Modern Art and Culture

Year
2
Academic year
2017-2018
Code
01015959
Subject Area
Fine Arts
Language of Instruction
Portuguese
Mode of Delivery
Face-to-face
Duration
SEMESTRIAL
ECTS Credits
6.0
Type
Compulsory
Level
1st Cycle Studies

Recommended Prerequisites

Knowledge of Portuguese language and a foreign language, preferably English.

Teaching Methods

The classes will enhance comprehensive perspective of the artistic modernity drawn between the years 1900 and 1930, this course will be linked with a theme, iconographic and historical reading of defining works of art, stimulating the students participation and investing in their conceptualization skills.

Learning Outcomes

This course will analyze the characteristics of some of the major artistic movements that established western world cultural landscape in the first five decades of the twentieth century, an historical age which is acknowledged by scholarship as the summit of Modernism; the  time  line is inbetween the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 and the Europe exhibition New American Painting (1958-59): Cubism, Russian Cubo futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism will be the primary themes of this curricular unit.

The course will assess the implications that have befallen the traditional notion of art with the popularization of mechanical forms of communication (photography, advertising posters, printmaking , film and radio). To attain this purpose it is essential that students acquire a bibliographical culture  upgraded by the texts and documents provided by the teacher and that they develop the skills to infer  and comment the iconography produced by the Mode.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

The course aims to raise awareness through formal and iconographic analysis of artworks (paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings and reading of excerpts from literary documents (poems and literary narratives) of the changes that have taken place in the artistic culture of the twentieth century, focusing the following issues:

The Crisis of figurative image making: the end of reciprocity between visual form (mimesis) and semantic connotation (storytelling) and the absence of a  “ narrative relationship between objects" in the modernist pictorial surface.

The methodological expansion of the concept of art work, the case of the "Demoiselles d'Avignon" (Picasso, 1907).The surrealist influence on American abstract painting.

The dialectics between the encoded image (visually complex as in Cubism or ascetic as in Russian Constructivism) and the image "nonsense" (Dada experience from the political to the burlesque).

The phenomenon of the avant-garde, its notion and its praxis. 

Head Lecturer(s)

Pedro Filipe Rodrigues Pousada

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Exam: 40.0%
Frequency: 60.0%

Bibliography

Baanham, Reiner, Teoria e Projecto na primeira era da Máquina, S.Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1979.

Berman, Marshall, Tudo o que é sólido se dissolve no ar, Lisboa: Edições 70, 1989.

Calinescu, Matei, As Cinco faces da Modernidade, Lisboa: Vega, 1999.

Chipp, Herschel B.Theories of Modern Art-a source book by artists and critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Conio, Gerard, Le Constructivisme Russe, Tome Premier: les Arts Plastiques, textes théoriques, Manifestes, Documents, Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme, 1987.

Hatherly, Ana, O espaço crítico - do Simbolismo à Vanguarda, Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1979.

Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernists Myths, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994.

Lodder, Christina, Russian Constructivism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987 (1983).

Sousa, Ernesto de, Ser Moderno em Portugal, Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1998.