ARTH 366 - Mysticism and Modernism, 1850-1950

FC ARHU

4 credits
Much modern art aspired to rationality, even science, but many modernists oriented their work, and lives, toward what might seem like science’s opposite: mysticism, magic, metaphysics, the occult. This course tracks the rise of modernist art in the West, from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, alongside the coterminous and often overlapping rises of esoteric thought and practices, including Spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy. The course will aim to be both empathetic and critical, looking at the way these beliefs fed projects both anticolonial and primitivist in political terms, both experimental and traditional in artistic ones. Recommended preparation: At least one 200-level course in art history.