The Shift to Modernism: Modern European Art

As I've had little time to write because of my teaching schedule this year, I've decided to post clips from some of the online lectures I did for my students at Pace University and at SVA this past semester (Spring 2020).   Though the course below is about interdisciplinary writing and research on literature and the the arts, in the following lectures I focus on the "tradition of the new" in painting and the radical shift away from figurative or representational work to the more abstract or dehumanized art of the Twentieth Century.  I've appropriated Robert Hughes's "Shock of the New" phrase as the title of the PowerPoint presented here.  It begins with an impromptu discussion of poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the significance of collage to modern art in the first clip.  Other clips cover works by artists from Delacroix and Manet to Picasso and the Cubists; then from the Futurists, Orphists, and Duchamp to the Dadaists; then from the Surrealists to the Abstract Expressionists.  The connection to the Blackboard server broke off at different points during the lecture, which conveniently provided opportunities to make the following five video clips.