Rubens and Rauschenberg: Racing and Re/visioning Genealogies of Modern Art

AH4123.01
Course System Home Terms Spring 2021 Rubens and Rauschenberg: Racing and Re/visioning Genealogies of Modern Art

Course Description

Summary

The seventeenth-century Flemish painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens anchors a course proposing the residual baroqueness in diverse strains of high modernism. Our transdisciplinary project crosses entrenched nationalistic and chronological borders between modern and early modern art and artists including Bacon, Guston, Manet, Newman, Picasso, Reinhardt, and Titian in addition to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), himself a more conceptually various and possibly more prolific artist than even Rubens (1577-1640) to whom some 3,000 paintings and drawings have been attributed. Both international art stars took on current, highly traumatic events, war and diplomacy, as well as cultural notions of race and gender. Moreover, in the most literal sense, there is a lot of Rubens in Rauschenberg! In this course we will seek to determine how subsequent and peer artists were influenced and/or distanced, in often unacknowledged ways, by individual works of and critical responses to, Rubens and Rauschenberg.

Prerequisites

Toward a Rigorous Art History; Painterly Painting OR permission of instructor

Please contact the faculty member : vanessalyon@bennington.edu

Instructor

  • Vanessa Lyon

Day and Time

Academic Term

Spring 2021

Area of Study

Credits

4

Course Level

4000

Maximum Enrollment

14