Nineteenth-Century European Art (AHIS20016)

What does nineteenth-century European art tell us about the society that made it and our world today? Radical social and cultural changes marked this period. Political upheavals, rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, a second scientific revolution, and the aggressive expansion of European imperial powers in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean reshaped society’s attitudes towards class, race, gender, nature, bodies, senses and emotions. These shifts have left a lasting impact that still reverberates today. Artists responded to these changes in multiple ways, defying the traditional approaches of the academy and creating new modes of representing the world. From Romanticism and Orientalism to Impressionism and the avantgardes of the late nineteenth century, artists’ shifting representations of social relations, the landscape, the human body, and sexual and gender identity fundamentally altered both the function of visual art and the role of the artist.

In this subject, students will explore how painting and sculpture of nineteenth-century Europe were instrumental in creating new identities and modes of being in and imaging the world amid the conditions of modernity and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Engaging with recent scholarship and artworks from the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria, students will be encouraged to question and critique the ways in which art has the capacity to embody, reflect, and challenge the ideologies of its time.