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Art entails and provokes thinking, but how do we as art historians establish relationships between particular works or groups of works and specific ideas, forms of cognition, and knowledge? Scholars have sought to connect art with recondite philosophy (e.g. American landscape painting and Transcendentalism, Abstract Expressionism and Existentialism), misguided beliefs (eugenic theory and design, or “ideologies” of various kinds), and commonplace mental practices (“cognitive styles”). This seminar will examine and compare such forms of interpretation by looking at case studies drawn mostly from classic and recent scholarship on American art. Our interests will be both methodological (what kinds of connections between art and thinking are possible? which styles of
interpretation draw the connections most effectively?) and historical (how have art in the U.S. and its histories engaged ideas?).
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