ART 295-03 - Special Topic: Gender, Race and Fashion in Western Portraiture, 1550-1950

4 credits (Fall)

Explores race, gender, and fashionable dress as co-constitutive forces in portraiture from 1500 to 1950. We will investigate self-portraiture, group portraiture, historiated portraiture, and allegorical personification. If idealized white, female beauty is one of the portraiture’s longstanding fetishes, how do notions of sexual difference, physiognomy, and skin-color, among other variables, inflect representation? Subjects range from Tudor England, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Velaquez to Qing, China, Viceregal Mexico, ninteenth century Paris, and post-war New York.

Prerequisite: ART 103.
Instructor: Lyon