Confirm course times, discussion section times, and call numbers
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of Classes.
All Columbia seminars (with "AHIS" prefix) require an application. Columbia seminar applications are due on April 21, 5:00PM in 826 Schermerhorn Hall. The application form can be found at here.
If you are interested in a Barnard seminar, please attend the first day of class. Please compose a brief statement (1-2 paragraphs) explaining your interest in and preparation (e.g., past coursework) for the course. Address the statement to the instructor (Dear Prof. xxxx.) Include: name, PID or social security number, school, Major/Concentration(s), year, email address. An individual application is required for each seminar to which you apply.
Many courses fall into more than one distribution area. However, A SINGLE COURSE can never fulfill two Field requirements AT THE SAME TIME . For example, AHIS W4155: The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Mesopotamia can fulfill either 'Ancient' or 'non-Western' but never both . CHECK to see which requirement the courses below fulfill here.
Please note that 4000 level lectures are "introductory graduate courses" and are open to advanced undergraduate and all graduate students, and a limited amount of registered auditors from the School of Continuing Education, if the instructor permits auditors
(BC 1001) Introduction to the History of Art II
K. Moxey
First in two-term series; either term may be taken separately. Brief examination of the techniques of visual analysis, followed by a chronological survey of the major period styles of Western European art. Emphasis on the introduction of form and content in the works studied and on the correlation of the visual arts with their cultural environments. BC1001: Greek and Roman art; medieval art. BC1002: Renaissance to modern art.
(ACLG W3002) Introduction to Archaeology
J. Smith
An exploration of past and present knowledge that exists because of the field of archaeology. Individual site-based and cultural studies from around the world combine with rediscoveries of systems of communication, such as languages and belief systems, to make for a broad-based introduction to archaeological discourse.
(AHIS V3201) The Arts of China
R. Harrist
Introduction to the arts of China--ceramics, bronzes, sculpture, and painting--from the time of the earliest farming cultures (ca. 5000 B.C.) through the end of the traditional period.
(AHIS V3203) The Arts of Japan
A. Watsky
Introduction to the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Japan from the Neolithic period through the 19th century. Discussion focuses on key monuments within their historical and cultural contexts.
(AHIS W3230) Medieval Architecture
S. Murray
Developed collaboratively and taught digitally spanning one thousand years of architecture.
(AHIS V3248) Greek Art and Architecture
F. De Angelis
Introduction to the art and architecture of the Greek world during the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods (11th - 1st centuries B.C.E.).
(AHIS W3420) Italian Renaissance Sculpture
J. Beck
Surveys the principal Renaissance sculptors operating in Italy, including Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello, Ghiberti,
Desiderio da Settignano, Niccolò dell'Arca, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo, with an introduction to the early masters, including Nicola and Giovanni Pisano.
(AHIS W3600) Nineteenth-Century Art
J. Crary
Painting and sculpture in Western Europe, 1789-1900. The neoclassic, Romantic, Realist, Impressionist, and post-Impressionist movements.
(AHIS BC3642) North American Art and Culture
E. Hutchinson
Examines North American painting, sculpture, photography, graphic art and decorative arts from the colonial period until World War I. Artists discussed include West, Copley, Cole, Spencer, Powers, Aragon, Duncanson, Church, Homer, Eakins, MacNeill, Whistler, Cassatt, Moran, Tanner, and Muybridge.
(AHIS BC3658) The History and Theory of the Avant-Garde
R. Deutsche
Examines the practice of artistic avant-gardism from the mid-19th to the late 20th century. Explores the relationship between the avant-garde, the institutions of art, and political radicalism. Studies art-historical theories of the modernist, historical and neo-avant-gardes as well as critiques of avant-gardism from feminist and democratic points of view, discussing the charge of "elitism" often leveled against avant-gardism.
(AHIS BC3680) Postwar Art 1948-1978
instructor TBA
Description to follow
(AHIS W4870) Minimalism/Postminimalism
B. Joseph
This course examines minimalism—one of the most significant aesthetic movements—during the sixties and seventies. More than visual art, the course considers minimal sculpture, music, dance, and “structural” film, their historical precedents, development, critical and political aspects. Artists include: Carl Andre, Tony Conrad, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Anthony McCall, Yvonne Rainer, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson.
Columbia University undergraduate seminars require an application, which are due on April 21, 2006 5:00 PM in 826 Schermerhorn Hall. The application can be found here
(AHIS W3888) Pop Art
B. Joseph
This seminar reevaluates Pop art, focusing not only on painting, but on performance, happenings, writing, and other media and multimedia. Canonic artists Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Oldenburg are examined and contrasted with West coasters Conner and Ruscha, the Baroque "pop" of Jack Smith, the political narrative of Fahlstrom, and later revisions by Pettibon, Kelley and Graham.
(AHIS W3895) Major’s Colloquium: the Literature and Methods of Art History
Z. Bahrani
Prerequisites: the department's permission. Students must sign-up in 826 Schermerhorn. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.
(AHIS W3961) Major’s Colloquium: Architectural History Focus
B. Bergdoll
Prerequisites: the department’s permission. Students must sign up in 826 Schermerhorn.
This course will combine practical training in visual analysis and architectural historical research with a close reading of key works of architectural historians since the emergence of the discipline as a free-standing field of inquiry in the late 19th century. In addition to course meetings one or more site visits will be arranged in the city and further a field.
(AHIS W3893) The Japanese Print
A. Watsky
Description to follow
(AHIS W3900) The Archaeology of Greek Colonization
T. Jackman
This seminar explores the art, architecture and archaeology of the Greek colonies of the eighth through fourth centuries B.C. We will examine the organization of urban and ritual space, the relationship of city and territory, the emergence of regional architectural and artistic styles as well as the relations between the Greeks and the native peoples they encountered during the colonial process.
(AHIS BC3927) Gender & Sexuality in Roman Art
N. Kampen
Attendance at first class mandatory. Instructor determines class roster on first day of class. No application required. Description to follow.
(AHIS BC3944) Americans in Paris
A. Higonnet
Attendance at first class mandatory. Instructor determines class roster on first day of class. No application required. Description to follow
(AHIS C3948) Nineteenth-Century Criticism
J. Crary
Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing and the instructor's permission. Application required.
This course will allow art history majors to examine a heterogeneous selection of texts that have a crucial bearing on the formation of concepts of modernity and new aesthetic practices in 19th-century Europe and North America. Using works of fiction, poetry, art theory, philosophy and social criticism, the seminar will trace the emergence and development of new models of subjective experience and their relation to social and historical processes.
(AHIS BC3949) The Art of Witness: Memorials and Historical Trauma
R. Deutsche
Attendance at the first class is mandatory. Limited to 15 students. Instructor determines class roster on first day of class. Examines aesthetic responses to collective historical traumas, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, AIDS, homelessness, immigration, and the recent attack on the World Trade Center.
(AHIS BC3968) Art Criticism
J. Miller
Please attend the first day of class if interested. No application required. Contemporary art and its criticism written by artists (rather than by art historians or journalistic reviewers). Texts by Dan Graham, (Art and Language), Robert Smithson, Brian O'Dougherty, Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper and others. Considers the art and writing of each artist together.
(AHIS W3969) Collage and its Histories
G. Bader
This seminar will examine the importance of collage for European and American art of the past century. Of particular concern will be the diversity of forms that collage-inflected practice has taken and artists’ interest in collage and its corollaries as a means of historical and political analysis. Artists considered include Picasso, Arp, Schwitters, Eisenstein, Höch, Rauschenberg, Kaprow, and Hirschhorn, among others.
(AHIS W3970) The Histories of Photography
T. Sheehan
This seminar critically explores the history of the history of photography, as it has developed between the 1840s and the present. We will examine how major histories of the medium have defined photography’s artistic, social, ontological, and institutional identity. Authors include Root, Newhall, Benjamin, Taft, Gernsheim, Barthes, Tagg, Krauss, Batchen, Frizot, and others.
(AHIS W4443) Baroque and Rococo Architecture, 1600-1750
H. Ballon
Survey of the architecture, theory, city planning, and landscape design in relation to political and cultural developments across Europe from 1600 to 1750. Topics include the rise of capital cities (Paris, London, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg); the impact of war on the built environment; court culture, chateaux and palaces; the debates of Ancients and Moderns; and the work of Wren, Hawksmoor, Mansart, Le Notre, Borromini, Bernini, Neumann, and Dietzenhoffers.
(AHIS G4127) Rock-cut Architecture of India
V. Dehejia
For a period of over a thousand years, a favored mode of architecture across India was to create monuments by excavating into the rock of the mountainside. This course examines the rock-cut mode of architecture, adopted by Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains, that remained popular right upto the tenth century when it yielded precedence to structures built by piling stone upon stone.
(AHIS W4330) Paris in the Middle Ages
S. Murray
The urban fabric of Paris provides the connective tissue linking medieval achievements in architecture, sculpture, and painting with the history of the city from the Romans to the Renaissance.
(AHIS W4870) Minimalism/Postminimalism
B. Joseph
This course examines minimalism—one of the most significant aesthetic movements—during the sixties and seventies. More than visual art, the course considers minimal sculpture, music, dance, and structural film, their historical precedents, development, critical and political aspects. Artists include: Carl Andre, Tony Conrad, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Anthony McCall, Yvonne Rainer, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson
(AHIS W4850) Collecting
A. Higonnet
This course studies the nearly universal human phenomenon of collecting. We will begin by gauging the range and basic structures of the phenomenon, looking at collections ranging from sock monkeys through anatomical waxes to ukiyo-e cards. These examples will enable us to compare and contrast theories of collecting, of which the most important will be psychological and anthropological. Moving from these general theories to the historically particular, we will next turn to the history of high-end collecting, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and the origins of museum. The history of the art museum will then be studied in some detail, through both analysis of art museum types – principally national or municipal, private, monographic, and geographic – and through case studies of personal collections. Finally, the course will address art-work about collecting. Lectures, readings, and discussion sections will be reinforced by multiple visits to New York City museums.
(AHIS G6270) Roman Art II: Augustus to the Flavians
F. de Angelis
The course will investigate Roman art and architecture from the age of Augustus to the Flavians. Particular attention will be given to the issues entailed by the development and diffusion of a visual language common to the whole of the Empire
(AHIS G6690) Surrealism
R. Krauss
Surrealism examined less as an art historical movement than as an exclusion from and an irritant within art history itself. The dynamics of this paradoxical relationship are explored through surrealist objects and texts organized around conceptual markers such as: the informe, the uncanny, fetishism, repetition, compulsion. The works of André Breton and Georges Bataille.
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All graduate seminars require an application. Applications are due by *August 1, 2006, 5:00pm* without exception in 826 Schermerhorn Hall. The seminar application for all Art History and Archaeology graduate seminars consist of a one-page form, available *only* online as a PDF or as a RTF (the office does not have copies of the form.) Do not attach second pages or letters to the form, only this application form will be accepted. An individual application form is required for each seminar to which you apply. Please drop off seminar applications to 826 Schermerhorn by the deadline.
(AHIS G8012) Early Modern Architectural Treatises and the Legacy of Vitruvius
F. Benelli
The seminar covers the theory of architecture in architectural treatises and its reflection on real buildings from its beginning to the XVII century. Starting from the first known architectural treatise written by Vitruvius in the I century BC, the seminar focuses mostly on the Renaissance era - when the foundation of modern architecture had been laid - from the rediscovering of Vitruvius by Leon Battista Alberti up to Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi. All sections will be held at Avery Library and based on the reading and analysis of original Renaissance books of the Avery Rare book collection.
(AHIS G8106) Writing the History of Chinese Art
R. Harrist
The historiography of Chinese Art, focusing on traditional Chinese
texts, the emergence of Chinese art studies in the West and the use of
critical theory in expanding the range of questions addressed by this field.
(AHIS G8365) Art & Internationalism in the Mediterranean Bronze Age
J. Smith
Application form required by August 1, 2006. A forum for the study of the arts, architecture, and archaeology of the Mediterranean Bronze Age, this seminar is inclusive material and questions related to interconnections among the Aegean, Anatolia, Syria-Palestime, Cyprus, Egypt, Italy, and Sardinia.
(AHIS G8692) Uses of the Past: the Artefact of History
Z. Bahrani
Application form required by August 1, 2006. The seminar covers antiquarianism and collecting, ancient practices of monument preservation and memorial constructions in Near Eastern and Classical antiquity. These ancient conceptions of the past will, in turn, be studied in relation to the uses of the past in post-Enlightenment European traditions and to contemporary cultural heritage issues.
(AHIS G8421) Masaccio & His Friends
J. Beck
Application form required by August 1, 2006. The seminar concentrates on the art unfolding in Florence during the lifetime of Masaccio (1401 -1428) with the emergence of the Renaissance style. Masaccio’s contribution in painting will be studied in rapport with that of Donatello in sculpture and Brunelleschi in architecture.
(AHIS G8726) Collecting and Curating African Art
S. Vogel
Application form required by August 1, 2006. This seminar will explore broad issues in collecting and curating through the prism of African art. Many of the issues confronting museums are thrown into sharp relief when the art is African: the ethics of collecting, and the display of religious or sensitive objects; conflicts over identity, representation, and whose message will be heard in the museum; questions of quality and museum authority -- among many other issues of contention including the definitions of art itself. Students will become familiar with fundamentals of African art, though no prior knowledge of the field is necessary.
The class will curate and install an exhibition of contemporary and African art that reexamines the idea of Primitivism. The exhibition opens at Sean Kelly Gallery December 15th 2006, with a publication authored by the students.
(AHIS G8785) Portraiture
R. Brilliant
Application form required by August 1, 2006. The seminar shows the genre of portraiture in Western art in all media, including extensive discussion of principal motifs, issues of representation, self-representation, and questions of identity. Focus will be on 18th-20th century.
(AHIS G8910) Contemporary Landscape
V. Di Palma
Application form required by August 1, 2006. This course investigates concepts fundamental to the design and interpretation of contemporary landscapes from urban parks to national wildernesses to post-industrial sites. Topics addressed include: changing definitions of nature, garden, and landscape; the relationship between architecture and landscape architecture; challenges presented by contaminated areas and derelict urban sites; the role of tourism in defining protected areas; and the politics of environmentalism.
(AHIS G6009) Proseminar
D. Freedberg
Required course for first-year PhD Students in the Art History Department
(AHIS G8990) MA Colloquium
J. Rajchman
Required course for all first-year Modern Art M.A. students. The M.A. Colloquium, taken in the first term by all M.A. in Modern Art students, is designed to explore issues of historical and critical method by focusing them through the lens of a particular area of concern within the modernist field. These "lenses" will change from year to year, but an example would be the rise of photography within modernism, with all that it implies for the relationship between high art and mass culture and all that it signals with regard to new media. Another such example might be notions of "primitivism," which would lead to sessions ranging from postcolonial studies to contemporary art's use of ethnographic models; or again, contemporary architecture studies and theories of urbanism. The structure of the colloquium combines reading and analysis of major texts conducted by the major theorists and critics working in the given subject area.
(AHIS G8991) Curatorial Seminar
J. Rajchman
Required course for first-year Modern Art/Curatorial Track M.A. students. Beginning this fall the Curatorial seminar, formerly the Whitney Seminar, will be conducted in a modular format with guest speakers giving lectures for a limited number of weeks on various topics. A very limited number of spots are reserved for advanced M.A. students by seminar application only.
Beck (spring)
Crary (spring)
Grewe (year)
Hutchinson (spring)
Kellie Jones (year)
Pasztory (fall)
Rosand (fall)
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