On the day of class, students are responsible for choosing one question (written by

Transcription

1 ARTHI Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves: Myths of the Modern Artist, 1880s-WWI Professor David Getsy, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism School of the Art Institute of Chicago Fall 2005 / Tuesdays 6-9pm / 620 MC office: 710 MC / office hours by appointment To coincide with the major exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre at the Art Institute of Chicago, we will discuss the stereotypes of artistic identity that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a series of case studies we will examine the popular conceptions of the artist as Bohemian, criminal, sociopathic, insane, or perverse, discussing why the public and often artists themselves mythologized creativity as an alienation from culture, rationality, and normality. In addition, we will investigate how these constructions of artistic identity have been transmitted to popular culture through fictionalized biographical films about late-nineteenth-century artists. Course description Each three-hour session will consist of a combination of lectures and discussions of images, texts, and film excerpts. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their comprehension of course materials, attendance and preparation, critical engagement with the ideas presented in the course, and synthesis of course themes presented in classroom sessions, museum visits, and required readings. There is one required text: PATRICIA MATHEWS, Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999). All other readings will be made available through the Docutek system (password: myths). Generally, only excerpts will be shown from films listed in the category for each session. Should students want to view entire films, all are available in the Flaxman Library Video/DVD collection. Course structure Expectations and evaluation 1. All students are expected to attend class meetings prepared to discuss the required readings. This is a discussion-based class, and all students should regularly and productively contribute to class discussions. Attendance at all class meetings is essential. More than two missed classes may be grounds for a no credit. [attendance and participation: 20% of final evaluation] 2. For each required reading, each student must prepare three discussion questions and post them on the course homepage by Tuesday at 9am. Discussion questions should critically engage with the text or point to wider themes we are pursuing. We will use these as the basis for our conversations. Unacceptable questions are those that simply require yes/no answers, ask about facts easily discovered on one s own, or are overly simplistic or broad. Unsuitable questions will receive no credit. No student will be given credit for the class unless a complete set of discussion questions is posted. Students absent from class must submit questions for the missed session s readings within one week. On the day of class, students are responsible for choosing one question (written by

2 2 another student) that seems most interesting, problematic, or worthy of debate or discussion. Each class, various students will be asked to discuss this question and why they chose it. [discussion questions: 35% of final evaluation] 3. All students must make independent trips to visit the exhibitions Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre and Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of the Poster at the Art Institute of Chicago. This must be done prior to class on the 4th of October, and two additional questions must be posted for that day. [evidence of engagement with exhibition (including the posting of two additional discussion questions): 5% of final evaluation] 4. Over the course of the final four sessions, all students will present an illustrated research report on a topic related to course themes. All topics must be submitted to the instructor for suggestions, advice, and approval. All topics must be approved by 1 November at the latest. Reports can take the form of an investigation into an artist, artwork, or theme from the chronological range of the course or discuss the repercussions or afterlife of course themes into modern and contemporary art. If the latter is chosen, extra effort must be made to tie topics to our primary focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Graduate Students in Art History must chose the first option if this course is to fulfill the 19th century course requirement. Students are responsible for acquiring visual material to accompany their report. Presentations will be minutes in length followed by a 10-minute question and answer session in which other students will be expected to participate. Attendance at all presentation sessions is mandatory for all students. [presentations: 40% of final evaluation] 5. All art history students will be required to develop a research paper from their report (10 pages for undergraduates, 15 pages for graduate students), and all research papers are due, without exception, on the final day of class. [factored into 40% from no.4] Differently -abled students Any students with exceptional needs or concerns (including 'invisible' difficulties such as chronic diseases, learning disabilities, or psychiatric complications) are encouraged to make an appointment with the professor to discuss these issues by the end of the second week of the term so that appropriate accommodations can be arranged. Any student in need of academic adjustments or accommodations should first contact Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD). SSD can be reached by phone at or by sending an to Sara Baum, Coordinator of Services for Students with Disabilities (sbaum@artic.edu). The School of the Art Institute of Chicago prohibits dishonesty such as cheating, plagiarism, or knowingly furnishing false information to the School. See Students Rights and Responsibilities, Student Handbook: One plagiarizes when one presents another s work as one s own. It is a form of intellectual theft. Plagiarism need not always be intentional. One can plagiarize even if one does not intend to. The penalty for plagiarizing ranges from a failing grade on the plagiarized assignment to not earning credit for the course. This may also result in some loss of some types of financial aid (for example, a No Credit in a course can lead to a loss of the Presidential Scholarship), and in cases of regular offenses can lead to expulsion from the School. The Faculty Senate Student Life Subcommittee has prepared a 28-page handbook entitled Plagiarism: How to Recognize It and Avoid It. The document is available online on at Plagiarism

3 3 SESSIONS AND REQUIRED READINGS 6 September Introduction: The Lure of Bohemia Screening Moulin Rouge, dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2001 Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000). Jerrold Siegel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, (New York: Viking, 1986). Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth- Century Paris (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963). Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment, trans. A. Laing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 13 September The Agonistic Culture of the Avant-Garde Screening Graduate reading Lust for Life, dir. Vincente Minelli, 1956 [excerpts] Pollock, Griselda. Avant-Garde Gambits : Gender and the Color of Art History, Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992, pp Pollock pp Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by G. Fitzgerald. New York: Icon Editions, Gibson, Ann. "Avant-Garde." In Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp September The Case of Van Gogh Lust for Life, dir. Vincente Minelli, 1956 [excerpts] Vincent & Theo, dir. Robert Altman, 1991 [excerpts] The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh, dir. Paul Cox, 1987 [excerpts] Aurier, G.-Albert. "The Isolated: Vincent Van Gogh [1890]." In Art in Theory: , edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger. London: Blackwell, 1998, pp

4 4 Orton, Fred, and Griselda Pollock. "Rooted in the Earth: A Van Gogh Primer." In Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, pp Shapiro, Meyer. "On a Painting of Van Gogh." In Modern Art 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers New York: George Braziller, Mathews, Patricia. Aurier and Van Gogh: Criticism and Response. Art Bulletin 68, no. 1 (March 1986): Soth, Lauren. Van Gogh s Agony. Art Bulletin 68, no. 2 (June 1986): Pollock, Griselda. Artists, Mythologies, and Media Screen 21, no. 3 (1981). Homburg, Cornelia, ed. Vincent Van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard, exh. cat., Saint Louis Art Museum. New York: Rizzoli, September The Case of Gauguin Screening Wolf at the Door, dir. Henning Carlsen, 1987 [excerpts] Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism [1989]." In Modern Art and Society: An Anthology of Social and Multicultural Readings, edited by Maurice Berger. New York: Icon Editions, 1994, pp Pollock from 13 September readings, pp MATHEWS pp : Gendered Bodies II: Paul Gauguin Eisenman, Stephen. Gauguin's Skirt. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997, pp Gauguin, Paul. Noa Noa: Gauguin s Tahiti, ed. Nicholas Wadley, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985). Gauguin, Paul. The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin. Melbourne: Heinemann, Foster, Hal. Primitive Scenes. Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): Brooks, Peter. Gauguin s Tahitian Body. Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 2 (1990): Wallace, Lee. Tropical Rearwindow: Gauguin s Manao Tupapau and Primitivist Ambivalence. Genders 28 (1998). 4 October The Case of Toulouse-Lautrec NOTE: All students must have visited the exhibitions Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre and Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of the Poster before this date. In addition to your reading questions, you must also post one to two additional questions about the exhibition. Screening Moulin Rouge, dir. John Huston, 1952 [excerpts] Verhagen, Marcus. "Whipstrokes." Representations 58 (1997):

5 5 Graduate reading Thomson, Richard. "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre: Depicting Decadence in Fin-de-Siècle Paris." In Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005, pp Chapin, Mary Weaver. "Toulouse-Lautrec & the Culture of Celebrity." In Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005, pp October The Cultural Geography of Parisian Bohemia Moulin Rouge, dir. John Huston, 1952 [excerpts] The Brilliant Years, dir. Matthew Reinders, 1990 [excerpts] Zola, Émile. The Masterpiece [1886]. Translated by Thomas Walton and Roger Pearson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp Morrow, W. C. and Edouard Cucel. Le Moulin de la Galette. In Bohemian Paris of To-Day. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1900, pp Thomson, Richard. "The Cultural Geography of the Petit Boulevard." In Vincent Van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard, exh. cat., edited by Cornelia Homburg. Saint Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 2001, pp Hewitt, Nicholas. "Montmartre: Artistic Revolution." In Paris: Capital of the Arts , exh. cat., edited by Sarah Wilson. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002, pp Picon, Gaetan, and J. L. Logan. "Zola's Painters." Yale French Studies 42 (1969): Verhagen, Marcus. Bohemia in Doubt. In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, edited by Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski. New York: Routledge, 2004, pp October Aesthetes in England Wilde, dir. Brian Gilbert, 1998 [excerpts] The Picture of Dorian Gray, dir. Albert Lewin, 1945 [excerpts] Pater, Walter. "Conclusion [1873]." In The Renaissance, edited by Adam Phillips, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp Edwards, Jason. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Aesthete: Alfred Gilbert's Perseus Arming (1882) and the Question of 'Aesthetic' Sculpture in Late-Victorian Britain." In Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c , edited by David Getsy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp Wilde, Oscar. Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891], Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young [1894], and "Oscar Wilde on the Witness Stand. In The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp , , and

6 6 Documents relating to the Wilde Trials of 1895 in Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook, edited by Chris White. London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp Fryer, Jonathan. Dandyism, Decadence and Dissent: Style and Sensibility among Wilde and his Coterie. In The Wilde Years: Oscar Wilde and the Art of His Time, exh. cat., Barbican Art Galleries. London: Philip Wilson, 2000, pp Cohen, Ed. "Posing the Question: Wilde, Wit, and the Ways of Man." In Performance and Cultural Politics, edited by Elin Diamond. New York: Routledge, 1996, pp Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. New York: Routledge, Sato, Tomoko. Salomé: The Legacy of Oscar Wilde. In The Wilde Years: Oscar Wilde and the Art of His Time, exh. cat., Barbican Art Galleries. London: Philip Wilson, 2000, pp Davis, Whitney. "Decadence and the Organic Metaphor." Representations 89 (2005): October Insanity and Genius : Edvard Munch and Camille Claudel GUEST LECTURE Graduate reading JAY CLARKE, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago will speak on Edvard Munch s Scream paintings Camille Claudel, dir. Bruno Nuytten, 2001 [excerpts] Gaertner, Johannes. "Myth and Pattern in the Lives of Artists." Art Journal 30, no. 1 (1970): MATHEWS pp.46-85: The Ecstasy and the Agony: Creative Genius and Madness, and The Gender of Creativity: Women, Pathology, and Camille Claudel MATHEWS pp : Symbolist Women Artists: Practice and Reception [excerpt, re: Claudel] Berman, Patricia. Edvard Munch s Self Portrait with a Cigarette: Smoking and the Bohemian Person. Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (December 1993): Mitchell, Claudine. "Intellectuality and Sexuality: Camille Claudel, the Fin de Siècle Sculptress." Art History 12, no. 4 (1989): Bataille, Georges. Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh. [1930] In Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, , edited by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp November After the fin-de-siècle in Paris: Picasso, Stein, Modigliani Montparnasse 19, dir. Jacques Becker, 1958 [excerpts] Modigliani, dir. Mick Davis, 2005 [excerpts] Paris was a Woman, dir. Greta Schiller, 1995 [excerpts]

7 7 Graduate reading Who was Modigliani?, dir. Matthew Reinders, 1990 [excerpts] Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Vintage Books, 1933, pp , Garb, Tamar. "'To Kill the Nineteenth Century': Sex and Spectatorship with Gertrude and Pablo." In Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'avignon, edited by Christopher Green Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Berger, Maurice. "Epilogue: The Modigliani Myth." In Modigliani: Beyond the Myth, exh. cat., edited by Mason Klein. New York: Jewish Museum, 2005, pp Lubar, Robert. "Unmasking Pablo's Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture." Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): Wayne, Kenneth. Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Gallery. New York: Harry N. Abrams, November Modernist subcultures in Britain before the war Screening Savage Messiah, dir. Ken Russell, 1972 [excerpts] Tickner, Lisa. Augustus John: Gypsies, Tramps and Lyric Fantasy, and Wyndham Lewis: Dance and the Popular Culture of Kermesse. In Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, pp and : Getsy, David. "Punks and Professionals: The Identity of the Sculptor " In Sculpture in 20th-Century Britain, edited by Penelope Curtis and et al. Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2003, pp Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1970, pp Shalgosky, Sarah, Rod Brookes, and Jane Beckett. "Henri Gaudier: Art History and the 'Savage Messiah'." In Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, sculptor , edited by Jeremy Lewison. Cambridge: Kettle's Yard, 1983, pp November Echoes into contemporary art: The example of Tracey Emin Stallabrass, Julian. High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. London: Verso, 2001, pp , 36-43, Osbourne, Peter. "Greedy Kunst." In The Art of Tracey Emin, edited by Mandy Merck and Christ Townsend. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002, pp Merck, Mandy. "Bedtime." In The Art of Tracey Emin, edited by Mandy Merck and Christ Townsend. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002, pp Cherry, Deborah. "On the Move: My Bed, 1998 to 1999." In The Art of Tracey Emin, edited by Mandy Merck and Christ Townsend. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002, pp

8 8 Presentations I (half session) 22 November (Thanksgiving Week) Presentations II 29 November Presentations III 6 December CRITIQUE WEEK, no class held 13 December Presentations IV