Spring 2017 (Undergraduate): City College New York, City University of New York*

Major survey textbooks of global art (Gardner, etc.), tend to forget about Asian art during the modern period, and shift towards linear histories of European and then North American modernism as their prime focus. This course fills that gap and examines modern art in Asia via two national focus-points: Japan and India. In this course we trace how artists from both countries developed anti-colonial and Pan-Asian forms of modernism during the early twentieth century, experimented with mediums including printmaking and performance in the postwar period, and developed complex and intersecting relationships with artists and artistic movements originating in Europe and North America. The course raises questions around realism versus abstraction; the nation, nationalism, and internationalism; identity and the body; and the emergence of the global contemporary.