Taking a diverse, global view of art making from the Ancient to the Modern world, ARHT1001 will introduce students to key philosophical and methodological approaches in the field of Art History. As our experiences are increasingly mediated through a variety of visual platforms, this course will help students develop critical perspectives on visual communication. The development of professional skill sets will be a key focus. As such, the course serves as an essential introduction to Art History for those considering a career in the arts, education, or the museum and design sectors.

Art shapes our cities, streets, galleries, phones and minds. It is now made with every conceivable material, and sometimes none at all. It shocks, challenges, soothes, entertains, engrosses and overwhelms us. This unit charts the history of Modern and Contemporary Art across the world, as it is shaped by and shapes society, politics and environment. It shows current concerns in art , with materials, landscape, self-image, politics, and the body are grounded in a century of global experiment

This unit explores Romantic Art in Europe from 1780-1830, emphasizing the relationship of this art with wider social, cultural, philosophical and literary currents. We explore the most compelling Romantic art and architecture, including works by Caspar David Friedrich, Blake, Turner, and Delacroix.

At the great courts of the seventeenth century, artists painted, sculpted and built vast programs of works to completely overwhelm the senses. Grand pavilions and gardens, sumptuous clothes and décor, and extravagant spectacles drew audiences into a world shaped by artifice and etiquette. This course will consider why the artist was an essential ally for those with absolutist ambitions.

This unit studies the interplay between high art and popular culture in America from the 1950s onwards. Pop Art, Minimalism and Performance formed alongside emerging youth cultures of political protest, drugs and rock music. We examine the interactions of high art, youth culture and mass media.

The Unit of Study will explore a range of alternative approaches to some of the most famous works of art in the Western tradition, including works by Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. Topics to be investigated include: problems of definition in High Renaissance and Mannerist art; Rome under Julius II and the creation of an imperial capital; Venetian visual poesie; art and dynastic display in Medicean Florence; civic ritual and public space; eroticism and mythology at princely courts; portraiture and gender.

This unit treats French Art in terms of the cultural structures that allowed academic art, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to emerge. Mainstream art is studied alongside emerging avant-gardes. Other topics include nationalism, exoticism, and peripheral versus metropolitan modernism.

What is contemporary art? Today we encounter art on our phones, in the street, at festivals, in the natural environment as well as in galleries. We explore art's expanded field from a global perspective. Themes include the art of de-colonisation, globalization, art and environment, feminism and queer art, traditional and new media, art as spectacle, art curating, aesthetic value, art and the everyday. We spend time at the Biennale of Sydney, explore university collections and city galleries, adding our voices to current art debate.

This unit examines Australian art, cinema and popular imagery from 1880-1940, situating them within the global history of modernism and modernity. Themes include the landscape tradition, national identity, war, gender, and indigenous issues, with special focus on the Australian film industry.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait art is the major Australian movement of the last 50 years. Surveying its development from Papunya Tula to the present, the unit focuses on critical issues like appropriation and copyright, art and native title, women artists, the market and curatorial practices.

This unit explores contemporary art from across Asia since World War II. The unit places artistic developments, curatorial practice, and artworks within the context of rapid geo-political and socio-cultural change, particularly exploring the effects of nationalism and globalisation.

This unit explores the art, architecture and material culture of dynastic China (ca. 3000 BCE-1900), contextualizing works within the region's diverse social, political and cultural histories. The unit foregrounds focused interpretation of individual works through visual and material analysis.

Examining cinema as a manifestation of modernity, this unit of study contextualizes early film as art, commodity, industry, institution and mass production of the senses. It introduces students to the study of the history and aesthetics of silent cinema, including major genres such as melodrama and slapstick, and the impacts of the transition to sound.

1. A historical study of independent cinema, or New Wave movements in post-World War II Europe, including Italian Neo- Realism, the French New Wave and New German Cinema among others. 2. The study of Gilles Deleuze's thesis about these cinematic movements and concepts. 3. A study of the idea of Epic cinema cross-culturally so as to understand how memory is erased, sustained and created anew by film.

Nations are like movies: they are the result of complex imaginings. To what extent have nations been imagined through movies, and have movies been affected by national imaginings? This unit of study takes Hollywood as a starting point to examine the evolving relation of national cinemas and film genres. A national case study - for instance, Australian cinema - will be studied to identify and analyse some of the complexities of the relation of film genres and national audiences.

This unit examines art and the culture of travel from a post-colonial perspective. The work of European Orientalists will be analysed alongside work by North African, Persian and Ottoman artists and in conjunction with photography, international exhibitions, travel literature and film

This unit offers an introduction to the study of dress through the discussion of major theories and methodologies that inform current scholarship in the field. With a focus on designers, wearers, and cultural practices of dressing the body, the unit will question how dress communicates as a form of visual expression.

Working in partnership with leading museums, this unit introduces students to object-based learning, and the study of artworks in situ. Driven by hands-on learning experiences, students will develop a core set of analytical and professional skills through the close examination of artworks as material and physical objects.

What is the cinematic object of the twenty-first century? Where do we locate the essence of a medium that has undergone such a radical transformation? This course examines the intersection of film, digital cinema, and new media experiences such as YouTube, machinima and mobile cinema. Where many have spoken of the death of cinema in a digital era, we will conceptualise the complexity of cinema's evolution from its earliest celluloid incarnation to the technologies of digital simulation.

This unit investigates art produced in Italy during the 14th century for a range of patrons, from bankers and merchants to kings, princes, city states and new religious orders like the Franciscans. Traditional narratives are critiqued and alternative interpretations encouraged.

This unit explores the development of art and architecture in early modern France, from court to Revolution. We investigate how this art has been understood in critical accounts, including debates about France's international standing and new social and cultural pressures.

This unit critically analyses the role of the visual arts in mediating the experience of urbanism in 19th-century Britain and its function across a global Empire. We undertake an in-depth study of the rich holdings of this art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This unit focuses on critical and theoretical issues affecting Indigenous art practice today. The parameters of cross-cultural understanding will be addressed. Key ideas derived from Indigenous cultures, language and identity will be debated.

Through analysis of both high-art and low-art imagery, this unit will demonstrate the cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical nature of Australian visual culture from first European contact, arguing against its current relegation to the margins of art history.

This unit investigates key debates about the visual culture of East Asia in the early modern and modern eras. The impact of profound political and social changes on cultural identity will be explored in depth. We also consider the role of art in addressing evolving identities and increasing globalisation in the region.

This unit will draw on a wide range of photographic material, including university and museum collections, to examine the pivotal role of photography in recording and shaping our image-culture across diverse global contexts. The unit will engage with key debates to examine the social, cultural, theoretical, historical and art practice contexts of the photograph as an image and as an object. Key theories from Walter Benjamin to Hito Steyerl will be used to interrogate themes of memory, documentary and the real, witnessing, conflict, gender and sexuality, decolonisation, and the digital.

This unit investigates issues of gender and sexuality in art, visual culture and art history in modern and contemporary Asia from the 19th century to the present. Students will explore women- and/or queer-centred histories of the production and reception of art, and the rise of feminist and queer art and art history in parts of Asia.

This Senior Fieldwork unit takes students out of the classrooms and into major world cities to explore not only the history of architecture and public space but also the galleries, collections and artworks housed in the city. It offers a vital opportunity for students to learn with and from artworks, buildings, spaces and monuments in situ.

Interdisciplinarity is a key skill in fostering agility in life and work. This unit provides learning experiences that build students' skills, knowledge and understanding of the application of their disciplinary background to interdisciplinary contexts. In this unit, students will work in teams and develop interdisciplinarity skills through problem-based learning projects responding to 'real world problems'.

This unit concentrates on key developments in the history of art history as a discipline. The seminar centres on selected polemical texts and disputes in the discipline, to demonstrate that much of what all art historians do is contested and problematic. From the question of what we should study to the always vexed question of 'how' we should study it, the aim of this unit is to give you a sense of both the history and the problematic of the discipline in which you will be engaged whether you intend careers as scholars, researchers, curators, or art writers.

This unit extends and tests students' art historical knowledge and analytic skills through in situ encounters with a variety of art objects and images, histories and traditions. These encounters are set against selected polemical texts and disputes in the discipline. Our weekly engagements range from the museum's modernist aesthetic hang, media specific exhibitions, de-materialised art projects, curated exhibitions, popular culture, Indigenous Australian and Chinese art.

This unit involves research towards and preliminary writing of an Honours thesis of 18 000-20 000 words, in collaboration with a supervisor approved by the Art History Honours Coordinator.

In this unit you complete and submit your substantial, independent research project in Art History. Regular meetings with a supervisor approved by the Art History Honours Coordinator will guide your progress. You will continue to submit drafts at agreed times, and develop your expertise in relevant research methods and analytical skills as well as in the subject matter of your specialist topic.

Since the early 20th century, Hollywood has dominated film screens around the world. This unit considers America's 'dream factory' as profit-oriented industry, mass entertainment, and cinematic art form. It covers key historical developments including the star system, Production Code censorship, New Hollywood, and the franchise film.