ARTH 365 - Studies in 17th and 18th Century Art and Architecture: Art and Decoration in France and Britain (1760—1804): Enlightenment and Expansionism

• W - 18:00-20:15
• EV-1.605
• INSTRUCTOR: DR. LAURIE MILNER

This lecture and discussion course explores French and British art and decorative art in the long eighteenth-century (1760-1804), considering its production. appearance and use in relation to regimes of knowledge and embodied experience. It was during this period of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on empiricism, reason and individual freedom, that art academies and public exhibitions emerged, art canons were codified, public debates about what constituted virtue in art emerged, and some artists and critics, at odds with the state and its institutions, began to defy their authority. These developments unfolded unevenly in England and France in the context of differently configured public spheres and cultural traditions. At the same time, European expansionism exposed artists and the elite to foreign cultures and exotic goods, creating new tastes for decorative objects, apparel, drugs, spices and stimulants. The consumption of these imports resulted in new spaces of interaction, new social practices, new addictions, as well as competing discourses about the effects of foreign goods and behaviours on the individual and the nation. In this course, we will examine art, decorative art and the careers of artists within these overlapping and sometimes irreconcilable fields of knowledge and sensory experience.