Courses - The History of Art Department

Department of History of Art 

UC Berkeley 

416 Doe Library 

Phone: (510) 643-‐7290 

http://arthistory.berkeley.edu/ 

R1B Courses Reading and Writing About the Visual Experience 

Section 1 

CCN 04803 

Carl Gellert 

carlgellert@berkeley.edu 

Section 4 

CCN 04812 

Yasmine Van Pee 

yasmine.vanpee@berkeley.edu 

Section 7 

CCN 04821 

Elizabeth Ferrell 

ferrell@berkeley.edu 

Section 1 Early Japanese Art 

Carl Gellert 

CCN 04803 

updated 8/27/12 

Section 2 

CCN 04806 

Edwin Harvey 

eharvey@berkeley.edu 

Section 5 

CCN 04815 

Eva Hagberg 

evamayhagberg@gmail.com 

Section 8 

CCN 04824 

Marcelo Sousa 

msousa@berkeley.edu 

Section 3 

CCN 04809 

Amy Kim 

amyckim@berkeley.edu 

Section 6 

CCN 04818 

Sherry Ehya 

eleventy@berkeley.edu 

Section 9 

CCN 04827 

Catherine Telfair 

catytelfair@yahoo.com 

This course will provide students with an introduction to art historical analytical writing through the examination of 

ancient and early Japanese art. Readings and class discussion will focus on the development of the Japanese state and its 

material culture, as well as examine artistic influences from Japan’s early interactions with mainland Asia. Students will 

learn to read images within the social and political contexts of their production and discover the continuing importance of 

art and its study in the formation of cultural identity. 

Textbooks (available on Amazon.com): Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing About Art (10 th ed.) ISBN-10: 

0205708250 

Section 2 Reading and Writing American Art 

Edwin Harvey 

CCN 04806 

How do mechanisms of perception structure responses to visual art? What is at stake when words describe images? By 

means of intensive looking, thinking, speaking, and writing, this course introduces the student to a series of problems and 

issues in the description and analysis of works of art. Because the course is also an introduction to the historical study of 

art, it is intended for students with no previous course work in the field. 

Each week we shall read, summarize in written form, and discuss a recent article from “American Art” (a quarterly, peerreviewed 

journal published by the Smithsonian Institution and dedicated to the history of American art), paying particular 

attention to research methods, argument, and matters of visual analysis and description. Additional writing assignments 

will include a visual analysis of a work of art in a local, Bay Area collection and a ten-page term paper. 

Section 3 Art, Labor, Value 

Amy Kim 

CCN 04809 

Fall 2012 Course Descriptions 

The literary critic and theorist, Terry Eagleton, wrote that the emergence of the aesthetic as a theoretical category in the 

eighteenth century was closely bound up with the material processes of early capitalism, which freed art from many of the 

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various social and religious functions it had traditionally served. The articulation of this new “autonomy” of art became 

one of the central concerns of classical idealist aesthetics, and also provided a new model of subjectivity for a nascent 

bourgeois civil society. In this course, we will examine the challenges posed by twentieth century artists and theorists to 

the categories of traditional aesthetics, in seeking to gain a glimpse of the forms of subjectivity under contemporary 

capitalism. What kind of a subject is art? What constitutes an art object? What does it mean to create art? These questions 

will guide a study of theories and practices of twentieth century painting, sculpture and photography, including Soviet 

constructivism, Duchamp and the readymade, conceptual art, and appropriation art. We will track the intersection between 

these challenges to and expansions in the categories of aesthetics and contemporary transformations in the understanding 

of concepts of value and labor in the wider economy and society. In order to address these varied aims, the course will 

draw on a range of texts and disciplines, from primary documents and art historical writing to critical theory, political 

economy and law. Equally important is the question of the nature of aesthetic experience, and we will also focus on visual 

analysis and learning to put our aesthetic experiences into words. The course will incorporate visits to the Berkeley Art 

Museum and SFMOMA. Assignments will include a series of short essays and a final 10-page research paper about an art 

work the student has seen first-hand at a local museum. 

Section 4 The Artist as Ethnographer 

Yasmine Van Pee 

Title TBD; CCN 04812 

A little over fifteen years ago, art historian Hal Foster identified what he saw as a new paradigm in 

art practice. Referring to Walter Benjamin’s 1934 lecture “The Author as Producer,” Foster claimed 

that: 

Today there is a related paradigm in advanced art on the left: the artist as ethnographer. The 

object of contestation remains, at least in part, the bourgeois institution of autonomous art, its 

exclusionary definitions of art, audience, identity. But the subject of association has changed: 

it is now the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the artist often struggles. 

In the years since Foster launched a discussion of the ethnographic aesthetic, its presence within contemporary art practice 

has only become more pervasive, prompting a much-needed revaluation. Important issues in this course will be how 

ethnographic artistic practices relate to affective or performative modes of knowledge production; the engagement of 

actual social sites and quotidian experience within artistic practice and its implications; the effects and affects of 

description, or the “–graphy” in ethnography; and the role of the documentary impulse in the face of incomprehensible 

lived experiences, where simple notions of “realistic” representation, of truth, fact, and evidence, no longer hold. 

The course will combine discussion with a hands-on writing workshop. Readings range widely in tone 

and format, from standard art historical narratives to fiction and poetry. 

Section 5 Access, Archives, and Architecture: John Galen Howard and the University of California 

Berkeley’s Women’s Faculty Club 

Eva Hagberg 

CCN 04815 

In 1923, towards the end of his career, California architect John Galen Howard, then Supervising Architect of the 

University (which he called a “City of Learning”), designed the Women’s Faculty Club as a sanctuary for female faculty 

ordinarily barred from the Faculty Club. The third (along with Julia Morgan and Joseph Esherick))--and less sung--hero of 

Berkeley architecture, Howard was instrumental in shaping the built environment through and around which Berkeley 

students, faculty, and citizens weave their ways. Architect of multiple campus projects, including Hearst Memorial 

Mining Building, the Hearst Greek Theater, Wheeler Hall, and California Hall, as well as of large-scale projects like the 

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Howard’s often-overlooked architectural career is ripe for a new spotlight. 

This R1B will be a practical seminar, ending with two finished products: a full-scale publication to be produced by the 

Women’s Faculty Club, and a series of talks to be given coinciding with the WFC’s 100th anniversary. Students will each 

be responsible for a short essay that will appear in the publication, and/or a five-minute presentation. Together, we will 

examine text archives held by the Bancroft Library and visual materials held by the Environmental Design Archives. 

Students will be asked to infer historical information from visual, textual, historical, narrative, and journalistic sources, 

and will essentially operate as a scholarly collective. Students will have the opportunity to explore a variety of archival 


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sources and find the one that suits them the best, and to plan and execute their own essay and talk topics. 

As the class moves forward on this focused project, there will also be a number of quick writing assignments intended to 

stretch and strengthen students’ writerly capabilities. There will be a significant amount of workshopping and 

collaboration, and students will work together as creative colleagues. 

BOOKS REQUIRED: 

Sally B. Woodbridge, John Galen Howard and the University of California: The Design of a Great Public University 

Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 

Section 6 Twentieth-Century Sculpture: The Object of Art 

Dr. Sherry Ehya 

CCN 04818 

In the late 1950s, American painter Ad Reinhardt defined sculpture as “something you bump into when you back up to 

look at a painting.” Summing up a centuries-old prejudice against sculpture, Reinhardt’s quip also emphasized the 

medium’s defining feature: its existence as an object in a world chock-full of other objects. Offering a survey of theories 

and practices of European and American sculpture since the end of the 19th century, this course will investigate how 

sculpture has consistently negotiated and re-negotiated its position in the world. We will consider theoretical approaches 

to sculpture — among them writings by Hildebrand, Baudelaire, Greenberg, Fried, and others — and the medium’s often 

tense, yet productive, relationship to other arts, always grounding our discussions in visual and material analysis of 

artworks. 

Over the course of the semester, students will complete short writing exercises and two longer essays, strengthening their 

ability to analyze artworks, compose an effective thesis statement, write/edit their work, and conduct research. 

Section 7 Art and Atrocity: Artistic responses to War in the Twentieth Century 

Elizabeth Ferrell 

CCN 04821 

How does one represent catastrophic violence? The advent of mechanized warfare in the early twentieth century posed 

this question with new urgency, and artists repeatedly returned to it as the century progressed through two world wars and 

countless armed confrontations. This course explores the intertwined histories of art practice and violent conflict in the 

twentieth century. What forms and media have artists used to vividly communicate the physical and psychic trauma of 

war? What ethical issues arise from imaging and viewing bodies at their most vulnerable? How has cultural production 

been wielded as a weapon of war, and how has art figured into protests against martial action? What new strategies of 

memorialization have artists invented to commemorate cataclysmic events, such as the Holocaust and the Allied 

bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The course addresses these questions through three thematic units. Each unit 

examines a different mode of artistic response to war – representation, intervention, and remembrance – through case 

studies involving far-flung conflicts and disparate media. 

This course provides an introduction to looking, reading, and writing in the discipline of art history. The primary goal is 

to guide students through the processes of learning to craft an argument based on their visual experience. Projects will 

involve visual analyses of artworks, analysis of art-historical writing and methodology, and the students’ scrutiny of their 

own writing, as well as that of their peers. These assignments culminate in a polished 10-page research paper on an 

artwork that addresses the course’s themes. 

Section 8 Warhol and Pop 

Marcelo Sousa 

CCN 04824 

This course will examine the visual production of Andy Warhol and other significant works of Pop Art. We will explore 

numerous critical interpretations of Warhol’s art and situate them within a broader cultural context. Some of the issues 

this course will address include: Warhol’s early production and its role in the homoerotic imagination; the role of Pop art 

in late capitalist consumer culture; the banality of everyday life in the age of the “machine”; Pop art as “kitsch” and its 


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ability to simultaneously challenge and appropriate mainstream popular culture; the cult of celebrity and the role of 

glamour in visual art; Warhol’s films and the Factory; the role of censorship in Warhol’s production, and finally, the 

legacy of Pop and its relevance today. 

Section 9 Ambiguities 

Caty Telfair 

CCN 04827 

"As for myself, ... I prefer to spend my time creating clouds rather than dispersing them, questioning opinions rather than 

forming them..." - Diderot 

Much of the study of art history involves the identification and categorization of objects, and the resulting articulation of a 

stylistic and historical trajectory for the development of art. This endeavor, important as it is for our understanding of art 

in context, involves prioritizing the coherence of the story over the irreducible complexity and fascinating specificity of 

any single art object. However, certain key objects in the history of art frustrate attempts to fix their meanings within this 

story. Through historical mischance, cultural displacement, or even purposeful mystery on the part of an artist, the status 

or meaning of these works remains highly contested and obstreperously ambiguous. How do art historians approach these 

objects, and how do they define their goals for studying them? 

This class will be organized around five Western art objects that are both canonical and particularly puzzling: 

1) The paintings in Room 5 of the Villa of the Mysteries outside Pompeii, believed to have been painted around 60 BCE 

2) The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533 

3) Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez, 1656 

4) A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte - 1884 by Georges Seurat, completed in 1886 

5) Marilyn, by Andy Warhol, 1962 

We will read several texts that deal with each object, in order to see what different scholars can glean through different 

modes of inquiry. This emphasis on methodology and focus on conversations that form around particular objects will also 

allow for the prioritizing of close reading and analyzing of the texts themselves, and we will therefore be introduced to the 

broader spectrum of ways to look at and to think and write about art. We will also be practicing the basic skills involved 

in researching, reading and writing effectively in an academic context. 

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES 

HA 39E Freshman and Sophomore Seminar: Socially Engaged Art and the Future of the Public University 

1.5 units, P/NP 

CCN: 04853 

Co-taught by Professor Gregory Levine (History of Art) and Bay Area Artist Scott Tsuchitani 

Check online schedule of classes for lecture and discussion section times/locations 

This seminar will meet the first seven weeks of the semester. Event dates and arrangements will be discussed in class. 

Co-taught by a Bay Area artist, Scott Tsuchitani, and UC Berkeley art historian, Professor Gregory Levine, this seminar 

examines “socially engaged art,” an emerging form of creative public practice. It introduces artists, collectives, and 

crowd-sourced participants employing diverse themes, imageries, materials, technologies, performances, sites, tactics, and 

philosophies. Whether it takes the form of a bold action in a discrete but visible space, or a long-term nationwide 

campaign, socially engaged art suggests a unifying premise: namely, that performative, public, and frequently 

participatory cultural work can effectively intervene in the status quo to bring about meaningful social transformation. The 

seminar therefore asks, “Can art create social change, help achieve social justice?” How is socially engaged art different 

from, on the one hand, what we generally think of as political activism and, on the other, art with political content viewed 

in museums and art galleries? We will also examine ongoing debates around the ethics, aesthetics, and effectiveness of 

socially engaged art, which by its own nature is so resistant to definition and containment that neither academics nor 

practitioners can agree on a name for it (other names include interventionist art, participatory art, dialogic art, social 

sculpture, relational aesthetics) and critics and advocates alike dispute its status as “art.” A recent focus of activity in 

socially engaged art is the future of the public university in a time of global neoliberalism and degradations of access and 

diversity. This suggests an immediate point of inquiry for this seminar: what sorts of art and processes of cultural 


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production and encounter might we imagine, as we imagine the future of UC and public higher education? We invite 

students who are interested in the arts and society—participants need not think of themselves as “artists” or “activists.” 

We also seek students interested in the critical conversation about public higher education taking place right now in local 

and global contexts. This seminar is a Berkeley Arts Seminar. Admission to the on-campus arts events included in this 

course will be provided at no cost to students. 

Gregory Levine is Associate Professor in the History of Art. His teaching and research focus on various fields including 

East Asia, Buddhist visual culture, and histories of collecting. An appointed member of the Berkeley Faculty Association, 

he is active in conversations around the future of UC. For more information regarding Professor Levine, visit 

http://arthistory.berkeley.edu/Faculty_Levine.html. 

Scott Tsuchitani is a visual artist based in San Francisco whose interdisciplinary cultural interventions have impacted art, 

academic, and public discourse locally and internationally. He has exhibited his work in New York and Los Angeles, as 

well as the SFMOMA and de Young Museum in San Francisco. He has been lecturing on art and intervention at colleges 

and universities around the Bay Area since 2005. For more information regarding Mr. Tsuchitani, visit 

http://www.scotttsuchitani.com/. 

HA 30 Art of India 

Professor Sugata Ray 

CCN 04830 

Lower Division: Asian (South Asian) 


This course explores the visual culture of the Indian subcontinent (modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, 

Nepal, and Sri Lanka) from the early urbanization of the Indus valley region (ca. 2300 BCE) to contemporary print culture 

and cinema. Along with a close study of visual form, we will read translations of Sanskrit poetry, descriptions of gardens 

in 16 th -century imperial biographies, European travel accounts of India, and scholarly essays to understand how imagemaking 

was, and still is, central to formulating identities and subjectivities. Situating visual production within systems of 

politics and power, religion/s and philosophy, aesthetic theories and cultural praxis, and gender and sexuality, we will 

develop a reflexive methodology to read images and texts critically. No previous background in Art History or South Asia 

is required. 

HA 35 Art and Architecture in Japan 

Professor Gregory Levine 

CCN: 04842 

Lower Division: Asian (Japanese) 

Check online schedule of classes for course times/locations 

This course—an introductory survey—examines art and architecture in Japan, to contemporary, crossing into multiple 

categories of visual, material, and built culture in diverse social, political, and religious contexts. Moving in a rough 

chronological structure, the course considers questions such as the following: Why do images of the Buddha seem to look 

alike (but may vary in striking, important ways), and what does seeing a Buddha mean; why are rough earthenware tea 

bowls among the most treasured artistic objects in Japan; what’s up with the representation of “Geisha;” how can a 

building (Ise Shrine) be simultaneously the oldest and newest architecture in Japan; how has modernity made Japanese art 

“Japanese”? What do works of Japanese art and architecture demand of us, in our critical study of the visual arts, and what 

do they reveal or perhaps conceal? There is no prerequisite for this course, and students from all majors and disciplines 

are welcome. 

HA 51 Introduction to Medieval Art 

Professor Beate Fricke 

CCN 04854 

Lower Division: Western (Medieval/Early Modern) 



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A selective, thematic exploration of the visual arts from the decline of the Roman empire to the beginnings of Early 

Modern period. The emergence of new artistic media, subject matter, and strategies of making and viewing will be 

discussed against the ever-shifting historical circumstances of medieval Europe. Emphasis will be placed on the methods 

of interpreting the works, especially in relation to then-current social practices and cultural values. 

HA 100 Theories and Methods of Art History 

Dr. Justin Underhill 

CCN 04866 

Upper Division requirement 


How art has been studied in the past and how it is currently studied, its historiography and methodology. Consideration of 

the earliest writers (Pliny, Vasari) but also modern approaches, from traditional style analysis and connoisseurship 

through the "founders" of modern art history (Panofsky, Riegl) to more recent approaches, e.g. psychoanalysis, feminism, 

social history, anthropology, semiotics, etc. 

Textbooks (Available on Amazon.com): 

1. Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology ISBN-10: 0199229848* 

2. Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, eds., The Anthropology of Art: A Reader (Wiley-Blackwell Anthologies in 

Social and Cultural Anthropology) ISBN-10: 1405105615 

3. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell 

Companions to Literature and Culture) ISBN-10: 1405168064* *Kindle edition available. 

HA C120B Art of Ancient Mesopotamia: 1000-330 BCE 

Art of Empires: Assyria, Babylon, and Persia 

Professor Marian Feldman 

CCN 04878 

Upper Division: Western (Ancient) 


From 1000 to 330 BCE, the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia dominated the ancient Near Eastern world, stretching 

from Greece and Egypt to Central Asia. In concert with imperial expansion came an explosion of artistic production 

ranging from palace wall reliefs to small-scale luxury objects. This course provides an integrated picture of the imperial 

arts of these three great empires, situating them within the broader social and political contexts of the first millennium 

BCE. In their conquest of foreign lands these powerful states came in contact with and appropriated a diversity of 

cultures, such as Phoenicia, Israel, Egypt, and Greece, which we will also study. 

The goal of the course is to encourage a critical reading of the works of art based on approaches from art history and 

archaeology. Discussions and short assignments will stress interpretative approaches based on looking and analyzing the 

works of art. 

HA C121A Introduction to Islamic Art and Architecture 

Dr. Heba Mostafa 

CCN 05211 

Upper Division: Elective; see department for more information 


This course introduces the art and architecture of the Islamic world, examining transformations from pre-Islam up to the 

present. The course explores the main features of the built environment of Muslim communities throughout the Central 

Islamic lands, Central Asia and Spain with emphasis upon the Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Seljuk, Ayyubid, Mamluk, 

Ilkhanid, Timurid and Ottoman periods up to the present time. The course explores the range of cultural, political, social 

and religious aspects related to the development of the visual culture. This involves an examination of the impact of 

Islam’s encounter with late antiquity and aims to explain the rise of Islamic architecture as a cultural product of this 

encounter. It also aims to challenge notions of Islamic art as a straightforward synthesis of the art and architecture of the 

late antique and ancient near eastern world. The development of Islam’s architectural manifestations is cast within the 


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context of the development of its institutions to aid in the understanding of the rise of the seminal building types of Islam. 

The course begins by introducing the rise of the mosque, the early palace and the shrine during the Umayyad and Abbasid 

periods within the context of the development of praxis as well as overarching political and cultural shifts. Furthermore it 

aims to examine the later development of Islamic architecture through a rigorous understanding of the seminal shifts in 

the development of the culture as a whole within the context of the surrounding polities. The course will also touch upon 

aspects of the development of the Medieval Islamic city in light of the development of the seminal institutions of 

palace/citadel, the evolution of the religious complex as well as the economic centers. The course concludes with an 

assessment of the place of architecture within contemporary Islamic communities. 

HA 131C Art and Propaganda in Modern China 

Professor Patricia Berger 

CCN 04926 

Upper Division: Asian (Chinese-Modern) 


The history of Chinese art from the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912 to the present, including the reformist movements of 

the early 20th century; the new urbanism and its visual articulation in advertising, photography, and popular arts; national 

style; politicized painting and woodblock prints in the Western style; Communist socialist realism; and the meaning of the 

avant-garde as both Communist ideological movement and anti-authoritarian concept. 

HA 169A Elizabethan Renaissance: Art, Culture, and Visuality 

Professor Elizabeth Honig 

CCN 04890 

Upper Division: Western (Medieval/Early Modern) 


This course has two goals: to explore visual culture and the role of visuality in renaissance England, and to develop 

research skills. 

Elizabeth I's long reign saw a remarkable flowering of the arts. Her unique position as a female monarch surrounded by 

male courtiers produced a dynamic in which all artistic production seemed to reflect back upon her, the powerful focus of 

men's desires and aspirations. From the building of stately houses to the writing of poetry, a rhetoric of courtship and 

persuasion would underlie England's renaissance. Following on a long period of state-sponsored iconoclasm, the status of 

the visual arts and their relationship to verbal expression also had to be redefined. This course will consider the 

Elizabethan period in relation to culture under Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, her brother and sister, and her Stuart heir 

James I. We will treat poetry, painting, and pageantry; rhetoric, architecture and urban development. We will also pay 

close attention to the applied and domestic arts--furnishings, clothing, embroidery. Writers and artists we will discuss will 

include Holbein, More, Hilliard, Sidney, Smythson, Jones, Jonson, Van Dyck and Rubens. 

This course involves interdisciplinary, research-based learning. The evaluation of your work will be based not on 

examinations but on a multi-part project, on which you will have extensive, structured guidance from the professor, the 

GSI, and the library staff. You will write an original interdisciplinary research paper using primary sources available 

online. 

HA 171 Special Topics: Early Modern 

Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain and Colonial Latin America (16 th through 18 th centuries) 

Professor Todd Olson 

CCN 04950 



The epithet “Golden Age” is commonly used to describe the art and literature of seventeenth-century Spain. Ironically, the 

complex paintings of Diego Velázquez, harbingers of Manet’s modernity, were produced during the decline of Spain and 

its Empire in Europe and the Americas. These individual artistic achievements are inextricable from an understanding of a 

global history and the migration of images in the trans-Atlantic world. This course will trace the mutual impact of 


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conquest on the visual and material cultures of Spain and Colonial Latin America, examine Spanish art in relation to 

religious, economic and political change in early modern Europe, and conclude with Goya’s contribution to the myth of 

Spain’s isolation from the European Enlightenment. 

HA 185A Art, Architecture and Design in the US (1782-Present) 

Professor Margaretta Lovell 

CCN 04902 

Upper Division: Western (Modern/Contemporary) 


Looking at major developments in painting and architecture from Romanticism to Post-modernism (with some attention to 

sculpture, city planning, design, and photography), this course addresses art and its social context over the last two 

centuries in what is now the United States. Issues include patronage, audience, technology, and the education of the artist 

as well as style, cultural expression, and the relationship of "high" art to vernacular and popular art. We will focus on the 

ways in which visual culture incorporates and responds to narratives of personal, community, and national identity. 

HA 186A Early Twentieth Century Art: Shock of the New 

Dr. Jacqueline Francis 

CCN 04914 



This course is an introductory survey of Western art produced from 1900 to 1960. It engages key writings in art history 

and visual cultural studies that interpret and offer critical analysis of modes of creative expression, artistic practices/styles, 

and movements. The course focus is on painting and sculpture; photography, performance, video art, and architecture are 

discussed as well. 

HA 190B Roman Painting 

Professor C.H. Hallett 

CCN 04938 



What role did painting play in Roman life? What sort of paintings do we hear about in the writings of Latin authors? 

Battle paintings, for example, carried in triumphal processions, and described by Roman historians; or Greek ‘old master’ 

paintings purchased for extravagant sums by art collectors like Lucullus and Hortensius, and cherished as their prize 

possessions—to the dismay of Roman moralists. What kinds of pictures were set up as votives in Roman temples and 

public spaces? What designs and subjects did ordinary Romans choose to have painted on the walls of their homes, their 

villas, and their tombs? 

This course will present the surviving evidence for a wide range of pictorial representation in the Roman world. It will 

include the earliest remains from the city of Rome itself; the elaborate suites of painted rooms found in the houses of 

Pompeii and Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples; and Roman mosaics—‘paintings in stone’—from Italy, North Africa, 

and the eastern Mediterranean. Some topics to be considered: the ‘four styles’ of Pompeian interior decoration; the 

architect Vitruvius’ denunciation of contemporary painting in the early Augustan period; the reproduction of Greek ‘old 

master’ paintings from pattern books; the surviving paintings of the Domus Aurea, the emperor Nero’s gigantic ‘Golden 

House’ in Rome; the painting of marble statues and reliefs; and finally the brilliantly colored mummy portraits preserved 

by the sands of the Egyptian desert. 

There will be a mid-term exam, a short paper, and a final exam. 

HA 192A UG Seminar (Japanese): Visual Cultures of Zen Buddhism in Medieval and Early Modern Japan 

Professor Gregory Levine 

CCN 04974 

Upper Division: Asian (Japanese) 

By permission of the instructor. 


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This seminar examines the visual cultures associated with medieval-to-early modern Zen Buddhism in Japan, situating the 

production, materiality, expressive forms, and functions of painting, calligraphy, and sculpture within the East Asian 

interregional context of Buddhism and art making and circulation. Taking advantage of recent publications on Zen 

Buddhism and Zen art, the seminar introduces key works and situates them within critical debates surrounding, among 

other topics, portraiture and the Zen figural pantheon, calligraphy and inscriptional practices, ritual functions, and 

sectarian orthodoxy. Many of these works are considered “masterworks” of Japanese art; our task is to consider them not 

strictly in terms of their “star status” in the modern canon but as far more complex and potent visual embodiments of 

soteriology, cultural praxis, and self-fashioning (which turn out, often, to be far more fascinating than our modern 

interpretations suggest). 

Readings will be geared toward acquiring historical-contextual knowledge as well as a grasp of the (sometimes 

polemical/contentious) history of the subject of Zen art and the current “state of the field.” Participants will be expected 

to be thoroughly prepared for each session (based upon reading, looking, and thinking) and to lead/contribute to 

discussion. Weekly writing assignments will build toward a final research and writing project. As feasible, we will study 

selected works held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Asian Art Museum, SF. Prior study of art history, 

Asian studies, Buddhist Studies is not required but will be helpful (students without such background will be expected to 

“dive in” immediately and deeply). Note: This course will not consider “Zen rock gardens” or architecture; nor is it an 

examination of modernist or contemporary art with Zen associations/appropriations (and student projects may not focus 

on these topics). 

HA 192B UG Seminar (Ancient): Roman Coins 

Dr. Gaius Stern 

CCN 04976 


The ancient Romans used coins as newspaper headlines to spread information. Coins circulated information such as 

religious festivals, declarations of war, victory in war, and changes in government. Because most Romans were illiterate, 

coinage had to display a message with pictures instead of words that all Romans could easily understand. Of course, on 

many occasions the central government used coin to spread what we consider to be propaganda instead of news. This 

class will teach students how to recognize and interpret ancient Roman coins with an eye towards the propaganda 

message. Our study will begin with a very rapid survey of how Greek coinage influenced Romans, who adopted the use 

of coinage as late as 269 BC. Every week we will focus on half a dozen or so coins in a chronological sequence to 

examine their general and specific messages. We will handle real ancient Roman coins in this class. Students will find it 

helpful (but not necessary) to have completed a class on ancient Rome prior to this course (such as CLAS 10B, Roman 

Art, or Roman History). This class will examine 300 years with the Roman coinage through the fall of the Roman 

Republic into the regimes of Augustus and Tiberius. 

The midterm of this class consists of designing a Roman coin with a message easily read by any illiterate Roman. 

Course Textbooks: 

1. David Sear The History and Coinage of the Roman Imperators (available from eBay or the author; contact the 

instructor for more information). 

2. Course Reader from Zee Zee copies. 

3. Handbook of Ancient Greek and Roman Coins, by Zander Klawans ISBN 030709362-X 

HA 192C UG Seminar (Medieval): Dürer 

Professor Beate Fricke 

CCN 04977 



Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528) was one of the greatest German painters and printmakers. His vast oeuvre includes 

altarpieces, portraits and self-portraits, copper engravings, woodcuts and several theoretical tracts dealing with geometry, 

perspective and the human proportion. Stemming from Nuremberg, he travelled through Europe and was well known as 

artist well as mathematician, inventor, collector and art theorist. On his travels through Europe he got in touch with 

famous scholars and artists, worked for important kings and saw the Aztec treasure sent to Charles V by Hernán Cortés. 

His artistic work gained fame all over Europe through his own engravings and woodcuts. Soon his works were also copied 


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as prints and sold by other artists. This provoked an early lawsuit regarding the ownership of copyright for a work of art. 

The seminar is an introduction not only to Dürer's work but also to the art and culture of Northern 

Renaissance. Emphasis will be placed on the methods of interpreting the works, especially in relation to then-current 

social practices and cultural values. 

HA 192F UG Seminar (19 th -20 th Century): Queer Art and Visual Culture in Britain 1850-191 

Professor Whitney Davis 

CCN 04978 



Update 8/27/12 – HA 192F CANCELED 

HA 192G UG Seminar (American Art): Art in the Workplace, Art in the News 

Professor Margaretta Lovell 

CCN 04979 



This seminar is designed to give declared Art History majors (as well as minors, and undeclared prospective majors on a 

space-availability basis) an opportunity to explore the employment tracks of professional art historians. It is intended to 

help undergraduates envision themselves actively and productively participating in the world of arts professionals and to 

give them a sense of the skills necessary for employment and advancement in these various positions. Weekly field work 

and writing assignments. 

HA 192H UG Seminar (Modern/Contemporary): Contemporary Art and Handicraft 

Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson 

CCN 04980 



This undergraduate seminar examines the resurgence of craft within contemporary art and theory. In a time when much 

art is outsourced -- or fabricated by large stables of assistants-- what does it mean when artists return to traditional, and 

traditionally laborious, methods of handiwork such as knitting, jewelry making, or woodworking? Though our emphasis 

will be on recent art (including the feminist reclamation of quilts, an artist who makes pornographic embroidery, a 

transvestite potter, queer fiber collectives, do-it-yourself environmental interventions, and anti-war craftivism), we will 

also examine important historical precedents. We will read formative theoretical texts regarding questions of process, 

materiality, skill, bodily effort, domestic labor, and alternative economies of production. Throughout, we will think 

through how craft is in dialogue with questions of nation-building, gendered work, and mass manufacturing. The seminar 

is centered around student-led discussion of our critical readings and culminates with final research projects. 

NEW COURSE JUST ADDED! 

HA 192H.2 Undergraduate Seminar (Modern/Contemporary): In Between the Local and the Global: 

Contemporary South Asian Art 

Dr. Atreyee Gupta 

CCN 04982 

Upper Division: Asian (Modern/Contemporary) 


Over the last ten years, contemporary art from South Asia has made its presence felt in the global imaginary. Today, one 

might argue, there is an equitable cartography for contemporary art. Think, for instance, of Subodh Gupta, a Delhi-based 

artist who was recently dubbed the “Damien Hirst of India” and is represented by Hauser & Wirth, a gallery with no 

presence in South Asia itself. Thus, quite paradoxically, even as contemporary South Asian art gains an ever-increasing 

international visibility, it loses its claim to the local as a site of resistance to a hegemonic global. How do we navigate this 

paradox? This question remains at the heart of this seminar. Sifting through artworks, critical texts, manifestoes, and 


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artists’ writings, we will work towards developing a methodological frame to approach the global contemporary, one that 

neither reduces difference to produce an imagined commensurability nor annunciates a reified alterity. Simultaneously, we 

will engage with the idea of the global as the local through interactions with the South Asian diasporic art community in 

the Bay Area. Although we will ground our discussion in a historically located understanding of post-1960s art in India 

and Pakistan, students are welcome to write papers that relate to the seminar’s theme but focus on areas beyond South 

Asia. No prior knowledge of either South Asia or contemporary art is required. 

GRADUATE COURSES 

HA 200 Graduate Proseminar in the Interpretation of Art History 

Professor Whitney Davis 

CCN 05061 


The Proseminar in the History of Art introduces methods, theories, histories, conceptual frameworks, and certain current 

issues of the field of art history, with considerable focus on the major philosophical traditions within which art history has 

been shaped and the wider interdisciplinary matrix within which art history has been positioned. The seminar does not 

deal systematically, however, with intellectual or ideological "isms" (Marxism, existentialism, feminism, etc.), as books 

and courses on these are readily available; rather, it concentrates on distinctive modes and formations of thought within art 

history and sometimes unique to it, and on some of its leading practitioners and writers. One possible framing device for 

the course will involve a critical examination of the programs of the 2012 International Congress of the History of Art and 

the 2013 Annual Meeting of the College Art Association. 

HA C220 Graduate Seminar: The Sacred and the Arts from the Ancient Near East to the Late Antique 

Professor Marian Feldman/ Professor Diliana Angelova 

CCN 05064 


This seminar will address cross-cultural and “longue durée” concerns regarding ritual and the sacred in the ancient Near 

Eastern and Mediterranean world from the early periods in Mesopotamia to the Late Antique (c. 500 CE). We will take as 

our initial focus several case studies drawn from both the Ancient Near Eastern and Late Antique worlds to serve as 

springboards for discussion. These case studies will range from landscapes and urban spaces, to individual architectural 

structures, to images and forms. Topics that will be touched on in the course include spiritual seeing and visuality, 

mysticism and sacred architecture, visual exegesis, icons and their meanings, material and visual aspects of ritual practice, 

and the intertwining of the sacred with collective memory and communal identity. 

This seminar will fulfill the interdisciplinary seminar requirement for the AHMA program. 

HA 230 Graduate Seminar (Chinese): Ornament: Theory and Practice 

Professor Patricia Berger 

CCN 05067 


This seminar will look at the theory and practice of ornament, taking China, and specifically the eighteenth-century, 

globally-aware High Qing period, as a case in point. We will survey the growing body of theoretical writing on ornament 

(Gombrich, Grabar, Trilling, Powers, Hay, and many others) to consider how ornament has been constructed in various 

cultural settings as a systematic visual form. Some guiding questions: How does ornament differ fundamentally from 

other visual practices? How applicable are linguistic terms, such as language, grammar and syntax, to systems of visual 

ornament? What about geometries of ornament? What, if any, parallels can we find between visual ornament and 

ornamented language? What purposes does ornamental script serve? What place does ornament have in devotional 

religious practice? How were exotic ornamental systems absorbed into new contexts (and how did this alter or expand 

their ability to signify)? 

Students from all fields are welcome. Knowledge of Chinese is not required; final paper projects need not focus on China. 


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HA 260 Graduate Seminar (Renaissance): Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) 

Professor Todd Olson 

CCN 05070 


The Spanish born artist, who was active in Rome and Naples during the first half of the seventeenth-century, has left a 

series of works that are remarkable for their repetitiveness. Thumbnail photos of his oil paintings in catalogue raisonées 

betray obsessive repetition. This seminar will consider how figurative iteration, reversibility and material degradation in 

Ribera’s etchings provided an experimental practice. The seminar will also consider the late work of Caravaggio in 

Naples, Sicily and Malta, Ribera’s representation of torture and martyrdom, his graphic procedures, and the politics of 

representation in viceregal Naples. 

HA 281 Graduate Seminar (European): Debating about Degas 

Professor Darcy Grigsby 

CCN 05073 


Edgar Degas offers a remarkable body of work for scholars of nineteenth-century French culture. Here is an artist adept at 

drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture who also made photographs. Degas’s art forces us to think about the 

relationship among these media at a moment of industrialization and mass production. He was, to cite Carol Armstrong, 

the “odd man out” among the impressionists with whom he exhibited. He was a member of the avant-garde although 

socially conservative; an extraordinary portraitist although socially awkward; a man who sensitively portrayed women 

such as his close friend Mary Cassatt, although attacked (and celebrated) for his misogyny. No surprise that Degas’s work 

has catalyzed a vast, wonderfully contentious art historical literature wherein feminists, for example, revile and champion 

his art, debating whether he was a flaneur, voyeur, or introvert. Central to his oeuvre are problems of portraiture, vision, 

temporality, seriality, caricature, pornography, prostitution, anti-semitism, urbanization and class; let’s call them the 

problems of modernity. We will read primary and secondary literature and also closely study and argue about this (ever so 

delicious and challenging) art, including his work in New Orleans. 

HA 290 Graduate Seminar (Special Topic): In Between the Local and the Global: Contemporary South 

Asian Art 

Dr. Atreyee Gupta 

CCN 05078 


Over the last ten years, contemporary art from South Asia has made its presence felt in the global imaginary. Today, one 

might argue, there is an equitable cartography for contemporary art. Think, for instance, of Subodh Gupta, a Delhi-based 

artist who was recently dubbed the “Damien Hirst of India” and is represented by Hauser & Wirth, a gallery with no 

presence in South Asia itself. Thus, quite paradoxically, even as contemporary South Asian art gains an ever-increasing 

international visibility, it loses its claim to the local as a site of resistance to a hegemonic global. How do we navigate this 

paradox? This question remains at the heart of this seminar. Sifting through artworks, critical texts, manifestoes, and 

artists’ writings, we will work towards developing a methodological frame to approach the global contemporary, one that 

neither reduces difference to produce an imagined commensurability nor annunciates a reified alterity. Simultaneously, we 

will engage with the idea of the global as the local through interactions with the South Asian diasporic art community in 

the Bay Area. Although we will ground our discussion in a historically located understanding of post-1960s art in India 

and Pakistan, students are welcome to write papers that relate to the seminar’s theme but focus on areas beyond South 

Asia. No prior knowledge of either South Asia or contemporary art is required. 


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HA 298 Group Study: Elizabethan Renaissance 


1-2 units 

This class is an opportunity for students hoping to participate in the spring semester travel seminar to prepare for the 

Elizabethan portion of that course. You can do that by auditing the Elizabethan Renaissance lecture course; but people 

who have partial conflicts with that, or who want to do some written work & get credit, can register for this one- or twounit 

course. You will still audit whatever lectures you can. In our seminar meetings, I will fill in any lecture material you 

have to miss, and we will discuss selected readings. For those who register for 2 units there will be exercises in the visual 

analysis of material culture, and in reading 16 th -century primary sources (from inventories to poetry to bestiaries and 

travel descriptions) for what they can tell us about visuality in Elizabethan England. You will not write a research paper 

but will have the background to do so next semester. Note that this is not a prerequisite for the travel seminar but merely 

an optional way to acquire background in one part of the material. 

HA 300 Teaching Art History 


CCN – see department 


This seminar satisfies a University-wide requirement that all first-time Graduate Student Instructors take a pedagogy 

course. Offered in the fall term, it can be taken concurrently with a first teaching assignment or in the semester before 

beginning teaching. It will encourage you to think in larger terms about the function of pedagogy in art history–what we 

learn, what we teach, who we are as teachers in this field. You should learn how to lead a good section and how to grade 

exams effectively, but also how to help students think and write in visual terms, how to guide them to a more critical 

mode of reading, how to direct them in independent research, and how to ensure that they work to the best of their 

potential. 

Beyond that, this class is a pre-professional workshop, designed to help you plan what your teaching will be like when 

you are designing and instructing courses on your own. Throughout the semester you will be thinking about a class that 

you would like to teach some day in your field. You will make up paper assignments and exams for that class, and 

eventually will draft a syllabus and part of your first lecture for that class. Your final project will be a “teaching portfolio,” 

which will incorporate your syllabus, assignments, and a “teaching statement” explaining your personal philosophy of 

teaching. We will also be talking about the job market, interviewing, and job talks. 

RELATED COURSES 


Studies in the History, Society, and Politics of the Italian Peninsula: Art and Incarnation 

Instructor: Kathryn Blair-Moore 

Italian Studies 160 

CCN 47010 

In this course, we will examine the relation of art production in early modern Italy to the theology of Incarnation, from the 

establishment of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation in 1215 and its promotion by the Franciscan order through the 

Counter-Reformation period. We will explore how the central representational function of the Eucharistic host informed 

the development of altarpieces and their architectural settings; the contemporary cultivation of Marian icons and shrines 

that similarly sought to embody divine presence; the creation and use of illustrated manuscripts relating to new forms of 

affective piety and virtual pilgrimage; and major changes in all of these art forms in response to both iconophobia and the 

Reformation. 

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Throughout the course, we will seek to develop a critical framework for evaluating how divine presence was 

communicated and experienced through material embodiment in a variety of media, including pictorial, sculptural, and 

architectural representation, with a particular focus on the arts of Tuscany and central Italy. 

Iconoclasm and the Image (RAHS 4840) 

Instructor: Professor Mia Mochizuki 

THURSDAY 2:10-5 pm – Starting Thursday, September 6 

This course follows the GTU Academic Calendar, so its first meeting is Thursday, September 6 th , 2:10-5 pm. It will meet at the 

Jesuit School of Theology (1735 LeRoy Ave., between LeConte and Virginia Avenues), room 217. 

Destruction, devotion and image wars. Why has the interpretation of devotional art weighted production over annihilation 

? After all, reformers of all eras have sought to decapitate, maim and otherwise “erase” sacred art. Taking a long view of 

iconoclasm as the active interrogation of objects by objects — through case studies from ancient, medieval and 

reformation art to today’s contemporary crises — this course will consider the power of religious art from the frankly 

object-centered perspective of “applied criticism,” censorship and renunciation. Topics will include lineage and cyclical 

regeneration, protection and preservation, memory and ruin, economies of sight, mimesis and the miraculous object, 

senses and the infinite hermeneutic, rupture and the failure of the eye, and the hundred-eyed hydra of immediate, 

interconnected media images that freeze us today. Advanced M.A./doctoral seminar. Active class participation, brief 

presentations and a research project. An art history course is preferred, but not required. 


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Courses - The History of Art Department

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