Spring 2026 Course Search

The seventeenth-century Flemish painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens is at the heart of a course that proposes the intrinsic baroqueness of diverse strains of high modernism. Our transdisciplinary project crosses entrenched nationalistic and chronological borders between modern and early modern art and artists including Bacon, Guston, Manet, Newman, Picasso, Bearden, and Titian in addition to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), himself a more conceptually various and possibly more prolific artist even than Rubens (1577-1640) to whom some 3,000 paintings and drawings have been attributed.

This course examines the visual representation and performance of race, gender, and fashionable dress from roughly 1504 to 1954. For elite early modern sitters, portraits were a valued means of constructing a public image, securing a spouse, memorializing the dead, and emphasizing political and dynastic relationships.