ART 295-01 - Special Topic: Gender, Race and Fashion in Western Portraiture

4 credits (Fall)

This course 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 portraiture’s tropes, 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 Velazquez to Qing, China, Viceregal Mexico, nineteenth-century Paris, and post-war New York.

Prerequisite: ART 103.
Instructor: Lyon