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HA 394.201 Special Topics: Gender and
Visual Culture of Paris and Berlin in the
1920s.
The "new woman" has served as an important focal point for both art historical and gender studies of metropolitan France and Germany of the 1920s. This female figure is cast in roles ranging from the mannish lesbian of fashion to the inconsequential shop girl/consumer. But discussion of the role of women artists in constructing images of the new woman has often been missing from these investigations of this female type. In both Paris and Berlin, there were numbers of new women who were responding to their cultural context and producing images of their experiences of modernity. This course will examine gender issues in the visual culture of Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. In the first half of the course, we will consider the many ways in which the new woman functioned as a symbol of modernity in these two cultural capitals, and the manners in which women negotiated and contributed to the the images of contemporary femininity in popular culture, film, and art. The second half of the course will be devoted to investigations of the significant contributions to visual culture made by women artists who were, in various ways, new women. Thus this course will also offer an introduction to such avant-garde movements as Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, and the Bauhaus through the focus on the work of women artists of the 1920s. (Cost: 1 WL: 2) (3 credits) (Otto, Elizabeth) |