Professor Benjamin H.D. Buchloh - Department of History of Art and Architecture 

Office Hours: Th 2-4 pm / Sackler 512 / Phone: 6-2348 Email: bbuchloh@fas.harvard.edu

Head Teaching Fellow: Katrin Schamun schamun@fas.harvard.edu

All lectures take place in Sackler Auditorium, M/W 12 noon – 1 pm 

Course Description

This lecture course examines the artistic production of the United States and Europe during the first three decades after WW II, from 1945-1975. Its historical and theoretical scope focuses on three complexes: first, how does the production of the postwar neo-avant-garde relate to, repeat and/or transform the paradigms of the historical avant-garde from the period of 1915-1935 (e.g. Abstraction and International Constructivism, Dada, Duchamp and the Ready Made, Surrealism and Automatism).

The second set of questions addresses the various interactions (from opposition to pure affirmation, between neo - avant-garde practices and the increasingly powerful formations of mass media culture, identified by T.W. Adorno in 1947 as the ‘Culture Industry.’

The third group of questions tries to clarify in each particular context how the cultural production of the immediate post - war years attempted, succeeded, or failed to address the caesura of civilization brought about by the Holocaust and WW II, with the inherent destruction of traditional concepts of humanist subjectivity, and the annihilation of nation state identity and its cultural representations.

Even though we consider it to be the primary task of this course to familiarize the student with the historical material and the theoretical questions outlined above, one additional focus will be of central interest throughout the lectures: to clarify the differences of art historical methods and critical and theoretical models, and their often rather diverse attempts (and results) at understanding and interpreting the artistic production of this period.