ARTH

This course is an introduction to the major monuments and movements of Buddhist art in Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Tibet. Emphasis is placed on the interaction of different Buddhist concepts/schools and diverse visual forms that represented them. Issues of examination include the evolution of the Buddha's image from aniconic to iconic representation, the development of Buddhist iconography in relation to other religious iconography and secular imagery, the role of patronage, and the relationship of pilgrimage and art production.

This course examines Chinese art in the socially and politically tumultuous twentieth century, which has witnessed the end of Imperial China, the founding of the Republic, the rise of the People's Republic, and the impact of the West throughout the period. The focus is on the art and society from the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to the 21st century.

This course is a survey of the visual arts of Japan from the Neolithic period to modern times. The course also examines the social, political, and philosophical atmosphere that shaped these arts. Architecture, sculpture, ceramics, and decorative arts are discussed, but painting and woodblock print is emphasized in the later periods.

This course is an introduction to the foundations of Chinese art from the Neolithic period to the present. It covers the arts of ceramics, bronze, jade, painting, calligraphy, sculpture, and architecture. Emphasis is placed on the relationship of art forms and the socio-political forces and intellectual discourses that shaped them. Each class combines lecture and discussion. The course includes two hands-on sessions of Chinese calligraphy and ink painting.

The period between 1780 and the end of the nineteenth century is marked by myriad social changes and scientific innovations, from revolutions across Europe and the Americas, enlightenment thought, and increasing emphasis on human rights, to the innovation of photography, steel construction, and paint in tubes. This course studies how artists and architects responded to these developments, focusing particularly on the shift from academic works to the rise of modernism and the avant-garde.

This course introduces the art of Medieval Western Europe from the Period of Migrations through the Gothic Era (7-14th century.) A fundamental social and cultural transformation of Western Europe followed the end of the Roman Empire characterized by the increasing dominance of the Christian Church, the interaction of various cultural and ethnic groups, the development of feudalism, and the eventual renascence of the Western Roman Empire.

This course explores the artistic traditions of the Late Antique and Byzantine periods from the earliest surviving monuments of Christian art of the mid-3rd century to the monuments of the Late Byzantine Empire up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The course examines how the interactions between the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian traditions produced the art of Late Antiquity and Byzantium, and accentuates the visual, social, and religious continuities and ruptures between these traditions.

This course introduces selected monuments of the Etruscan and Roman civilizations from ca. the 8th c. BCE to the 4th c. CE. Through careful analysis of artworks, the course traces the emergence, flourishing, and eventual disappearance of the Etruscan civilization in Northern Italy in the 8th-3rd centuries BCE and follows the spectacular development of the city-state of Rome into the vast Roman Empire dominating the Mediterranean and Western Europe.

The civilization of ancient Greece has an important place in the formation of Western culture and in the development of Art History as a discipline. This course examines the art produced in Greece and the Greek world from the Early Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period (ca. 3000 BCE to 1st c. BCE), with particular emphasis on artistic production of the 8th through the 1st century BCE. Works of art are examined with particular attention to their original function, context, and intended audience, and are presented from a range of methodological perspectives.

Islamic culture is truly global, encircling the planet from the Islamic Center of Tacoma, WA to the Kaaba in Mecca, to the myriad mosques of Xinjiang Province in China. The history of the Islamic world is equally vast, spanning over a millennium. This course focuses on the history of Islamic visual culture from the 7th through the 17th century and explores works of art in a variety of media (e.g., architecture and monumental decoration, book illuminations, ceramics, metal-works, textiles, etc.) both from the religious and the secular realms.