Media History 1: Dead Painters 1945 to 1985 Post/Modern Issues In 1839, according to legend, Parisian painter Paul Delaroche first saw a Daguerreotype. He is said to have exclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" Painting has since died-or been declared dead-many times. Is painting a zombie? A phoenix? Surveying European and American painting in the period from 1945 to 1985, this course will consider the following questions: How do we understand this important oscillation in the history of modern and postmodern art? How did painting respond, not only to the challenges of photography, film, and mass-market print culture, but to the rise of global commodity culture, the trauma of world war and genocide, struggles for civil rights, and the emergence of twentieth-century feminism? How has painting coped with art movements such as Minimalism and Conceptualism, by which it was aggressively marginalized? Examining primary and secondary source-texts, this reading-intensive, discussion-based class will ground students in key aspects of modernist and postmodernist thinking, and prepare them for Media History 2: Living Painters, or Contemporary Issues in Painting, 1985-2013.

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