Art on Site

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module provides you with the opportunity to learn how to make in-depth studies of objects, across historical time and about particular centres of production. The spring term lectures prepare you for field work to be undertaken as part of the module. This will includes grasping the first principles of the relations that develop between artists and their patrons, the relationship between artistic production and a particular geographical site and the way that meanings can evolve in particular places.

Exhibition Studies

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module will focus on the ways in which the objects of art history are described, displayed and made available to their audiences. You will deal with the practical elements of how to describe works of art and then go on to consider how exhibitions and displays work, considering the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of all these topics.

Methods and Approaches to Art History I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Visual culture embraces a wide range of issues and meanings. This module provides an introduction to the study of visual material and the different approaches that scholars have taken in undertaking research into visual culture. Centred on a common module document, the module includes study skills workshops providing instruction on how to use visual analysis effectively, how to read primary and secondary sources critically, and how to synthesise, summarise and reference accurately. The generic skills teaching will arise from the teaching of thematic topics and will consider a range of objects and spaces from a variety of periods and cultures. The module assumes a high level of IT literacy.

Objects of Art

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module focuses on the objects of art history: specific paintings and works of art. Each session involves lecturers discussing a specific object within its visual, historical and art historical context.

Stories of Art I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module is a 10-week lecture-based module. It aims to introduce you to a wide range of works of visual art across time and across cultures, considering many different kinds of works of art – paintings, sculptures, architecture, prints, drawings, and the so-called decorative and applied arts – and acknowledging that such objects raise a wide range of questions that can be answered in many different ways. The module is based on the principle that there are stories of art, rather than one single story of art.

Stories of Art II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Art and the City

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Sites of Art follows on from Stories of Art. The module is concerned with the physical and social contexts for the production and consumption of works of visual art and is built around two geographical case studies, the city of Rome and our local region of Brighton and Sussex.

Methods and Approaches to Art History 2

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

The interrelationship between text and image is one of the critical issues in visual culture from classical antiquity to the present day. From Chinese calligraphy, which blurs the divide between painting and writing, and medieval manuscripts where pictures appear in margins of the text to contemporary advertisements that use graphics and photography, these connections have influenced our attitudes towards images and information. This module asks how objects as diverse as Chinese porcelain or a Dyson vacuum cleaner, a pair of jeans or a designer dress, acquire meaning and value, both in the past and in the present. It raises questions about materials and techniques: how things were made and what form affects how they look. This module takes one or a number of places and periods to explore the way text and image functioned in society and the different interdisciplinary approaches required to study the two together.

Period in Art History: Art and Society: Art after 1945

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module examines developments in western art from 1945 to the present, placing them in a variety of social and cultural contexts. It begins with Pop Art and its relation to 1950s consumerism, before charting the rise of conceptual art practices in the context of 1960s counter-culture. It goes on to explore the emergence of post-modernism, and the challenge presented to a predominantly white, male, Eurocentric art establishment by identity politics and feminism in the 1980s. The module concludes by looking at `relational' art practices in the 1990s and 2000s, along with the rise of the art biennial.

Period in Art History: Dutch Art of the 17th Century

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines how the particular characteristics of the northern European schools of 17th-century art have been defined and argued about. The critical tradition has taken sides on a number of issues, namely how far an apparent attention to realism disguises complex meanings, whether religious painting was still important in a post-Reformation society, on the role of optical illusion, and on portraiture and landscape as evocations of the nation-state. All these issues are constantly referred back to a standard of quality and rules for debate set down elsewhere, in Renaissance Italy. The main body of material will be taken from 17th century Dutch painting, but with constant reference to the art of the Spanish Netherlands in order to examine how far the region to the south provided a conduit to the art and criticism of Italy and whether it makes sense to see the two countries as a cultural whole.

Period in Art History: From Picasso to Bacon: Painting and Sculpture 1920-1970

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

Period in Art History: Selling yourself: 18th Century Art and Society

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module considers the production of visual culture in the 18th century within its social contexts. Rather than simply looking at a list of artists, you will consider the visual arts against the backdrop of contemporary social and ideological issues: commerce and luxury, urbanization and the rise of industry, the impact of empire and colonialism.

The approach will be a thematic one, looking at topics such as the representation of labour, the image of the family, the cult of individualism, the representation of war, as well as the more conventional genres of portraiture, landscape or history painting. You will also relate the visual arts to 18th century literary culture: the rise of the novel, georgic and pastoral poetry, and developments in social philosophy.

Period in Art History:Palaces, Churches, Piazzas: Art and Society in Renaissance Italy

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, focusing particularly on its role in constructing and maintaining social relationships. It encompasses a range of Italian urban and courtly centres, exploring how distinctive regional contexts influenced the design, content and location of works of art. Investigating the networks of people involved in commissioning and creating art objects, it explores how viewers engaged with them in civic, sacred and domestic settings. The module considers the traditionally privileged 'art' of the Renaissance - painting and sculpture - in relation to luxury 'arts' - ceramics, glass, metalwork and textiles - to investigate the changing visual and material culture of Italy in this period. Finally, it addresses the term 'Renaissance', examining how this concept has been historically constructed and reinforced.

Art in Context: Art and Politics in Britain 1979-the present

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module examines the place of politics in recent British art. Starting with Thatcher's Britain, we will look at a number of critical art practices in the 1980s, including those associated with the New Colour Photography and Black Art movements. We will go on to address the self-professed entrepreneurialism of 'young British art' against the backdrop of Thatcherism and the recession of the early 1990s. We will explore the co-option of the young British artists (yBas) as part of New Labour mythology, and the impact of globalisation upon the perceived `Britishness' of British art. The module concludes with the re-emergence of political art in the past ten years, made in response to the Iraq War and to the current government's cuts to public spending.

Art in Context: A Great and Golden Age:Byzantium 843-1204

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module deals with art of the Byzantine Empire between 843 and 1204 AD, from the end of iconoclasm to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. You will examine the role of images in Byzantium after iconoclasm and considers their use in both religious and secular contexts and in a variety of media. You will also be introduced to a range of Byzantine writings about art and explore Byzantine attitudes to their own artworks.

Art in Context: Inhuman Bondage: the Image of Slavery 1750-1850

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will focus on the impact of slavery and the slave trade on western visual culture, until recently a subject little considered in art-historical scholarship. You will consider not only the iconography of slavery and the representation of enslaved Africans and slave plantations, but also how the ideologies of slavery infused the commercial society that was the context for artistic production, asking to what extent  art and aesthetics directly or indirectly were implicated in the slave trade. Of central concern will be the role of visual imagery in the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade in the late 18th century.

You will look at a wide variety of visual culture, not just works of 'fine' art, but also prints, textiles, applied and decorative arts, and furniture, to assess the significance of this conventionally overlooked, but important and problematic subject.

Art in Context: Michelangelo and Raphael: Art of the Papal Court in the 15th and 16th centuries

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

In Rome at the beginning of the 16th century Popes Julius II and Leo X, their courtiers and followers commissioned buildings, paintings and sculpture that politically argued the power of the Papacy and artistically sought to rival the achievements of the ancients.  You will examine some of the major projects of the time, looking at the intellectual rationale for these works and their relationship to the contemporary discoveries of the fabric of the ancient city.

Art in Context: Paris the Crucible of Modernism 1900-20

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module concentrates on a single decade in one centre of art production: Paris during the forging of Modernism. You will track the careers of particular artists, critics, composers and writers in detail and examine appropriate critical and analytical frames of references for them in relation to the social and cultural history of the period.

Among those figures who to be examined are Henri Matisse, Claude Debussy, George Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Andre Derain and Giorgio de Chirico.

Topic in Art History: Architecture and Interiors

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module examines the relationship between changes in architectural style and practice, and the concept of the interior in the European and American world from the 15th century to the present. How are the concepts of outside and inside related through architecture and how does architecture organise the interior in particular ways? The module takes a historical and social path, but you will be encouraged to build on this through dissertation and presentation.

Topic in Art History: Art and Empire

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module consists of an in-depth consideration of the visual arts in relation to imperialism. It will thus pick up on Edward Said's important intervention in proposing a critical relation between 'culture and imperialism'. This module will look at the ways in which the visual arts were influenced and informed by the material processes and ideologies of empire – from imperial/colonial war to architectural settlement. It will consider not just how artists reacted, referred to and exploited empire in their work (by, for example, taking the opportunity to cultivate new markets in newly colonised territories), but how empire was represented to domestic audiences and informed visual and aesthetic dismodule.

Topic in Art History: Art and its Literary Context

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module takes an interdisciplinary perspective on the links between visual and literary imaginations. Depending on the tutor, the module may look at any one of a variety of periods from the medieval to the 21st century. A typical module may focus on the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, in one of the great capitals of Modernist experimentation - London. The presence of international artists and writers such as Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska will be examined, as well as the distinctive developments in painting and writing around the Bloomsbury Group, the Vorticists, the Camden Town Group and the London Surrealists.

Topic in Art History: Commemorative Art

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module considers the visual culture of the death ritual and, in particular, examines how monumental art seeks to represent and sustain the memory of the deceased. The module moves freely between different cultures and periods, working towards the final dissertation and the assessed presentation, responding both to your individual interest and to the availability of primary and secondary material. In particular, you will be encouraged to consider the many and varied (but little-studied) resources in those subject areas which are available in local and national collections. The module starts with a consideration of a number of relevant theories: genres and hierarchies within art-historical discourse; the roles of mourning and commemoration within the contexts of theology and sociology; and, varied anthropological accounts. Case studies will include: war memorials and other public memorials; the church monument; the engraved headstone and other tomb-markers; monuments to princes and other rulers; mourning costume; the organising, representation and recording of funeral; coffins and their furniture; and cenotaphs and other empty tombs.

Topic in Art History: From Decorative Arts to Material Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module considers the traditional categorisations of the arts into 'fine' and 'decorative' and how this distinction has characterised scholarly approaches to them. Art history's recent engagement with methodologies from the field of material culture has revived interest in objects that had been relegated to the ranks of 'applied art', revealing original contexts and functions that had previously been overlooked. You will explore how the relationship between different art forms was conceived in the past, investigate the range of methods used by art historians to study art objects, and consider how these categories have informed their display in museums.

Topic in Art History: Photography in Context

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The module provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the place of photography in American and Western European culture from the medium's invention in the 1830s to the present. It pays particular attention to the relationship between photography as art and its applications within mass culture. We consider the different contexts in which photographs are encountered and how these affect issues of status and meaning, along with the impact of technological changes upon the production and dissemination of photographic images. We also examine how historic photographic traditions have been extended and disrupted by more recent practices.

Topic in Art History: Representing Women

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module looks at attitudes to women as represented in art within an extended time period. It considers how concepts of gender and gender roles remain constant or change over time, and at how art and texts come together to form a composite picture of women's cultural status. It will also explore how feminist methodologies may or may not be of value in examining images.