This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
The development of British and American art reveals patterns of affinity, divergence and mutual interplay, against a backdrop of the wider of an international Modernism centred to a large degree on Paris. This module examines such themes as the following: the currency and influence of realist, abstract, and surrealist aesthetics in the first decades of the 20th century(focussing on figures such as Walter Sickert, Edward Hopper, Ben Nicholson, Stuart Davis, Henry Moore); the impact of the Second World War (and of Picasso’s Guernica as an exemplary artistic response to conditions of war); the emergence after the war of painterly abstraction (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Peter Lanyon), alongside new approaches to expressive figuration (Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon); the development of constructed sculpture (David Smith, Anthony Caro) and ‘post-painterly’ abstraction (Frank Stella, Bridget Riley) on either side of 1960; parallel manifestations of Pop, Minimalist, Conceptual and Land Art (Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Richard Long, Robert Smithson); attitudes to photography as an artistic and documentary medium (Walker Evans, Bill Brandt, Diane Arbus).
This module requires 300 study hours in total. Contact hours will include a two-hour lecture and a two-hour seminar session each week. The remaining hours will be dedicated to private study, and the development of subject-specific and key skills through carrying out the learning tasks.
100% coursework: 1500-word short essay (30%), 3000-word long essay (50%), Seminar presentation (10%), Study journal (10%).
- Anfam, David Abstract Expressionism. London: Thames & Hudson, 1990.
- Art History. Special Issue: Anglo-American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USA David Peters Corbett and Sarah Monks (eds), Volume 34, Issue 4, September 2011.
- Gooding, Mel Abstract Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2001.
- Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood (eds.) Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
- Livingstone, Marco Pop Art: A Continuing History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
As a consequence of completing this module, students will have:
1. Acquired an understanding of the key principal figures, histories and debates relating to the development of British and American Modernism;
2. Gained detailed knowledge understanding of methodological approaches to the interpretation of modern non-figurative and representational art;
3. Developed an appropriate vocabulary for describing and addressing such works which can be applied to specialised and non specialised audiences;
4. Acquired a systematic understanding of the key principal figures, histories and debates relating to the development of British and American Modernism;
5. Gained detailed knowledge and in depth understanding of methodological approaches to the interpretation of modern non-figurative and representational art;
6. Developed an appropriate vocabulary for describing and addressing such works which can be applied to specialised and non specialised audiences;
7. Acquired an in-depth and systematic understanding of the cultural and theoretical presuppositions and implications of the major approaches to modernism employed by artists, critics, theorists and (other) audiences in the two centres.
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