U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES FALL 2007

Histart 186A

EARLY 20thC ART (4 UNITS)
Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:30-5:00
102 Moffit, CCN 05526
Sebastian Zeidler

This class will be a focused survey of some of the historically most significant artistic movements in Europe and America before 1945. As such, it will also be a lesson, taught by works of art, in the dramatic transformations that swept through the world of modernity during that time: it will explore Cubism, Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism as so many practices that within a few decades re-defined modern subjects and their objects beyond all recognition. Where these objects were paintings, we will witness how a formerly stable repertory of themes and images was now being purged of narrative, dissolved in light, attenuated by time, displaced by matter, annihilated by abstraction. And where these objects were sculptures, we will find them assimilated by turns to what used to count as thoroughly non-aesthetic objects, among them the modern industrial commodity and what the new knowledges of primitivism and psychoanalysis would come to call the fetish. As for the human subject, we will find that category become just as uprooted and contested as the objects of its experience. We will encounter modern viewers as contemplative individuals and as activated collectives, as distracted city-dwellers and modern savages, builders of new worlds and connoisseurs of obsolescence, shifting between class allegiances, instable in their gender identities, permeable to the machine, ravaged by war. (Mo)

Letters in bold following individual upper division course descriptions cite the History of Art major breadth requirement fulfilled by the course. (As=Asian, An=Ancient, Me=Medieval, R=Renaissance, B=Baroque, Mo=Modern.)