This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

 

Readings

Required Texts

Amazon logo Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing About Art. 7th edition. New York: Longman Press, 2002. ISBN: 0321101448.

Amazon logo Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood. Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. ISBN: 0631227083. [referenced below as AIT]

Amazon logo Frascina, Francis and Jonathan Harris. Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts. London: Phaidon Press Inc., 1996. ISBN: 0714828408. [referenced below as AMC]

Amazon logo Frascina, Francis and Charles Harrison, eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. ISBN: 0064301249. [referenced below as MAM]

Reading Schedule

WEEK # TOPICS READINGS
1 Modernity, Modernism, Modernization

Lecture 1: Introduction to Theories of Modernism and Modernity

Lecture 2: Introduction to Theories of Mass Culture
Lecture 1

Amazon logo Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Chapters 1 and 7. ISBN: 0140216316.

Lecture 2

Amazon logo Williams, Raymond. Entries on "Art," "Culture," "Masses," "Popular." In Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ISBN: 0195204697.

———. "What Was Modernism?" In AMC, by Frascina.

Optional

View John Berger's BBC program Ways of Seeing, Episode 1.
2 Post-Revolutionary France

Lecture 3: Eugéne Delacroix, or How to Imagine Liberty

Lecture 4: Caricature and the Safehouse of "High Art"
Lecture 3

Amazon logo Pointon, Marcia. "Liberty on the Barricades: Woman, Politics and Sexuality in Delacroix." In Naked Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. pp. 59-82. ISBN: 521385288.

Lecture 4

Merriman, John. "Philipon Versus Philippe," and "The July Monarchy and its Enemies." In Kenney, Elise K. and John M. Merriman, ed. The Pear: French Graphic Arts in the Golden Age of Caricature. Mount Holyoke Art Museum, 1991. pp. 7-28.
3 Realism and The Painting of Modern Life

Lecture 5: Courbet, Realism, and Popular Images
Amazon logo Schapiro, Meyer. "Courbet and Popular Imagery." In Modern Art, ...Selected Papers. New York: Braziller, 1982. pp. 47-85. ISBN: 0807610348.

Amazon logo Nochlin, Linda. "Courbet's Real Allegory: Rereading the 'Painter's Studio.'" In Courbet Reconsidered, by Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Musem, 1988. pp. 17-41. ISBN: 0300042981.
4 Impressionism, Photography, Serialism

Lecture 6: Manet and Modernization

Lecture 7: The Impressionist Eye as Camera
Lecture 6

Baudelaire, Charles. "The Salon of 1846: On the Heroism of Modern Life." In MAM text 3.

———. "The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography." In MAM text 4.

Clark, T. J. "The Painting of Modern Life." In AMC text 5.

Lecture 7

Amazon logo
Varnedoe, Kirk. "The Artifice of Candor: Impressionism and Photography Reconsidered." Art in America 68 (June 1980): 96-110. (Anthologized in Perspectives on Photography. Edited by Peter Walch, and Thomas Barrow. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. ISBN: 0826308627.)
5 Modernist Anxiety: "Where are we going?"

Lecture 8: Serial Impressions (Print and Eye)
Amazon logo Perry, Gill. "Primitivism and the 'Modern'." In Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, by Harrison et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. pp. 3-34. ISBN: 0300055153.

Amazon logo Dening, Greg. "Dispossessed." In Islands and Beaches. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1980. pp. 268-288. ISBN: 0256073066.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism." Art in America 77, 7 (July 1989): 118-129, 161.

Amazon logo Eisenman, Stephen. Gauguin's Skirt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. ISBN: 0500017662.

Lecture 8

Eisenman, Stephen. "The Intransigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got their Name." In AMC text 19.

Isaacson, Joel. "Impressionism and Journalistic Illustration." Arts 56 (June 1982): 95-115.

Goldwater, Robert. "l'Affiche Moderne: A Revival of Poster Art After 1880." 1941.
6 Primitivism / Woman / Mass Culture

Lecture 9: Woman and the Modern City

Lecture 10: European Orientalism and Gauguin's Skirt
Lecture 9

Clark, T. J. "Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Manet's Olympia in 1865." In AMC text 12.

Amazon logo Wolff, Janet. "The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity." In Theory, Culture and Society 2:3. 1985, pp. 37-46. (Anthologized In Feminine Sentences. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. ISBN: 0520070747.)

Lecture 10

Said, Edward. "Orientalism." In AMC text 14.
Or, see expanded version in Amazon logo Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1991. pp. 1-28. ISBN: 0141187425.

Complete Gauguin readings, above.
7 Cubo-Futurism and the Sign

Lecture 11: Picasso's Cubism: Politics and/or Semiosis

Lecture 12: Futurism's and Dadaism's Popular Mechanics

Midterm Exam
Lecture 11

Leighton, Patricia. "The White Peril and l'art Negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism." Art Bulletin 72 (December 1990): 609-30.

Krauss, Rosalind. "In the Name of Picasso." In AMC text 21. 1981.
Or, see expanded version in Amazon logo Picasso Papers. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998. ISBN: 0374232091.

Review

Amazon logo Crow, Thomas. "Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts." In Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. pp. 3-37. ISBN: 0300064381.

Lecture 12

Marinetti, F. T. "The Founding Manifesto of Futurism." In AIT. 1909-1912, pp. 145-149.

Amazon logo Jones, Caroline. "The Sex of the Machine: Mechanomorphic Art, New Women, and Francis Picabia's Neurasthenic Cure." In Picturing Science, Producing Art. New York: Routledge, 1998. pp. 145-180. ISBN: 0415919126.

Duchamp, Marcel. "The Richard Mutt Case." In AIT. 1917.

Nesbit, Molly. "Ready Made Originals: The Duchamp Model." October 37 (Summer 1986): 53-64.
8 Commodities

Lecture 12 (cont.): Bauhaus Film
Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism." Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21. Edited by Lytton Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1976. pp. 152-157.

Marx, Karl. "The Fetishism of Commodities." Capital 1, 3 (1867).

Amazon logo Nelson, and Shiff. "Fetish, Commodity." In Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 0226571645.

Schlemmer, and Gropius. In AIT. pp. 306-314.
9 Photography, Propaganda, Montage

Lecture 13: (Sur)realism and Photography

Lecture 14: The Soviet Avant-Garde
Lecture 13

Breton, Andre. "The First Manifesto of Surrealism." In AIT. 1924. (Excerpts)

Bataille, Georges. "The Lugubrious Game." In AIT. 1929.

Amazon logo Krauss, Rosalind. "The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism." In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. pp. 87-118. ISBN: 0262610469.

Lecture 14

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction." In AMC text 27. 1936.

Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." In AIT. 1939, pp. 529-545

Amazon logo Teitelbaum, and Phillips. Montage and Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. pp. 1-35. ISBN: 0262200910.(Skim reproductions throughout.)

Buchloh, Benjamin. "From Faktura to Factography." October 30 (1984): 82-119.
10 Postwar Primitives

Lecture 15: Anti-culture? Dubuffet, Graffiti, and Art of the Insane

Lecture 16: The Jackson Pollock Case
Lecture 15

Horkheimer, and Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cummings. New York: Seabury Press, 1977. pp. 120-167.

Dubuffet, Jean. "Notes for the Well-Lettered," (1946) and "Crude Art Preferred to Cultural Art." In AIT. pp. 590-595.

Lecture 16

Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting." In AMC text 28.

Guilbaut, Serge. "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America, Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the 'Vital Center.'" In AMC text 23.

Amazon logo Crow, Thomas. "Fashioning the New York School." In Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. pp. 39-48. ISBN: 0300064381.
11 Marketing Mass Culture

Lecture 17: Robert Rauschenberg's "Coca-Cola Plan"
Jones, Caroline. "Coca-Cola Plan, or, How New York Stole the Soul of Giuseppe Panza." In Legacy of a Collector. MoCA, 1999. pp. 22- 49.

Stich, Sidra. "American Food and American Marketing." In Made in USA. University of California Press, 1987. pp. 77-109.
12 Pop Art and Popular Culture

Lecture 18: International Pop and Anti-Pop

Lecture 19: American Pop and the "Business Art Business"
Lecture 18

Hamilton, Richard. "For the Finest Art, Try Pop." In AIT. 1961, pp. 726-727.

Gerhard Richter Interview. In AIT. 1988, pp. 1036-1041.

Debord, Guy. "Society of the Spectacle" and other writings from the Situationist International. In AIT. 1961, pp. 693-700.

Alloway, Lawrence. "The Arts and Mass Media." In AIT. 1958, pp. 701-703.

Lecture 19

Amazon logo Bogart, Michelle. "Modernism and Advertising Art," and "Depression." In Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. pp. 137-157. ISBN: 0226063070.

Claes Oldenburg Manifesto (1961-62), Warhol Interview (1963), and Roy Lichtenstein Lecture (1964). In AIT. pp. 727-735.

Baudrillard. "The Hyper-realism of Simulation." In AIT. 1976, pp. 1049-1051.
13 Postmodernism and Mass Media

Lecture 20: Postmodernism and Institutional Critique

Lecture 21: Postmodernism, Feminism
Lecture 20

Huyssen, Andreas. "Mapping the Postmodern." In After the Great Divide. Indiana University Pres, 1984. pp. 178-221.

Thomas, Crow. "The Return of Hank Herron: Simulated Abstraction and the Service Economy of Art." In Modern Art in the Common Culture. Yale University Press, 1986. pp. 69-84.

Bois, Yve-Alain. "Painting - The Task of Mourning." In AMC text 31.

Haim Steinbach et al., 1986 Discussion; Krzysztof Wodiczko. "Public Projection." In AIT. pp. 1080-1084, and 1094-1097.

Lecture 21

Amazon logo Huyssen, Andreas. "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other." In After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. pp. 44-62. ISBN: 0253100577.

Amazon logo Owens, Craig. "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism." In Beyond Recognition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. pp. 166-190. ISBN: 0520077393.
14 The Collapse, or Renewal, of Aesthetic Distance?

Lecture 22: Report on the Present: Fashion Culture, Culture Fashion

Lecture 23: Last class, Discussion and Review
Hebdige, Dick. "...Postmodernism and the 'Politics' of Style." In AMC text 32. 1986.

Skim and study the curatorial categories in Hoptman, Laura. Drawing Now: Eight Propositions. Museum of Modern Art, 2002. Especially "Ornament and Crime: Toward Decoration," "Comics and Other Subcultures," "Popular Culture and National Culture," and "Fashion, Likeness, and Allegory."
15 Final Exam