Touring Modernism: From the French Avant-Garde to American Pop and Beyond

Cultural and Political Influences: Ability to understand the cultural and political contexts of specific art movements. Understanding gender biases and the absence of women artists in the modern period. Understanding racial biases and the issue of primitivism in the modern period.
Vocabulary of Art: Ability to articulate concepts of style in terms of describing form, color, line, light, materiality, and space. Ability to describe different techniques of painting, collage, photography etc.
Identification and Understanding of the Icons of Art History: Ability to identify key artists and works in their respective time periods, movements and styles. Ability to understand the chronological succession of art movements and why. Understanding the basic biographies of the major figures in the modern and postmodern era.

Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Charting the Avant Garde: From Romanticism to Utopic Abstraction
- This first course in the Touring Modernism: From the French Avant-Garde to American Pop and Beyond program covers the 19th century movements of Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism. These movements eventually set the stage for the radical expressions of Post Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and the pure abstraction of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, all of which pushed the boundaries of rebellion into new heights.

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Course 2: Surrealism and Its Legacy
- This second course covers the rebels and revolutionaries of the Dada and Surrealist movements including Duchamp, Dali, Magritte, and others. And then we jump across the pond to look at the American succession of the New York School with de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Krasner, and many more.

Course 3: Pop, Minimalism, and Postmodernism
- This third course examines the explosion of the mass media and its expression in Pop art as well as the rise of the simpler, but equally powerful movement called Minimalism. Conceptual art, performance/body art, Land Art, takes us into the countercultural 70s, and then finally the dizzying glut of the information age and Postmodernism.