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Course Description

Summary

The seventeenth-century Flemish painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens is at the heart of a course that proposes the intrinsic baroqueness of 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, Bearden, and Titian in addition to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), himself a more conceptually various and possibly more prolific artist even than Rubens (1577-1640) to whom some 3,000 paintings and drawings have been attributed. Both international art stars took on highly traumatic current 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.