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What can we learn about sex from paintings? What role does gender play in art? We will study some of the world's most beloved paintings in this course, led by expert curators and art historians who will think outside the box, bringing a gendered reading to the masterpieces contained in the magnificent collections that we have been fortunate enough to bring to the Coursera platform. This course will teach you how to:
- Gender and sexuality are integral to the creation and reception of works of art
- Gender and sexuality theories can help you better understand paintings
- Understanding key terms from gender-related art history and museology theories
- Recognize the operation of what is referred to as "the gaze" and how it operates in relation to paintings
- Recognize how ideas about gender and sexuality can be productively employed in theorising art curatorial practises
- Take the initiative in relating theoretical ideas about gender and sexuality to the reading and display of art and visual cultures
Syllabus:
1. Tiepolo’s Cleopatra
- Tiepolo’s Cleopatra: Agency in Paint
- Cleopatra: Female Pharaoh and Ruler of a Cosmopolitan World
- Ways of Seeing: The Power of the Gaze
2. The Culture of Sensibility and the ‘Man of Feeling’
- What is the Culture of Sensibility?
- Painting Sensibility: Gainsborough's Officer of the Fourth Regiment of Foot
- Gainsborough's Man of Feeling: animals, soldiers and chivalry
3. Gainsborough at the Huntington
- Music and the Senses: Gainsborough’s Portrait of Karl Friedrich Abel
- The Ligoniers: The Tensions of Gender in Paint
- The Blue Boy: Effeminacy and the Culture of Sensibility
- Gainsborough’s Cottage Door: Charity and Sensibility
4. Sexual Codes in Eighteenth Century French Courtly Painting
- Seduction in the Court of Louis XV
- Madame de Pompadour: Controlling the Gaze
- Fragonard: Sex and the Circulation of Popular Culture
5. Orientalism, Gender and Display - Painting in Morocco
- John Lavery’s In Morocco
- Wives and Models
- Women in Public Space
6. Henri Rousseau: Challenging the Myth of the Passive Woman
- Henri Rousseau’s The Dream: Eve in the jungle
- Dreaming with Animals: Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy
7. Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne and Max Dupain - Modernism, Gender and the Science of Movement
- Restaging the Nude: Matisse’s Dance
- Cezanne’s Bather: Masculinity and Movement
- The Sunbaker: Australian Men on the Beach
8. Frida Kahlo, Glyn Philpot and the Struggle to Paint
- Woman and Animal
- Queering the Canvas
- Myth and Sexuality
9. What is Women’s Business? Indigenous Art and the Dreaming
- What is Women’s Business?
- Big Yam Dreaming
- Owning the Dreaming
