U.C. Berkeley History of Art

Histart 192F.2

UNDERGRAD SEMINAR: FRANCE, SPAIN, MEXICO: GOYA AND MANET (4 units)

This seminar will examine Goya’s artistic reactions to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire and Manet’s painterly response to the art of Spain, primarily the painting of Velasquez, and to the Mexican Revolution of 1867. Our centerpieces will be Goya’s two pictures of May 2 and 3, 1808 and Manet’s many versions of the execution in 1867 of Maximilian, the ruler of Mexico installed and abandoned by Napoleon III, but we will also interrogate the end of Goya’s life in France and Manet’s earlier trip to Spain and so-called Spanish pictures, both subjects of recent scholarship. In addition, the photographs of Mexico circulating in France will require our analysis of that medium. We will take advantage of holdings at the Bancroft Library and the Berkeley Art Museum. This University has two versions, for example, of Désiré Charnay’s stunning photographs of Mexican ruins taken between 1857 and 1859. This is a historically specific seminar so papers will need to address one or the other of these two rich and fascinating moments of cross-cultural contact and political upheaval.