Modernism and Modernity

This course focuses on European and American art and visual culture between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. We will begin and end in Paris, exploring visual expressions of modernism as they were shaped by industrialization and urban renewal, the fantasies and realities of Orientalism and colonial exploitation, changing gender expectations, racial difference, and world war. Encompassing a wide range of media, the course explores modernism as a compelling dream of utopian possibilities challenged by the conditions of social life in the context of diversity and difference.