UCL - Arts of the 20th Century

[ARKE1311]

[22.5h] 3 credits

This course is taught in the 1st semester.

Teacher(s):

Language: French

Level: First

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods

Aims

This course examines a range of artistic disciplines during the second half of the 20th century, in particular architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture and engraving, installation, performance, mixed techniques, photography, cinema, video, music and design. The approach is intended to make students aware of the need to take into account the particular characteristics of the age in which they live when they deal with issues in Art history.

Main themes

The course examines the issues of the Plastic Arts after 1945. The following major aesthetic movements will be examined : post-war non-figurations, Pop Art and the New Realism, Arte Povera, Cobra, the great post-war figurative painters and sculptors, Minimalist Art, Conceptual Art, Body Art and Land Art and new so-called past modernist trend. Students' attention will also be drawn to the key authors and historians who have written about the Art of today to recent publications and current exhibitions wwhich they will be recommended to visit.

Content and teaching methods

This course reviews the formal and semantic properties of each figure and aesthetic movement examined. It also establishes parallels between the Plastic Arts and Literature, Music, Architecture and Cinema and highlights fascinating similarities with 20th century-specific sociological, economic, psychological and historical factors. It will also stress relevant aspects of ideologies with some modernist, avant-garde, academicist and post-modernist connection.