Enfilade

With a new academic year upon us, this year’s syllabi sampling is generously provided by Laura Auricchio, of Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Today’s syllabus comes from a graduate seminar offered four years ago in conjunction with Parsons’s MA program in the History of Decorative Arts (thus it’s heavy on visual and material culture and light on painting and sculpture). It’s been reformatted slightly, but the original is available here as a PDF document. We’ll have one more tomorrow. Thanks, Laura!

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Visualizing Revolution: America and France
Professor Laura Auricchio

How did works of visual and material culture help to shape, reflect, and commemorate the revolutions that roiled France and the United States at the end of the eighteenth century? Drawing on objects housed at the Cooper-Hewitt, and timed to coincide with a New-York Historical Society exhibition focusing on America’s 1824-5 celebrations of the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution, this course will examine stylistic and iconographic influences that crossed the Atlantic, and ask how and why the different contexts of the French and American revolution yielded different roles for the visual arts. Issues to be addressed will include: Neoclassicism as a “republican” style; the politics of dress and decoration; public festivals and monuments; and nineteenth-century visions of eighteenth-century events. This course will require students to integrate primary-source research with historical and theoretical readings, and is recommended only for students who have already taken Proseminar. (more…)