ARTH 66 — Visions of War: From Uccello to Picasso
Quarter: Winter
Instructor(s): Altair Brandon-Salmon
Date(s): Jan 4—Mar 8
Class Recording Available: Yes
Class Meeting Day: Mondays
Class Meeting Time: 5:30—7:00 pm (PT)
Please Note: No class on January 18 and February 15
Tuition: $455
Refund Deadline: Jan 6
Unit(s): 1
Status: Registration opens Nov 30 8:30 am (PT)
Quarter: Winter
Day: Mondays
Duration: 8 weeks
Time: 5:30—7:00 pm (PT)
Date(s): Jan 4—Mar 8
Unit(s): 1
Tuition: $455
Refund Deadline: Jan 6
Instructor(s): Altair Brandon-Salmon
Recording Available: Yes
Status: Registration opens Nov 30 8:30 am (PT)
Please Note: No class on January 18 and February 15
For five centuries, war has pushed artists toward extraordinary invention, yielding some of Western art's most riveting images. Uccello turned Renaissance rivalries into an experiment in perspective and geometric order in The Battle of San Romano. Goya reinvented the imagery of Napoleon's campaigns in The Disasters of War, trading heroic battle scenes for stark, intimate images of suffering. Picasso transformed the bombing of a Basque town into Guernica, using distortion and fragmentation to capture the violence of modern warfare. Lee Miller, a surrealist photographer embedded with Allied forces during World War II, brought that same eye for the uncanny to the devastation and liberation of wartime Europe. We'll place their work and more alongside the writings of Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz, three strikingly different attempts to understand war's place in human life. And we'll ask what art itself contributes to that understanding.
ALTAIR BRANDON-SALMON
COLLEGE Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education, Stanford
Altair Brandon-Salmon is an art historian and author of the forthcoming book Rubble: Art, the Blitz and London in Ruins. He received a PhD in art history from Stanford, and his scholarship has appeared in Art History, Art Journal, and the Oxford Art Journal. He has also written for America, Commonweal, Literary Review, and Public Seminar. He is a guest curator at Projects Twenty Two in Cornwall and has held curatorial roles at the Sheldonian Theatre and Campion Hall, Oxford. Textbooks for this course:
There are no required textbooks; however, some fee-based online readings may be assigned.