Art History - Hybrid Course

During the Online Art History course, you will cover the first half of the 20^th century. Our focus is on the intense ideological struggles between the countries of Europe and the wider world, in which people were swept up in two World Wars and their aftermaths: the Russian Revolution – or preliminaries, the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War. Modernism was at its height, and we explore the way in which contemporary events and ideologies affected the arts.

You will examine the way in which Stanley Spencer responded to his experience of the First World War and how it was commemorated by the British state and the way in which Kathe Kollwitz dealt with the defeat of her country. You will also explore the extraordinary images produced by Otto Dix and George Grosz of Weimar Germany in the 1920s and how John Heartfield and Felix Nussbaum responded to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

Special attention is given to how Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo used their art to promote the Mexican Revolution and Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali fought artistically on different sides during the Spanish Civil War. This course also looks at the story of Soviet Art and Architecture and how various artists in the USA responded to it with the development of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1940s.