Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.

Priority will be given to students who were enrolled in HA 180C Fall 2024. Taking each of the words paint, color, time, and camera as our subject, we will ruminate on the significant differences between two media. Our focus will be four artists whose painting practices existed in close relation to photography: Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard. All four painted while fully aware of the relatively new technology and its fundamental difference from the act of applying colored pigment to canvas over extended periods of time. Perhaps the very gap between these two modes of representation heightened painters’ fascination with these oddly modest, monochromatic, often blurred, pictures made with cameras and chemicals. Degas, Vuillard, and Bonnard all made photographs. Unlike Degas, Vuillard and Bonnard embraced the snapshot and took photographs, like amateurs, with inexpensive Kodaks. All four painters played with photography at the end of the century when their own practices had become layered, thick with color, and slow; that is, slowly made and slowly apprehended. The instantaneity associated with the early Impressionist project of the 1870s gave way to duration, dwelling, and seriality in the 1880s and 90s. Yet this turn did not diminish the intrigue with photography which remained a generative foil, an experiment. This seminar’s thought problem. Note that slow painting will require close and sustained looking as well as a search for words. This course fulfills the following HA Major requirements: Geographical area (A) and Chronological period (III).

Repeat Rules