Seventeenth-century Dutch art has usually been characterized in terms of a distinctive national style. The nineteenth-century socialist art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger coined a slogan that succinctly captures this idea: “A société nouvelle, art nouveau”—“A new art for a new society.” Art and cultural historians have recently begun to explore Dutch visual and material culture in its global context, however, and we are beginning to see that much of the visual culture of the period was created in complicated processes of cross-cultural exchange that spanned the globe. In this seminar we will read and discuss much of this recent scholarship, with the aim of redefining some familiar art historical concepts like national identity, style history, and the bounded work of art.
View complete course outline: ARTH435A2010 [.pdf]