LARTS 373 — War and Art in 20C Europe

3 credits
Spring
Gonzalo Sánchez

Minerva is the Roman goddess of warfare and sponsor of the arts, among other patronages. 20th-century Europe witnessed an unprecedented intensification in the unlikely pairing of these human phenomena, as social conflict and global war engendered art movements as diverse as soldier-poets and “the lost generation”; avant-gardes such as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Suprematism; and the explicitly political aesthetics of Fascism and Socialist Realism. This course will survey the most important social and political events of 20th-century Europe—wars, revolutions, economic and ideological crises—and their corresponding artistic responses.