Years 2 and 3

Michaelmas 2024

Imperial Art and Patronage in Early Modern China – Dr Hajnalka Elias

This course explores the imperial art of 18th century China, a period when court patronage of the arts inspired new heights in refinement, technical prowess and production output. The most talented artists and skilled craftsmen from all over the Qing Empire, as well as European Jesuit missionaries with special know-how and technical skills were recruited to serve in the Palace Workshops to create masterpieces in various media. The course also explores one of China’s greatest contributions to the decorative arts: its remarkable porcelain tradition. The period examined is particularly interesting as Chinese painters were, for the first time, introduced to the principles of Western linear perspective and chiaroscuro modelling, while Chinese porcelain came to have a significant influence on European ceramics. Imperial patronage and collecting, influenced by religion, ritual, technology, ideology and aesthetics, played a key role in the development of the art produced in an era of political and social stability and great economic prosperity.

New York Modern: Painting, History, Abstraction, 1945-1969 – Dr Saul Nelson

This option paper will introduce students to American painting in the wake of World War Two. We will encounter key concepts and debates from the history of modern art, around the emergence and meaning of abstraction; the changing role of the avant-garde; the function and value of tradition within modernism; and the political possibilities of representation. The artists who became known as Abstract Expressionists will be central to our narrative – not just well-known names such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, but also those who are sometimes written out of the histories: Joan Mitchell, Norman Lewis, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler. We will also consider mid-century American painters like Rose Piper, Jacob Lawrence, and Larry Rivers, who resisted the call to abstraction altogether, particularly when this resistance was seen as the condition for a kind of politicised representation capable of attending to the realities of race, class, and gender.

Students will learn to interpret modernist painting, as well as to locate it in its historical context. We will study the growth of American economic and military power in the aftermath of the war, the emergence of New York as the new global hub for the avant-garde, and the progress of movements for political emancipation like the Civil Rights Movement and Feminism. We will read key contemporary writers, such as the critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Elaine de Kooning, and Michael Fried, and the poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery – as well as studying how this period has since been written up by major art historians like TJ Clark, Rosalind Krauss, and Griselda Pollock.

Paris 1715-1815: the Birth of the Modern Art World – Prof. Caroline van Eck

Many of the features that characterize the modern art world have their origins in Paris in the years 1715 -1815, a period which started optimistically with the Regency and the rule of Louis XV, saw the turmoil of the French Revolution, and ended in the defeat of Napoleon.

In this period the art world started to develop many of the features that characterize the modern art world. These include the birth of the public art gallery in the Palais du Luxembourg, the rise of a new, articulate middle-class public of art lovers, critics and painters, and the emergence of different, and often conflicting theories of art. All these, often conflicting, developments manifested themselves in new styles, such as rococo for interior design; the rise to fame and prominence of artists who invented new genres, such as Watteau's fêtes galantes; Chardin's depictions of middle-class interiors with an unprecedented monumentality and absorption; Greuze's adaptation of the formal grandeur of 17th-century French classicism to depict domestic drama; Vigée-Lebrun's transformation of the conventions of royal portraiture; or David's theatrical recreations of Roman republican virtue informed by the latest archaeological knowledge. The French Revolution added another defining aspect of modernity: the development of a popular visual culture that drew in equal measures on high art and popular theatre; and the use of art as propaganda for the state.

Saints, Sinners and the Sensuous: Art and Architecture in Renaissance Italy and Beyond – Dr Rebecca Gill

From the celebration of bleeding saints and images of the Virgin Mary that cry real tears, to the veneration of the tongue of Saint Anthony and the devotion shown to the body of Christ, religious practice in the Renaissance took many different forms.  Religion also permeated every aspect of life.  By exploring cathedrals, pilgrimage sites, private chapels, reliquaries, reconstructions of Hell and miracle-working images, students will explore the different layers of religious life and the art, architecture and material culture that accompanied it. A key theme is how art, architecture and devotional objects framed and influenced the experience of the faithful. Students will also explore how the issues of gender and religious politics influenced the art and architecture of the period. Time will also be spent studying the expansion of Catholicism into the New World and the deployment of a distinctly Catholic and European language of architecture.  Over the course of the module, paintings and buildings by well-known figures, such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Paolo Veronese will be examined, as well as works by less familiar, but nonetheless fascinating and innovative artists and architects.

Lent 2025

Contemporary Art, Community and Critique – Dr Amy Tobin

This course offers a history of contemporary art through artists’ twin impulses to critique normative conditions and structures of domination and build community. We will consider different critical lenses, from feminism to queer resistance, protest to worldbuilding, decolonial politics and trans activism. We will contend with readings of politically engaged work that rely on a politics of authenticity or didacticism and instead consider how artists present complex and multifaceted perspectives on the world, often as a means of building solidarity and empathy. In response to the expanded field of contemporary art practice, we will engage with various media from moving image, to photography, performance, artist books, painting, textiles and beyond.

Gardens and Landscape [Dept. of Architecture] – Dr Maximilian Sternberg

The course will explore the changing meanings of western gardens and landscapes in the modern epoch focusing on cultural and social perspectives. It argues that the advent and ongoing re-interpretation of landscape offers a privileged window into the ‘nature’ of modernity. Following the introductory lecture, lectures 2-6 offer a compact historical overview of some of the major themes that have shaped and represented our understanding of how societies have related to their natural environment from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The last two lectures address different aspects of the renewed interest in landscape in architectural debates of recent decades, focussing on memory and cultural ecology, with a special emphasis on the relationship between the city and the natural world.

Global Modernisms: Art and Decolonisation – Dr Saul Nelson

Modernism was born in an age of colonial empires. In 1907, when Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – a work that used the encounter with the art of colonised West Africa to break through to a new clarity of artistic form – 560 million people (over a quarter of the world’s population) lived under some form of colonial rule. By the time of Picasso’s death in 1973, Europe’s empires had largely vanished. Wars had been fought. Forms of resistance had been practiced. Newly independent nation-states had emerged, composed of liberated subjects who built their own relation to the arts of industrial modernity.

This Option Paper will track the complex relationship between modernism and colonialism as it evolved over the first two thirds of the Twentieth Century. We will move from the first uses of the word modernismo – far from Europe, in the writings of a Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío – to experiments with cubist design and aesthetic theory carried out under British rule in India; from collaborations between modernists and colonial authorities in Africa, India, and the Caribbean to attempts to mobilise modernism in the service of anticolonial revolutions and postcolonial nation-building. Besides well-known modernists such as Picasso, Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo, and Le Corbusier, special consideration will be given to artists and contexts from outside the traditional canon of modernist studies. Students will encounter figures such as the Haitian painter Hector Hippolyte, the Brazilian modernist Tarsila do Amaral, and the Indian sculptor Nek Chand. Close attention will be paid to contemporary literature, in particular to attempts by figures such as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frantz Fanon to theorise the relation between modernism and colonialism.

Rubens – Prof. Alexander Marr

This Option Paper will provide an overview of the life, career and studio of Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens, the most successful and influential Northern European artist of the seventeenth century, excelled across all genres of painting while his designs served as models for generations of artists in Europe and the Americas. He is notable for the scale and organization of his studio, which included the Flemish artists Jacob Jordaens and Anthony Van Dyck—both important painters in their own rights. The paper will explore Rubens’ biography and work in mythological painting, religious imagery, portraiture, landscape and genre scenes, considering also his drawings and designs for the decorative arts. His career will be situated in the contexts of intellectual culture, social and family life, trade, gender and race. His response to diverse world cultures and his impact on global art, particularly the Americas through the Jesuits, will also be considered. Rubens is well represented in Cambridge collections, and there will be an opportunity to view his works firsthand in the Fitzwilliam Museum and King’s College Chapel.

The Global Eighteenth Century – Prof. Caroline van Eck

This course looks at artistic developments in the 18th century in a rapidly widening, and increasingly globalized, context. It will focus on the Dutch Republic and France, two nations with extensive commercial colonial empires, and whose colonial trading had a major impact on the arts. Global trade made available hitherto unheard quantities of materials and objects, ranging from gold and silver, mahogany and other rare woods from the Americas and Caribbean, to porcelain and lacquer work from China and Japan, or silk and carpets from Persia. This was not a one-way traffic: as has become increasingly clear in the past decades, globalization in the 18th century was a reciprocal process, in which embassies from sovereign states such as China and Siam had a huge impact on Western material culture, but the presence of traders, missionaries and diplomats also influenced the development of art and design in other parts of the world.

At the same time, the impact of globalization was not restricted to the material world of trade and luxury goods. It also led to the development of new disciplines such as anthropology and religion studies, which produced their own new, visual culture. These played an important role the widening of geographical, political, and cultural horizons.

In this course we will look at the political, commercial and financial developments that drove many aspects of globalization; next we will consider the role of the Dutch Republic in the earlier stages of globalization in the long 18th century; the main part of the course will be devoted to a series of case studies that illustrate the ever-increasing scope and complexity of 18th-century globalization in the arts.