RUSSIAN AND SOVIET ART 1757-PRESENT
Introduction to the history of Russian and Soviet art, from the foundation of the Academy of the Arts in 1757 to the present. Topics will include: the Russian empire and academic painting; the intelligentsia, serfs, and the professionalization of art; 19th century critical realism and progressive politics; the impact of Slavic folk art and Orthodox iconography on modernism; the avant-garde: from rayonnism and cubofuturism to constructivism and suprematism; art and ideology in Soviet society; socialist realism and the return of figuration; sots-art, Moscow conceptualism, and late Soviet kitsch; capitalism and artistic practice in the age of Putin and the oligarchs. No knowledge of Russian is required.
EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN THE RUSSIAN VISUAL ARTS AND MATERIAL CULTURE
In 1871, at the height of Russia’s colonial military campaigns in Central Asia, Vasilii Vereshchagin painted The Apotheosis of War: To All Great Conquerors, Past, Present and Future, which shows a pyramid of human skulls dominating a barren, desert landscape, while crows feast on the remains of decaying human flesh. The once flourishing but now destroyed and desolate ancient city of Samarkand is visible in the distant background. In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s unconscionable invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow featured Vereshchagin’s painting on its official Instagram account in a veiled condemnation of the regime’s actions. Starting with the conquest of Crimea by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, this course examines the degree to which Russian visual culture was complicit in systems of power and oppression and to what extent it advanced anti-imperial and anti-autocratic discourses from the enlightenment period to the end of the Tsarist era in the twentieth century. In what ways did artists from the so called imperial outposts—spanning from the Baltics and Ukraine in the West, to Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Russia’s Far East—interrogate, challenge, and revise their positionality as Russia’s colonial “others”? How did artists and cultural practitioners critique and subvert the Russian state’s self-mythologizing, its vacillation between reform and repression, its fraught relationship with both the East and the West, and its aspirations for prominence and recognition within global politics—issues that have become especially urgent in our present moment?
RACE IN RUSSIAN ART AND CULTURE FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE SOVIET ERA
From depictions of Mongol conquerors in medieval icons and illuminated manuscripts to Socialist Realist propaganda posters projecting racial harmony, this course examines the diverse modes by which race has been represented in Russian and Soviet culture. Particular attention will be paid to the role of images in either advancing or contesting concepts of race and ethnicity as features of identity on the one hand and systems of power on the other. Topics include: Alexander Pushkin and the question of his “blackness”; depictions of Central Asia in Vasilii Vereshchagin’s paintings; representations of the Caucasus in the visual and performing arts of the Abramtsevo Artistic Circle; Aleksandr Deineka’s portrayals of African Americans in Harlem. Students will engage with different theoretical positions and methodologies advanced by thinkers such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Patricia Hall Collins, and Adrienne Childs, among others. Course materials and discussions will be supplemented with direct object study in museum and library collections.
PAINTING THE ORIENT: ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN VISUAL CULTURE
This course will examine the politics and poetics of Orientalist representations in nineteenth-century European visual culture. Beginning with the colonial encounter, fascination with the so-called “Orient” found expression in a variety of different media, including painting, architecture, design, photography, theatre and film. Taking Edward Said’s seminal definition of Orientalism as a point of departure, the course will focus on a particular historical moment in the first half of the nineteenth century when Orientalist painting first rose to prominence as a popular genre of visual representation. We will then proceed to examine a series of case studies by celebrated European artists such as Delacroix, Ingres, Gros and Girodet amongst others, alongside key primary and secondary literature. Students will also engage with different theoretical positions and methodologies, including Marxist, feminist and subaltern critiques, exploring how the legacy of Orientalism continues to influence our perceptions of the East/West binary to this day.
REVIVALISM AS AVANT-GARDE STRATEGY
Much of Western art history is the story of revivals: the resurrection of forms and ideas slightly or radically adapted to suit new contexts and horizons. From Jacques Louis David and Neo-Classicism, to the English Pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic Revival, and finally even to Pablo Picasso and the “Call to Order,” the “long” nineteenth century has witnessed a succession of revivalist movements in art and architecture throughout Europe. Rather than being conservative or retrograde “returns” to past traditions and styles, revivalist movements were oftentimes radical protests against the prevailing tastes and artistic practices of a particular period. Stated slightly differently, revivalism was often deployed as an avant-garde strategy for bringing about change and innovation in the visual arts. By closely examining the rediscovery and reassessment of the iconic tradition in Russian modernist artistic practice, this seminar proposes to analyze the very nature of revivalism as a tool for articulating avant-garde theory and aesthetics. Why and how did artists on the cutting edge of modernity such as Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin turn to the past traditions of icon painting? Was this revivalist impulse antithetical to modernist practice, or on the contrary, integral to it? Since twentieth-century Russian art is focused on ideas as well as forms, art theory will be a central component of the seminar, and readings for the class will include primary texts in the form of statements and essays by avant-garde artists, theoreticians, and cultural practitioners.
KAZIMIR MALEVICH AND THE BLACK SQUARE
This course will examine the creation, exhibition and enduring legacy of one of the world’s most famous masterpieces of modern art: Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915). We will closely focus on a variety of primary materials in the form of Malevich’s artworks, memoirs, correspondence and critical writings, as well as contemporary art criticism and period publications that address crucial questions on the subject of aesthetics, culture and politics. We will likewise read a number of important secondary sources that will help us to better understand both Malevich’s motivations and his lasting impact on the realm of modern art. More specifically, we will analyze the broader historical conditions that shaped both the inception and public reception of the Black Square in order to comprehend how and why this work became the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture. A major component of the course will include a consideration of the immediate causes and effects of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
THE RUSSIAN “AMAZONS”: WOMEN ARTISTS, PATRONS, AND PERFORMERS IN LATE IMPERIAL AND EARLY SOVIET RUSSIA
This course will examine the cultural production and institutional creativity of a number of important female artists, patrons, and benefactors such as Elizaveta Mamontova, Princess Maria Tenisheva, Elena Polenova, Zinaida Serebriakova, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Vera Mukhina. It will likewise consider the contributions of celebrated stage performers such as Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, Nadezhda Salina, Anna Pavlova, and Ida Rubinstein. In addition to studying their dynamic and boundary-pushing roles in Russia’s cultural landscape, the course will also probe the ways in which these women navigated and advanced the institutional structures of artistic instruction and creativity in Russia, as well as analyzing their struggle for greater social and political autonomy both individually and collectively. Students will engage with key works of feminist critique and gender theory, including the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir, Linda Nochlin, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sianne Ngai, among others.
CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ART HISTORY
This course will examine the analysis of art as a historical and critical discipline. As an intensive study of both the nature and history of art history, we will examine the different methodological approaches scholars have used to shape the academic discipline today. Through a wide range of texts both classical and current, the course is designed to provide basic information literacy for the field as well as the principles of current art historical research and writing. We will consider questions such as: What does a work of art mean, to whom, and why? How does the art object function in culture, and how does culture function in it? In our global society today, how does the traditional history of art play a role in the context of new ideas? In tackling these questions, this course will equip you with the fundamental tools to critically think, analyze, and approach your own work for the concentration and beyond.
MODERNISM ON THE STAGE: THE BALLETS RUSSES IN BELLE-ÉPOQUE PARIS
This course will examine the phenomenon of the Ballets Russes from its origins in St. Petersburg to its heyday in Paris in the 1920s. Some of the foremost artists of the day—Bakst, Benois, Larionov, Goncharova, Matisse, Picasso, and Miro—created the costumes and stage sets for the company’s innovative and revolutionary productions. Through a close study of the preparatory drawings and stage sets, as well as period photographs, music recordings, and press reviews, the course will reconstruct the pioneering sights and sounds of several Ballets Russes performances and their enduring legacy in the history of fashion and the visual and performing arts. In addition to individual productions, the course will also consider the broader political, cultural, theatrical and aesthetic contexts and the most important debates and discourses of the day. Study of original paintings, works on paper, and photographs will supplement material covered in class meetings.
PARIS 1900: THE GREAT WORLD’S FAIR
This course will examine the visual archive of the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900. Marking the height of a politically turbulent period of imperial expansion, global trade and cultural interaction and exchange, the fair aimed to showcase the various international achievements of the past century. From the Human Zoo to the Palace of Electricity, we will probe the myth of modernity, analyzing the multiple competing, contradictory and often paradoxical narratives that emerged in the course of the fair. Particular attention will be paid to the artistic and technological innovations that subsequently shaped the twentieth century including but not limited to escalators, moving panoramas, diesel engines, talking films and the telegraphone. The visual resonances and implications of empire and imperialism, as well as spectacle culture, will also emerge as major themes.
