NEW – Making Sense of Art History: The Fundamentals
On campus
Dr Anne Puetz and Dr Niccola Shearman
Monday 7 – Friday 11 April 2025
£645
This course is now fully booked; if you wish to be added to the waiting list, please email short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk.
Course description
This intensive course is designed to equip students with the essential knowledge and skills that allow them to take their interest in works of art further. Our classroom sessions will make time for structured student participation and are complemented by visits to The Courtauld Gallery’s permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, its Prints and Drawings Study Room, and to one external collection.
We will explore the style periods and movements in European art history and the assumptions that underlie definitions of such terms as ‘antiquity’, the ‘Renaissance’, or ‘Modernism’.
We will look at the major themes and genres of Western art, and at art history’s many hierarchies: between ‘art’ and ‘craft’, different genders, Western and non-Western art, between different subject-matters, artistic media and practices.
We will think about evolving ideas about ‘art’ and ‘the artist’ and consider historical structures of patronage, workshop practice, and art education.
Finally, we will explore how art museums and galleries have collected, conserved, and displayed works of art and how these activities have impacted our enjoyment and understanding.
Throughout, we will pay attention to social contexts of the making and the reception of art, and to historical ideas that have shaped the evolving discipline of art history. At the same time, we will bear in mind the essential object nature of the work of art and learn to look closely, both in The Courtauld Gallery and print room, and on the screen. Guest lectures from colleagues working in conservation will help us understand how art works have been made in different historical periods, and in what ways their material qualities contribute to a work’s essential appeal.
Lecturers' biographies
Dr Anne Puetz is Head of Short Courses at The Courtauld, where she designs and manages a wide-ranging programme of on-campus and online short courses in art history, and in-person and online Study Tours. Anne’s own research and teaching focuses mainly on British, and also on French and German art from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. She was the research curator of the ground-breaking exhibition Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836 (Courtauld Gallery, 2001) and has written on various aspects of British art, including on notions of ‘modernity’; theories, practices and technologies of artistic reproduction; display and exhibition cultures; and art education. Anne is particularly interested in collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to art history and has been designing and leading workshops on visual literacy for medical professionals.
Dr Niccola Shearman is an independent historian of twentieth-century art, with a focus on Germany and Austria to 1945. She has held academic positions at the University of Manchester and at The Courtauld, and also contributes to the V&A Academy. Published articles have focused on German printmaking and its reception and in 2024 she contributed to the catalogue for Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider (Tate). Current projects include the careers of German and Austrian artists in exile in the UK and an exhibition entitled With Graphic Intent for The Courtauld Gallery, 2025, co-curated with Dr Emily Christensen.