitutes the principal matrix through which art history prior to the end of the nineteenth century is viewed. The course will examine the birth, meaning, and significance of the classical in ancient Greek and Roman art; study how the retrieval of its motifs made possible the art of the Renaissance; examine its return as “neo-Classicism” in the 18th century (and what this return means sociopolitically); and how it has been “remarked,” often ironically, in postmodernism. Students will acquire a clear sense of what classicism means and how it has, in its many forms, pervaded the history of visual culture and the traditions of the West.

This course investigates the visual history of fashion, focusing on France from the Ancien Régime via the Revolution to the present day, and with a particular focus on primary sources available in the museums and archives of Paris. Weekly units explore historical European fashion trends – their details, silhouettes, fabrics and embellishments – in their original social, political, economic, aesthetic and spiritual contexts. Influences and parallel developments in other countries are also covered in this class, as are connections between the fashion industry, theatre, film, and the fine arts. Students are introduced to research practices and encouraged to reflect on design and style choices rooted in fashion history.

This course introduces students to themes and topics relevant to the production and reception of the art and design disciplines taught at PCA. Using art and design objects located in Parisian collections as the basis for visual, contextual and cultural analysis, students will develop ways of seeing, contextualizing and describing art and design, while tackling a common set of issues, including but not limited to: chronology, style, authorship, form, function, composition, originality, narrative, and the decorative. Students will be guided as to how to conduct research in local collections and libraries and will produce a short contextually-oriented research paper on an art or design object or an artist or designer based on first-hand access to the object, artist, designer and archives.

History of New Media is an overview of the pioneering artists and scientists who have brought about the dissolution of boundaries that have traditionally existed between the artistic and technological disciplines. The course will survey the work and ideas of artists who have explored new interactive and interdisciplinary forms, as well as engineers and mathematicians who have developed information technologies and influential scientific and philosophical ideologies that have influenced the arts. The course begins with seminal artistic movements and genres as well as the study of the invention of information technologies and new human-machine paradigms that have come to define digital culture. This broad historical analysis will help illuminate an understanding of the emerging digital arts and its aesthetics, strategies, trends, and socio-cultural aspirations. Central to this analysis will be an understanding of key concepts for the interpretation of evolving multimedia forms: including integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and narrativity. The course will reveal how these primary elements of contemporary media have roots in experimental electronic and performance art prior to the digital era. Students will develop commentary in the form of critical projects through in-depth analysis of historical trends and seminal work in the media arts and information sciences.

This interdisciplinary course explores the rise of visual media, communication and information, within the context of a broad cultural shift away from the verbal and textual toward the visual, which has taken place since the advent of photography and cinema in the late 19th century, through the birth of television, to the present proliferation of digital media worldwide. We will consider the critical practices of looking, historicizing and interpreting that have accompanied this ‘visual turn’. Our readings will primarily address the theoretical foundations of the study of visual culture, which is understood to incorporate a variety of visual media and visual technologies: painting and sculpture, scientific imagery, material culture, the internet. If everything can be visual culture, what remains of traditional notions of medium specificity? What critical tools must be invented to analyze visual events from a visual cultural perspective? The relationship between the visual arts and visual media, especially with respect to the ‘global’ contemporary visual landscape, will be a focus of this course.

If modernity can be understood as the distinctive set social, political, economic, and technological conditions that both shape and respond to the needs of a new form of human existence and that begin to emerge in the late 18th century, then modernism can be taken as critical literary, artistic, and architectural responses to those conditions and their consequences. The responses are therefore plural, and as such, we must speak of modernisms, some of which celebrate and make use of the advances offered by modernity, while others call them into question. This course will inquire into the distinctive features that characterize modernity and explore the various aesthetic responses to them in tune with technological advances such as photography and film.

This course will focus on the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st. The work of various international authors representative of that time period will be examined. Arranged thematically, the course will approach each subject through a selection of photographs. The study of their meaning and singularity will help understand the particularities and issues of each theme and put them into perspective.

The notion of “creation” will constitute the common thread of this course. Each theme will interrogate the use of photography as a means of expression whether it be with a personal, political, artistic, commercial or social goal. Examining body of works developed from 1960 to today, we will see how photography has fostered tradition (commitment to a certain vision of the medium and to its history) as well as a stimulated novelty (invention of new ways of using the camera).

Based on the observation and comment of photographic images, this course aims to start a discussion and foster debate on the medium, its specificities and the way they have developed since 1960.

Conceived as an introduction to the history of photography, this course will focus on the first half of the 20^th century. The main movements and aesthetics characterizing that period will be examined through the work of various international photographers. Arranged thematically while following a chronological progression, it will approach each theme in connection with a major photographer whose singularity will help understand the particularities and issues of the subject and put them into perspective. As a product of light and chemistry, photography has always been determined by technical parameters. We will address these parameters and see how they shaped the history of the medium and what we can learn from them today.

Since its invention, photography has had an ambivalent status, regarded by some only as a way of recording or copying things, while others considered it as an actual means of artistic creation. This constant dichotomy between document and art will constitute the common thread of this course. We will look at it with a critical eye, examining photographs through all the stages of their life, from the moment they were taken to the moment they were printed, published, exhibited or discovered by others. In doing so, we will be able to examine how the status of these photographs often changed during the various stages of their history, going from mere document to renowned work of art.

Based mostly on the observation and comment of photographic images, this course aims to start a discussion and foster debate on photography, its specificities and the way they were developed and used in the first half of the 20^th century.

The industrial revolution made new forms of technology and mass communication possible, allowing not only for the mechanical reproduction of the image and its circulation on a large scale, but also new materials, new processes, and new media. These developments have had a decisive impact on visual culture, on aesthetic categories, and on the status of the image. The aesthetic revolution began in Montmartre in the 1880s, reached a climax in SoHo in the 1960s, and continues to shape visual culture and aesthetic debates today. What status does the image have? What is the difference between a Brillo box produced by industrial means and one produced by Andy Warhol? Does a distinction between high art and kitsch still matter in the age of Pop? How have the transformations in visual and material culture affected the productive activity of artists, or conversely, how does artists’ activity take up and critically remark upon these transformations? How has the Pop aesthetic translated and transmuted in contemporary global culture? These are the kinds of questions that this course will explore.

While searching for alternative styles and means of expression, modern artists were attracted to the unusual and exotic. Both pre-historic art, early ancient, and “primitive” art (the traditional indigenous products of Africa, Oceania and North America) penetrated the western artistic world and had a determining impact on the aesthetic of the 20th century. The purpose of the course is to contextualize and analyze art and architecture from these cultures, and to describe their afterlife in modernist production. It will also describe the social changes associated with this attraction to “primitive” art forms. Key aesthetic discourses of the period will be articulated, offering crucial insight into the complex and always changing nexus between culture, politics and representation. The course will include field trips to the antiquities collections at the Louvre, to Musée du Quai Branly, and the Centre Pompidou to examine both primitive and ancient objects and images together. Students will be exposed to art historical and post-colonial critiques of the appropriation of past forms and the complex visual and ideological implications of the wholesale designation of cultures as “other”.

The Senior Seminar alternates between combined collective seminar and individual tutroials with senior theis advisors. Students develop and produce research for the written student thesis on a topic relevant to art history, theory and critisism, which may include a practice component if relevant to their art historical thesis topic and a public presentation of their thesis topic during the end of year show.

This course explores the relationship between food, health and the environment. What is the impact of what we eat on our health, and how does food production affect the environment we live in? Starting from the study of the digestive system, students will be introduced to topics as food security, malnutrition and diet-related diseases. They will also examine how food production processes and consumption impact human health and the environment, and reflect upon innovative solutions offered by sustainable agriculture. Field trips to Ecole du Breuil (French school of gardening and horticulture), urban farms, La Louve (food coop), and to Rungis market (largest fresh products market in the world) will be part of the course.

Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Countee Cullin flocked to Paris in the 1920’s. Josephine Baker conquered the stage and the culture of cabaret. Later, jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and the artists Lois Mailor Jones and Palmer Hayden, as well as writers such as James Baldwin and Chester Himes, lived in and drew inspiration from the City of Lights. While the African American presence in Paris was clearly noticeable in the 1920s, it was not until after World War Two that Paris emerged as a center of creative and personal freedom to a large community of Black American writers, artists, musicians and political exiles. Through a consideration of literature, history, politics, art, and music, we will probe the impetus, meaning, and legacy of the latter period (1940-1960) in French and Afro-American cultural history. Readings will focus on literary texts, art, music, and the film industry, with careful and considerable attention given to historical and autobiographical contexts. We will attempt to come to our own definition of the character of cosmopolitan Paris, which facilitated the creation of an Afro-American expatriate colony in Western Europe. We will also explore the claim that this was a period when Black artists “allowed” their work to be appropriated and exploited. Works will be discussed artistically in relation to Modernism, politically in relation to radicalism and the decolonization movement and the presence of African-American artists in France, and historically in relation to Blacks in the United States. Coursework will be supplemented by visits to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Studio Museum of Harlem and Chez Joséphine.