ART 221 American Visual Culture Full Curriculum Program 2017/2018 Year - Prague

This course will investigate the character of American aesthetics in the visual arts as represented by American painting, architecture and other related arts of the 20th century.

Examined will be what makes American painting and architecture uniquely American, its influences and how and why it differs from or was influenced by the prevailing European styles. We will study in addition how the democratic principles of the new nation emphasized and gave birth to other new art forms such as popular American music and cinema. Finally, the role democracy played in shaping culture in America as opposed to the older European models of art patronage.

The course will begin in middle of the 20th century and investigate how the democratic and improvisational nature of the American musical arts (primarily jazz) directly influenced the Post-War painting of American Abstract-Expressionism and artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. We will also study how the methods of improvisation in jazz relate to the methods of the American Action Painters. A parallel investigation will be to study the degree to which the Chicago Blues influenced the Post-War Chicago painters like The Monster Roster and The Chicago Imagists.

The course will also examine earlier works by distinctly American artists such as Thomas Eakins and George Bellows in painting, and Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. Because of the range of the cultural innovations and technological developments in American society in the 20th century, we must examine cinema and music and their contribution to the total of American visual culture.

We will look at how engineering advances and commercial demands led to the first skyscrapers and the Chicago School of Architecture at the end of the 19th Century and how this was followed-up in New York in the 30's with the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. We then return to the Mid-West with the Second Chicago School of Architecture led by Mies van der Rohe.

We finally conclude by examining the state of the visual arts in America today and if the dominant influence of the art market and investment aesthetics may produce a new type of artist and gallery. We will end with the question as to whether contemporary American art still has the unique American vision it had for most of the 20th century or whether it has changed or diminished with globalization.