Art In The Age Of Colonialism

AY2015/2016 Semester 1

This course explores European visual culture created in response to contact and interaction with non-Western cultures from the fifteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Various European representations of the exotic Orient (Near and Far East) will be examined. The influence of European Imperialism upon the fine arts will be analysed in relation to eighteenth-century colonial landscape painting, the Romantic Orientalism of Eugene Delacroix, the work of Jean-Auguste Dominque Ingres and Jean-Leon Gerome, the popularization of the East in terms of Chinoiserie and Japonisme, primitivism in the work of Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, and the odalisques of Matisse. The course will also look at the rise of ethnography and the ethnographic museum, and the role of photography and international exhibitions. Students are reminded that ADM rules on attendance and plagiarism are in operation within all ADM courses as laid out in the ADM Student handbook http://www.adm.ntu.edu.sg/CurrentADM/Documents/ADMStudentHandbook2010-2011.pdf.