History of Art

This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials). Visiting students without a strong background in art history are strongly encouraged to take it as a primary course.

This course introduces key methods in art history through close readings of foundational texts. For your essays, you will be invited to apply the ideas and frameworks from these texts to an artwork of your choosing, from the Oxford collections or beyond:

1. Formalism (Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl, Henri Focillion)
2. Connoisseurship (Max Friedländer, Roberto Longhi)
3. Iconology (Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky)
4. Semiotics (Norman Bryson, Mieke Bal, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault)
5. Social History of Art (Arnold Hauser, T. J. Clark, Francis Haskell, Michael Baxandall)
6. Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Rosalind Krauss)
7. Feminist Art History (Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock)
8. Postcolonial Theory (Edward Said)

This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials). Visiting students without a strong background in art history are strongly encouraged to take it as a primary course.

This course will introduce you to major texts in art theory from antiquity through the nineteenth century, tracing the development of key ideas about art, aesthetics, art history, and criticism:

1. Antiquity (Aristotle, Pliny)
2. Renaissance (Vasari, Alberti)
3. Mannerism (Ripa, Zuccari, van Mander)
4. Classicism (Félibien, de Piles, Le Brun)
5. France and the Birth of Art Criticism (Diderot)
6. British Eighteenth-Century Theory (Shaftesbury, Burke, Hogarth, Reynolds)
7. German Enlightenment Aesthetics (Winckelmann, Kant, Lessing)
8. Nineteenth-Century Criticism and Modernity (Baudelaire, Gautier, Ruskin)

This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials).

This experimental course explores how concepts from literary and film genre theory can be applied to the visual arts. Bridging disciplinary boundaries, it invites students to engage critically with key texts in genre theory to think about the formation, function, and transformation of genres in painting. When taken as a primary course, it includes a genre-focused visit to the Ashmolean Museum and a historical survey of the emergence, hybridization, and disintegration of painting genres from the 15th to the 19th century.

1. Painting Genres: A Historical Overview
2. What is a Genre? (Rick Altman)
3. Mechanisms of Genre Development (Yuri Tynyanov)
4. Generic Expectations (Steve Neale)
5. Genre and Its Sociohistorical Context (Judith Hess Wright)
6. Genre and Perception (Linda Williams)
7. Genre and Institutions (Thomas Schatz)
8. Genre-Focused Visit to the Ashmolean Museum

This option can only be taken as a secondary course (4 tutorials).

This course examines the complex relationship between artworks and their viewers. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from art history, visual culture, and media studies, students will explore how perception, power, technology, and modes of display shape the way art is experienced and interpreted:

1. The (Male) Gaze (Laura Mulvey, Gresilda Pollock, Michael Fried)
2. Technology and Perception (Jonathan Crary, Walter Benjamin)
3. Realism, Illusion, Objectivity (Lev Manovich, Lorraine Daston)
4. Display and Experience (Stephen Greenblatt, Carol Duncan)

This option can only be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials).

This course introduces the history of British art from the 16th to the end of the 19th century through close study of key artists (Christopher Wren, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, William Blake, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner), movements (the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts, the Aesthetic Movement), and phenomena (portrait miniature, English garden, political caricature, early modern photography). As part of the course, you will engage closely with Oxford’s collections, architecture, and grounds. If circumstances permit, the course will also include a day trip to Tate Britain.

This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials).

This course offers an in-depth exploration of French visual culture across the long eighteenth century — a dynamic period during which many of the modern mechanisms of art production, consumption, and circulation first took shape. Through close study of artworks and primary sources, we will examine how artistic practices were embedded in broader social, political, and intellectual developments, and how they responded to the changing structures of the art world. Themes include:

1. Genre Painting, New Themes, and New Actors
2. The Rococo
3. Mechanisms of Art Commerce
4. Mass Reproduction and the Decorative Arts
5. The Role of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture
6. Public Exhibitions and the Invention of Art Criticism
7. Globalisation, Orientalism, and Travel
8. Print Culture: Celebrity, Caricature, and Propaganda

This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials).

Spanning the early decades of photography, from the 1820s to the 1880s, this course focuses on issues related to the reproduction of art: the complex relationship between the original and the copy, the varied uses of photographic reproductions, the technical challenges faced during the medium’s early years, and how reproductions reflect the aesthetic tastes of the time. The course combines practical sessions at the Weston Library and the Visual Resources Centre of the Department of History of Art, small-class teaching of the history of early photography, and discussions of key theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Paul Valery André Malraux, Stephen Bann, Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Bruno Latour, and Michelle Henning.

Taught by Kate Keohane

Are We Nearly There Yet positions “landscape” as both a genre and a metaphorical site of possibility. This short course examines the symbols that underpin landscape imagery to think about the literal places in which we live and move and the ones we dream of or remember.

Artistic approaches to landscape and environment can provide possibilities for activating histories buried beneath the soil, as well as (re)imagining ecological systems and collective strategies for being. Interrogating the ways in which artists, activists, writers, and geographers have approached the subject, setting, and sight/site of landscape across time, this course critiques and develops methods for documenting, analysing, and relating to the world.

Taught by Kate Keohane

This course explores the concept of the “global” in relation to modern and contemporary art, focusing on themes such as borders, migration, postcolonialism, and hybridity. Through assigned readings and discussions, it examines how globalization, cosmopolitanism, and historical contexts shape art practices worldwide. Key topics include the Black Atlantic, tropicality, and the politics of small island spaces, with attention to artists from regions including but not limited to Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The course encourages critical engagement with art’s role in reflecting and challenging global flows of power, identity, and cultural exchange, with weekly reflective essays and presentations on specific artists and movements.

This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials).

Students may choose to undertake an extended research project on a topic of their choice, developed in consultation with the tutor. The subject may be drawn from any area of art history.