AFRS 385 - Seminar in American Art

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as AMST 385 and ART 385) Topic for 2014/15b: The Visual Culture of the American Civil War. Today, images of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine are ubiquitous; they appear online, in print, and on television. Press coverage was equally pervasive during the American Civil War, but, in the nineteenth century, illustrated newspapers, documentary photography, and figurative monuments were new media that had only recently been developed. This course explores how and why the American Civil War was represented in the fine arts and visual culture in order to understand the complex and reciprocal relationship between the visual arts and politics. How did painting, photography, sculpture, and print shape the ideologies and realities of the War, and how did the War define the possibilities and limitations of these media as well as the relationship between them? We explore these questions through seminar meetings on such topics as slavery, violence, soldiers and veterans, the homefront, landscape, and emancipation as well as through the work of major American artists like Mathew Brady, Frederic Church, Robert Duncanson, Winslow Homer, Edmonia Lewis, and Thomas Nast. Ultimately, our goal is to develop a better understanding of the Civil War and American art as well as an intellectual and historical context for evaluating the visual culture of war in the United States today. Ms. Elder.

Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.