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     The Alps form a barrier across Europe that is difficult to cross. Languages and cultures develop differently in the North and South. It is not difficult, for instance, to distinguish 15th or 16th century art from the Netherlands from that painted in Italy. And yet the mountains were not impenetrable. Trade connections were formed, and along them flowed artists and their different ideas. The exchanges happened relatively easily in music, with a little more difficulty in the visual arts, and (for obvious reasons) the least in literature. But they did happen.

This course will look at the question of national identity in the arts, focusing primarily on the rise of nationalism throughout Europe in the 19th Century. This will be prefaced by a survey of the Middle Ages through the Baroque as a general introduction, and followed by a consideration of national identity in the modern era, when art, like much else, has become international.
 

The spirit of Romanticism sweeping across Europe carries with it a strong sense of what it is to live in a particular country. Poets and painters in England, poets and composers in Germany, extol a local landscape, a native way of being. In Germany as in Italy states come together to form an entire country. Paris stakes a claim as the artistic capital of Europe, despite wars that challenge its pre-eminence. By the end of the century, it will have become the undisputed leader in the visual arts, with strong traditions in music and literature also. Meanwhile, in Russia and America, writers are producing a powerful national literature, backed up in Russia especially by a national music. The major contribution of Italy is in opera, but that is a subject for a different course.
 

The Twentieth Century sees the rise of American art to a dominant position in the art world. In the first half of the century, American artists find their subjects in the farms and factories around them. But the same thing is happening in Germany and Russia, where painting become a form of national propaganda, extolling an ideal vision of the country that reflects the philosophy of its rulers.

Of perhaps greater significance is the rise of abstract painting, which begins in Europe in the first quarter of the century. Although there are almost as many movements as there are artists, what is important is the common excitement uniting their work rather than the nationalities dividing them. In the second quarter of the century, however, many of the leading artists flee to America, which is thus poised to become the world leader in the years after the War. Once more there is an international style—but many of its attributes are distinctly American. But does this mean anything in a world which is becoming increasingly Americanized in other respects, within an economy which is global rather than national?
 

I shall expand the class descriptions below as I work on them, especially those late in the course, and also add to the artists' bios and list of books. Links in GREEN will take you to the detailed page for the classes as they go online; the DARKER ones take you to the shorter entry below. As always, the FOLDED versions of this syllabus or handouts give you a PDF that you can print on two-sided-printers. rb.

	September 20
Tidemand & Gude: Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord (modified)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

1. Overview: history from a helicopter

The term "National Identity" begs many questions. What is a nation at any given place and time? What is identity, as applied to the arts: style, subject-matter, or something else? There is one area, however, in which these questions are both relevant and meaningful: the Romantic Nationalism of the later 19th century. We shall start there, and then jump forward on our helicopter tour to consider the arts of the United States, and how they alter the picture on both sides of the Atlantic.

In earlier centuries, the arts dance more unpredictably between regional traditions, the visions of some extraordinary genius, and the unifying forces of church, commerce, and court. We shall try to get an overview of the possibilities in the second hour, by calling at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which is both one of the great repositories of renaissance and baroque art from all of Europe and the world’s finest collection of Spanish art of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. This contrast is a theme of the course.

	September 27
Van der Weyden: Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (c.1440, detail)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

2. It's in the Details: news from the North

Contrary to the usual accounts, which look to Italy as the locus for the most interesting artistic developments in the 1400s, the work produced North of the Alps was often richer, more complex, and more technically sophisticated. Bruges, in fact, was the most important commercial center in Europe, and the art produced and sold there was greatly admired, including by Italian patrons. The comparative lack of attention to the arts of the North may be because they grew more seamlessly out of medieval practice, but declined earlier than in Italy. They were often collaborative, involving a variety of media. They were valued for different qualities. And many works were lost or destroyed in the Protestant Reformation.

Northern paintings of the 15th century typically have much more detail than their Italian counterparts: detail in the faces; detail in the setting; detail in the textures of hair, fur, and brocade; detail in the numerous objects which carry symbolic significance. Such detail in Northern painting was made possible by the use of oil paint, a technique not introduced into Italy until late in the century. We shall look at such artists as the Limbourg Brothers, Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, and in the next century Albrech Dürer and Pieter Bruegel. Plus a bunch of wonderful music by Franco-Flemish composers who were in demand all over Europe.

	October 4
Giorgione: Le tempesta, detail (c.1508)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

3. Sensation and Idea: four Italian cities

The image above, the central portion of Giorgione's La tempesta painted in Venice around 1508, sums up the theme of today's class. One characteristic of Italian Renaissance art, I would maintain, is the depiction of an idea or ideal, rather than mere sensation; in Florentine art, especially, the first often eclipses the second. But this picture comes from Venice, where the sensory world in all its aspects remained preeminent. We may no longer know what idea Giorgione aimed to express in his enigmatic little painting, but we can have no doubt about its uncanny atmosphere, sensual and disturbing at the same time.

Until well into the 19th century, Italy was a collection of city-states and dukedoms, interconnected, but each developing in its own direction. Historians of the Renaissance generally focus on Florence where, in the 15th century, the pursuit of classical Humanism led to significant changes in architecture and painting. We shall look at these, of course, but set against the context of what had been happening in Sienna and elsewhere in the 14th century and what would happen in Venice at the turn of the 16th. We shall end in 16th-century Rome, with the work of Raphael, whose art can be seen as a synthesis of Classical and Christian, ideal and sensory.

	October 11
Bernini: Saint Peter's, East window (1666)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

4. The Art of Transcendence: looking up, in, and out

I originally conceived this class with the title "Church and Court," on the understanding that the 17th century saw an international style in the Baroque—a similar language used throughout Europe for praising God and extolling a secular potentate. So in this sense, my concept of National Identity would break down. I now realize, however, that the international style relies on two formal developments, both beginning in Italy. One is a technique of illusionistic decoration that can make the walls and even the ceiling of a room seem to disappear. The other is a realist style beginning early in the century with Caravaggio, that reduces a scene to a moment of concentrated drama, without any idealization even in subjects from the Bible.

The first hour will be articulated by a number of works by Claudio Monteverdi who, though prefiguring the High Baroque, showed many of the concepts of space and dynamics that would be important in other arts also. In between, we shall look at the development of ceiling painting in Italian palaces and churches. The remainder of the class will be devoted to brief modules on four geniuses of the period: Bernini, Rubens, Velázquez, and Caravaggio, tracing the spread of baroque ideas beyond Italy and, in the case of Caravaggio, bearing some unexpected and charming fruit in the Netherlands.

	October 18
Rembrandt: The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (1662, detail)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

5. Portraits of Many Kinds: the Dutch Golden Age

Painting in 17th-century Holland is distinctly different from that even of its neighbor, Flanders. The largely Protestant nation developed an art that was bourgeois, secular, and concerned with civic values rather than those of court or church. You could argue that the dominant genre was the portrait, both of individuals and group portraits of the officers of some institution, such as you see in Rembrandt's Night Watch or Syndics (above). And extending the term to include any realistic depiction of the contemporary world, we get "portraits" of cities, the buildings in them, and the objects they contain. We get scenes from everyday life, often conceived as domestic moralities. And we get the portrait of Holland itself, its vast skies, and the spreading landscape of its land and water.

In addition to a wide range of examples as indicated above, the class will be anchored by the work of two geniuses who, though still a product of their place and time, stand nonetheless apart from it. In the first hour, we look at Rembrandt, more Protean than any of his contemporaries, more baroque in manner, and painting in a style more recognizable as his rather than that of his nation. The presiding genius of the second hour will be the meticulous Vermeer, producing very few paintings, yet in each one refusing to be tied to the expectations for the genre in lesser hands.

	October 25
Watteau: L'embarquement pour Cythère (1717)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

6. Relief from Sobriety: a conflict in French taste

Whether in the theatre of Racine and Corneille or the painting of Claude and Poussin, one of the salient characteristics of French 17th-century art is its serious-minded Classicism. It would resurface in later centuries with, say, the paintings of David or the drama of Cocteau. But this highly speculative class will explore its opposite, the equally-French delight in taking a break from academic sobriety through excursions into the world of color, make-believe, sensuality, and the exotic. One example is the painting above, Watteau’s image of amorous couples on a voyage to Cytherea, Venus' isle of love.

I make no claim that escapism is a defining aspect of French art, or even an especially important one. But in contrast to the highly-focused classes on the Italian Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age, it offers the opportunity to cut though a wide swath of French culture, over 200-year span. Versailles, for instance, is known for its vistas of dynastic splendor and divine right. But we shall look at the fanciful groves hidden in its fringes under the Sun King, or the make-believe farm where, a century later, Marie Antoinette and her ladies could play shepherdesses.

	November 1 November 4
Bellotto: Vienna from the Belvedere (c.1761)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

7. Crossroads of Europe: a visit to Vienna

We look at the situation dramatized by Peter Shaffer in his play and film Amadeus, when the young Mozart comes to Vienna in 1782, and produces a German opera, three Italian ones, and another German masterpiece before his early death. What does this tell us of the cultural climate under Emperor Joseph II, and of Vienna itself, less notable as the center of a national style than as the filter bed for influences from the South, the North, the West, and even from the East? What are the historical and geographical causes of this confluence of cultures, and how is it reflected in the non-musical arts?

Nevertheless, the second half of the class will be entirely devoted to opera, taking us from Italian tragedy to German comedy and beyond. While we shall end with excerpts from two masterpieces that premiered in Vienna—Mozart's Magic Flute and Beethoven's Fidelio—we will trace the journey there through less familiar pieces by Salieri, Gluck, Haydn, and others.

	November 8 November 1
Loutherbourg: Falls of the Rhine (1788)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

8. Banks of a Rocky Stream / From Mount and Meadow

"On the banks of a rocky stream" is the title of a poem by Wordsworth. I doubt he was thinking of anything as grandiose as the Falls of the Rhine near Schaffhausen painted by Philippe de Loutherbourg in 1788—more likely some mountain beck in his beloved Lake District. Yet I chose the painting for its aesthetic of the Sublime, which was so important to the later 18th century. And I wanted the German subject, because I intend to divide this class about the rediscovery of Nature almost equally between the poetic and pictorial English Romanticism of Wordsworth, Constable, and Turner, and the German variety of Goethe and Schubert that leans more toward music.

What I said above still applies, but since writing it I have refocused the class under a new title, "From Mount and Meadow." Taking the year 1800 as a pivot, we shall look at the ways in which art and indeed national identity in both countries became closely tied to the physical environment, whether on the large scale of mountain and myth, or the or the local one of familiar fields and woodlands. The first hour will start in Scotland then move to England. The second will be devoted to German poetry as immortalized in the songs of Franz Schubert.

	November 15
Kanstantin Makovsky: Peasant Dinner During Harvesting	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

9. Life on the Fringe: Romantic Nationalism

As I said in the first class, the "Romantic Nationalism" of the mid-19th century takes two complementary forms: the unification of smaller states to form the nations of Germany and Italy, and the emergence of national groups on the edges of the old Europe to assert their own cultural identity. This class will focus on the second of these, beginning with two countries under occupation by foreign powers: Poland and Finland. The situations are different, however. In Poland, the writer Adam Mickiewicz and painter Jan Matejko visited historical subjects to hold the old Poland up as inspiration for a future revival. In Finland, working virtually alone, the folklorist Elias Lönnrot compiled old legends into a national epic, the Kalevala, which served in turn as inspiration for artists like Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the composer Jean Sibelius.

Though it was a major power and master of its own borders, Russia in 1800 had virtually no independent artistic tradition. The arts had first been suppressed by the Orthdox Church and then replaced by the French culture favored by Catherine the Great. It was up to Alexander Pushkin, an aristocrat whose first language was French, to restore the Russian language as a vehicle for literature. Whether historical, folkloric, or contemporary, his poems and plays inspired composers like Modest Mussorgsky, Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Nicolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and were painted by Ilya Repin and others.

	November 29
Benton: Spring on the Missouri (1945)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

10. What's American about American Art?

The Thomas Hart Benton painting above is a very late example of American Regionalism, which turned to rural life from different parts of America's heartland. In many ways, it is a continuation of the Hudson River paintings of Thomas Cole and depictions of the West by Alfred Bierstadt that we discussed in our first session. The first hour of this class will expand a little on those themes, in literature and music as well as art, looking at ways in which artists of all types sought a specific American voice in the land itself.

In the second hour, I hope to turn to the urban environment, starting with depictions of city life by the Ashcan School in the early 1900s, and continuing to the first manifestations of Modernism.

	December 6
Details by Weber, Delaunay, and Kandinsky (1913–16)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

11. A Geography of Modernism

The strips of paintings shown above are respectively by Max Weber (1916), Robert Delaunay (1914), and Wassily Kandinsky (1913), all abstract or semi-abstract paintings painted at a similar time, and all owing something to Cubism. Apart from the Eiffel Tower in the Delaunay (which I chose to include), is there anything to make one specifically American, the other French, or the third Russian or German? We talk about "German Expressionism" in a similar period, just as we talked about "French Impressionism" a generation earlier, but the simple terms "Expressionism" and "Impressionism" apply anywhere, and nobody talks of, say, "French Cubism." It is a paradox that so many of the movements of Modernism, while starting out with specific geographical associations, soon become international forces tying their practitioners more closely to one another than to the country in which they happen to live.

Nonetheless, the class has developed with a more precise focus on two periods in which it is indeed possible to talk of a national identity. The first hour will thus be devoted to German arts in the first four decades of the 20th century, and the persistent strain of emotive exaggeration which runs through them. The second hour will consider the two postwar movements that established New York as the world capital of art: Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

	December 13
Archibald Mobley: Blues (1929)	HANDOUT     FOLDED     RESOURCES

12. Blue Notes, Black Ink

I have changed my plans for this final offering. In preparing the two classes dealing with American art, I realized I left a yawning gap by not discussing minority identities within the American whole. So, although I come to it as a rank outsider, I would like to look at the literature, music, and art produced by African Americans, beginning with the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties.

In the second hour of the class, we shall take a wider and more modern perspective, by sampling the work of Black artists in other countries and different media, especially those who explore the legacy of colonialism and/or project the legacy of Africa into a global context. rb.

 
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