Jackson Pollock, the inventor of action painting, got very involved in the physical aspects of making a work of art; he danced over his canvas dripping paint. Andy Warhol, the inventor of Pop Art, was quite content to install cans of Campbell’s Soup in a museum, stand back and call them “art”. How did these two very extreme kinds of art come to be?

This course offers a panorama of 100 years of American art covering the American school of landscape realism founded by Winslow Homer, the Ash Can School of New York, the development of abstraction, the regional and Afro-American schools of the 30’s, the birth of Abstract Expressionism , Pop Art and Conceptual Art.

The course will provide an opportunity to discuss a variety of social and political issues from the Big City to the Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal through painting and photography, architecture and sculpture. Students will be called upon to make presentations during the semester. Debates will be organized to allow students to express their opinions. Students must write a short term paper based on comparisons of works of art.

No previous knowledge of Art History is required to take this course!

Bibliography:
Barbara Rose: American Painting, The Twentieth Century, Skira
Susan Sontag: On photography, Dell
Lucy Lippard: Pop Art, Thames and Hudson
Irving Sandler: The New York School; the Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, Harper and Row

Dernière mise à jour : jeudi 9 avril 2009