ARTH 585
Facing Portraiture
Last Offered Spring 2024
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

What constitutes a portrait? How do portraits act in the world? What histories do they hold, and what stories can they tell? This seminar will explore how artists, sitters, viewers, and historians have approached this genre and to what ends. We will interrogate the possibilities and limits of portraiture; examine how portraiture encodes forms of difference through ideological claims to power, likeness, and self-possession; and explore how technological developments inform portraiture’s shifting private and public uses. Attending to historical and cultural specificity–with particular though not exclusive attention to the post-1800 period and the United States–we will also excavate the genre’s legacy by exploring its contemporary presence, asking what concerns shape conceptions of portraiture in contexts such as the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial Outwin Competition and popular discourse. Bridging past and present, and in conversation with objects held in the collections of the Clark, WCMA, and the Chapin Library, we will work toward our own definition of portraiture and, in so doing, discover and complicate the relationship between personhood, identity, and representation. Students are welcome to develop final projects on relevant topics and materials outside the temporal and geographic contexts addressed in class.