Art History (ARTH)

ARTH*1510  Art Historical Studies I  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course considers the visual arts in the Western tradition from prehistory through the Middle Ages. Emphasis will be placed on historical and critical analysis of key monuments and on the prerequisite technologies, as well as on various ways of looking at the visual past and present.
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*1520  Art Historical Studies II  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
A consideration of the visual arts in the Western tradition. Emphasis will be placed on historical and critical analysis of key monuments and on the prerequisite technologies, as well as on various ways of looking at the visual past and present. Focus will be on the visual arts from the Renaissance to today.
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2050  Modern Latin American Art  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course is an introduction to the study of visual culture and theory from South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean featuring art from the 20th century to the present.
Offering(s): Offered in odd-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2060  Indigenous Arts in the Americas  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course offers an introduction to the arts and cultures of Indigenous peoples of North, South and Central America ("Turtle Island"). It will survey First Nations, Metis, and Inuit artworks, with an emphasis on contemporary art from 1980 to the present day. It will take into account recent scholarship on the history of colonization, land claims, sovereignty and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2070  Art of the USA  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
In art, the 20th century has been referred to as "The American Century." Artists in the USA have a tradition of creating new visual languages, of using new ideas and technologies, and of representing the vanguard. Where did these ideas originate, and how has the USA determined our notions of what art is? This survey course focuses on modern American artists, on the evolution and growth of modern visual culture, and on how technologies and societies impact on artistic taste.
Prerequisite(s): 1 of 2.00 credits,ARTH*1510, ARTH*1520  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2120  Introduction to Museology  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
The course will examine the history of collections, traditions of cultural representation and display, constructions of authenticity, trade and exchange.
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2150  Art and Archaeology of Greece  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course is a survey of Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology, with stress on form and function plus stylistic trends and aesthetic values. The course will illuminate the cultural, social, and political life in Ancient Greece. (Also listed as CLAS*2150).
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Equate(s): CLAS*2150  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2220  The Visual Arts Today  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course is an introduction to contemporary visual culture, its current controversies and its historical roots. The avant-garde movements of the modern period and the impact of new technologies and media will be examined within a rich historical context. Topics will include international exhibitions, selling art, art and popular culture, censorship, and the relation between words and images.
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Restriction(s): ARTH*1220. This is a Priority Access Course. Enrolment may be restricted to particular programs or specializations. See department for more information.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2280  Modern Architecture  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course is an investigation of architectural theory and practice within the social and spatial complexities of national and international life.
Offering(s): Offered in odd-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2290  History of Photographic Media  Summer Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course is an introduction to the history of photography through to its application in contemporary visual arts.
Offering(s): Offered through Distance Education format only.  
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2480  Introduction to Art Theory and Criticism  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course provides an overview of some of the most significant methodological approaches and critical practices used by art historians to write about visual culture. Traditional methods of art historical analysis include connoisseurship, iconography, and formalism. With these we will be exploring newer interpretative models and multidisciplinary approaches such as structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory as well as political theories such as feminism and socio-cultural theory.
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Restriction(s): This is a Priority Access Course. Enrolment may be restricted to particular programs or specializations. See department for more information.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2490  History of Canadian Art  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course provides an overview of the visual arts in Canada from the earliest times to the present, with emphasis on the diverse contributions made by the First Nations, by French and British colonization, and by subsequent settlers from a great variety of different cultural origins.
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2540  Medieval Art  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course considers visual arts during a period when the Christian church built a new synthesis out of the legacies of the late Roman Empire and its "barbarian invaders".
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2550  The Italian Renaissance  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course will investigate the art, architecture, and visual and material culture of Renaissance Italy in its political, social, religious, intellectual and theoretical contexts. Topics can include artistic training and practice; methods, materials and techniques of art-making; science and perspective; patronage; collectors and collecting; public monuments and domestic art; Renaissance theory; humanism; artistic biography; and other thematic contexts.
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2580  Late Modern Art: 1900-1950  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This is a study of the historical avant-gardes in the social and political contexts of the period 1900-1950.
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2600  Early Modern Art  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course is a study of visual culture as it was transformed by the revolutions - industrial, political, and colonial - of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*2950  Baroque Art  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
The visual arts in an age of religious crisis and the growth of great trading empires will be examined.
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 2.00 credits or (ARTH*1510 or ARTH*1520)  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3010  Contemporary Canadian Art  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
The wide range of contemporary Canadian visual arts, from painting to new technological media, from 'high' culture to punk, will be examined in the context of specifically Canadian social and historical conditions during the modern and post-modern periods.
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3060  Public Art  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course explores the ideas, designs and processes of artworks and projects conceptualized to be situated or staged in public spaces. The objective of this course is to identify and investigate the contexts surrounding selected works of public art, which may include media works, sculpture, and landscape installation, from a global perspective.
Offering(s): Offered in odd-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3150  Space: Roman Art and Urbanism  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
Roman art and urbanism from the Early Republic to the end of the imperial period. The course will survey the developments of Roman art with an emphasis in architecture, sculpture and painting. It will illuminate the development of the urban space in the context of cultural, social and political life. (Also listed as CLAS*3150).
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Equate(s): CLAS*3150  
Restriction(s): ARTH*3530, ARTH*4500  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3200  Colour: Practice and Meaning in Western Art  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course explores the role colour has played in the work of selected artists and periods.
Offering(s): Offered in odd-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3210  Critical Issues in Art History  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course will provide an in-depth examination of the critical issues driving contemporary art. Though the specific topic will vary, the goal of this course is to establish a facility with the fundamental terms by which to analyze the cultural, economic, technological and visual conditions that shape the artworks of our time.
Offering(s): Offered in odd-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History, including ARTH*2480.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3220  Nationalism and Identity in Art  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course considers issues of identity formation and representation as they intersect with the agendas and interests of the nation state. The course looks at questions of power and exclusion, theories of representation and notions of centre/periphery, cultural hybridity and border-crossing in the age of globalization. It will examine the representation of identity in cultural institutions (including museums, and international art events) in cultural policy, and in cultural forms (fine art and popular culture, journals and periodicals).
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3320  Lives: Aspects of Western Art  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course examines how the theory and practice of art history has often been informed by biography and other constructions of stereotypes and social practices concerning the 'Artist', the artist's audiences, and the various contexts that inform artists' lives, real and imagined.
Offering(s): Offered in odd-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3330  Display: Visual Culture in Western Europe  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course examines the role of images in sacred and secular contexts: manuscripts, reliquaries, architectural sculpture, tapestries, and liturgical display in Romanesque and Gothic Europe.
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3340  Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course considers selected topics in the Renaissance and/or Baroque period(s), with emphasis on the political, social, economic, gendered, and aesthetic meanings of works of art.
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3520  Idea: Art Since 1950  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course provides an analysis of the visual arts of painting, sculpture, photographic media and non-traditional media World War II to the present. Selected artists of North America and Western Europe will be considered, as well as the institutions of the art world.
Offering(s): Offered in odd-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3600  Topics in the Long Eighteenth Century  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course examines themes and issues in European art and visual culture of the long eighteenth century (1680s-1830s) through case-studies in select national, regional and/or global contexts that engage with artists' careers, institutions related to artistic practice, and relevant theoretical and critical discourses.
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Restriction(s): ARTH*3310  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3620  Museum Studies  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This seminar course will be offered in conjunction with the staff and facilities of the Gallery of Guelph and will deal with historical matters relating to the role of the art museum in western life and the critical day-to-day management of a contemporary one. Students will participate, when possible, in the preparation of a current or forthcoming exhibition in the Gallery.
Prerequisite(s): 7.50 credits or 1.50 credits in Art History.  
Restriction(s): ARTH*4620  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*3780  Gender and Art  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course considers how the practice and reception of the visual arts intersect with constructs of gender in contemporary and historical contexts.
Offering(s): Offered in even-numbered years.  
Prerequisite(s): 10.00 credits including 2.00 credits in Art History.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*4310  Topics in Art and Visual Culture I  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [1.00]  
This seminar course is designed to explore one or more issues in Art and Visual Culture depending on the expertise of the instructor. Students should consult the department for specific offerings.
Prerequisite(s): 10.00 credits including 1.00 credits in Art History at the 3000 level.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*4320  Topics in Art and Visual Culture II  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [1.00]  
This seminar course is designed to explore one or more issues in Art and Visual Culture depending on the expertise of the instructor. Students should consult the department for specific offerings.
Prerequisite(s): 10.00 credits including 1.00 credits in Art History at the 3000 level.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*4330  Topics in Art and Visual Culture III  Winter Only  (LEC: 3)  [1.00]  
This seminar course is designed to explore one or more issues in Art and Visual Culture depending on the expertise of the instructor. Students should consult the department for specific offerings.
Prerequisite(s): 10.00 credits including 1.00 credits in Art History at the 3000 level.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*4340  Topics in Art and Visual Culture IV  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [1.00]  
This seminar course is designed to explore one or more issues in Art and Visual Culture depending on the expertise of the instructor. Students should consult the department for specific offerings.
Prerequisite(s): 10.00 credits including 1.00 credits in Art History at the 3000 level.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*4350  Topics in Art and Visual Culture V  Fall Only  (LEC: 3)  [1.00]  
This seminar course designed to explore one or more issues in Art and Visual Culture depending on the expertise of the instructor. Students should consult the department for specific offerings.
Prerequisite(s): 10.00 credits including 1.00 credits in Art History at the 3000 level.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*4600  Individual Study - Art History  Summer, Fall, and Winter  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
Each student establishes, in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course, the content of this special study within the area of expertise of that instructor. Students should plan their project and submit their proposal to the Director of the School (or designate) by the last day of classes in the semester prior to the one which they plan to enroll in ARTH*4600.
Prerequisite(s): 14.00 credits, including 6 credits in Art History.  
Restriction(s): Instructor consent required.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph  
ARTH*4800  Experiential Learning  Fall and Winter  (LEC: 3)  [0.50]  
This course provides an opportunity for independent study based on Art History related voluntary or paid experience. Evaluation will be based on the student's performance on related work assignments at the host institution as well as any assignments determined by the relevant instructor. Written proposals/rationales, signed by the appropriate instructor, must be submitted to the Director of the School for approval by the last day of course selection in the Fall (for Winter) or Winter (for the following Fall semester).
Prerequisite(s): A minimum of 14.00 credits including 2.50 credits in Art History.  
Restriction(s): Registration is limited to students registered in BA.ARTH specializations with a minimum cumulative average of 70% in all Art History course attempts. Instructor consent required.  
Department(s): School of Fine Art and Music  
Location(s): Guelph