ART 330: Contemporary Humanities: Modules

The Era of Invention: Paris and the Modern World

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Relate how the innovations in technology impacted the cultural frames of reference giving rise to unique new forms in the visual and performing arts.

 Explain how the artists Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, the German Expressionist groups, and the photographers who initiated filmmaking redefined the manner and purpose of image-making for the twentieth century.

 Summarize the importance of New York City as it grew to become a major center for modern art and the marketing of innovative works through the efforts of Alfred Stieglitz and other collectors.

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Image taken by Bill Onasill, March 10, 2017, available through CC https://www.flickr.com/photos/onasill/31270492078

The Great War and Its Impact: A Lost Generation and a New Imagination

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Relate Dadaism as the expression of meaninglessness and absurdity shown in the art of Duchamp and others.

 Define the contributions of early Russian artists and filmmakers of the visual vocabulary of film editing and composition.

 Explain how surrealism is an expression of Freud's and Jung's theories in art as seen in the art of Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and Salvador Dali.

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New York, Skyscraper Culture, and the Jazz Age: Making It New

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Summarize the promise and unprecedented growth the 1920s brought to New York City, as expressed in the neo-Gothic, Art Deco, and International Style architecture of the world's tallest buildings.

 Explain the development of jazz as the influences from New Orleans and Chicago were blended with musical innovations of New York artists including Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

 Distinguish Harlem Renaissance painters such as Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence from modern artists such as Stella, Demuth, and Georgia O'Keeffe whose imagery concentrated on the growth of urbanity and the alienation brought about by the machine age.

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The Age of Anxiety: Fascism and Depression, Holocaust and Bomb

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Describe the political, personal and social inspirations for Picasso’s painting Guernica; the murals of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Siquieros; Frida Kahlo’s art; and the WPA sponsored photographs of Depression era artists such as Lange and Evans.

 Explain the contributions of the Bauhaus Art School to modern architecture and design, and why the German government closed it down in October 1932.

 Trace the developments in motion picture and film arts in the 1930s and explain the impact of sound and color on film imagery and the subsequent influence of Hollywood on mass culture in general.

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After the War: Existential Doubt, Artistic Triumph, and the Culture of Consumption

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Relate how existentialism, alienation, and a response to absurdity are enacted in the action art of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and in the color-field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko. Describe how these themes are present in Abstract Expressionism.

 Compare the existentialist philosophy of John-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, who all demand that individuals are responsible for creating themselves through every choice they make or do not make.

 Explain how randomness is the key to the music of John Cage while the other themes of post–World War II recovery are also present.

 Summarize how music played underwater or a composition built on NOT playing a piano tie in to creation as definition, acceptance of the absurd, and deliberately acknowledging and expressing alienation.

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Multiplicity and Diversity: Cultures of Liberation and Identity in the 1960s and 1970s

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Explain how mass media and the culture of consumption is countered by the satire of pop art and the elimination of objectification in minimalism depicted in the work of Warhol, Oldenberg, and Rosenquist.

 Relate the struggles for equity and enfranchisement that coincide with the apparent fruition of the American Dream. The one-directional mass media unintentionally created the demand for access by all observers. A sensitivity to the oppression based on race and gender surfaced. The oppression of the working class became clear when noting who served in the war.

 Summarize how the generation that came of age in the 1960s saw the need to challenge the values and authority of their parents and found opportunities through displays of rebellion and values rejection as evidenced in their music and the integration of high and low culture.

 Relate the diversity of black experience expressed in the visual art of Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold to the strong critical positions in each.

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Without Boundaries: Multiple Meanings in a Postmodern World – Part One

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Explain the array of postmodern visual expressions from hyperrealism captured in photorealist painting to pure abstraction found in combining media forms.

 Identify the range of approaches used by visual artists to express seemingly contradictory concepts yet have them coexist with a spectrum of experimentation.

 Summarize how postmodernism expresses complexity and contradiction due to the multiplicity of decentralized perspectives that can operate simultaneously in any art form at any time.

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Without Boundaries: Multiple Meanings in a Postmodern World – Part Two

Objectives After completing this module the student will be able to:

 Critique the advances in technology and the spread of consumerism that have created a highly mobile, “itinerant,” and nomadic global community faced with a variety of stresses stemming from the rapid disappearance of traditional boundaries and stability.

 Describe how architects not only design monuments to national and corporate identity but also take into consideration compatibility with environmental/natural contexts.

 Relate the differences between Modern, Postmodern, and “Remodern” or Stuckist movements in the visual arts and identify the aims and characteristics of each.

 Summarize the impact of the AIDS pandemic first on the arts community and then as it continues to emphasize inequities of power and influence throughout the social, political, and economic contexts of the world cultural order.

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