This course will survey the art produced and exhibited in the United States between 1865 and 1968.  This period encompasses the history of modern art in the U.S., from its first appearances, to its rise to prominence and institutionalization, to its replacement by postmodernism.  While tracking this history, the course will examine this modern art's relation to historical processes of modernization (industrialization, the development of transportation and communications, the spread of corporate organization in business, urbanization, technological development, the rise of mass media and mass markets, etc.) and to the economic polarization, social fragmentation, political conflict, and myriad cultural changes these developments entailed. In these circumstances, art is drawn simultaneously toward truth and fraud, realism and artifice, science and spirituality, commodification and ephemerality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, individualism and collectivity, the past and the future, professionalization and popularity, celebrating modern life and criticizing it.  Case studies will include painting, sculpture, photography, magazine illustration, early cinema, happenings, and new media. Among the artists to be discussed are Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary
Cassatt, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Alfred Stieglitz, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd.

Classes will combine lecture and discussion.  There will be two research papers
and two exams.