Introductory & General Art History Courses

From the foam-born Venus to the warlike widow Judith, female figures drawn from mythology, scripture, and legend have captivated artists for centuries. Powerful, dangerous, seductive, virtuous, and often all of these at once, they offered a visual language through which ideas about gender, beauty and power could be explored, celebrated, and contested.

This course will provide you with a visual toolkit that will enable you to understand and analyse the appearance of paintings. You will explore their formal qualities, in other words the things that make paintings look the way they do. You will discover how an artist gets from a blank canvas, wood panel, sheet of paper to a finished artwork, and the visual decisions that have to be made along the way.

Look in depth at four artists a week across a series of themes from body and power to socio-environmental change. What links can be made between artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and where is art heading?

Do you enjoy looking at art but want to understand it more deeply? This introduction to art history course will help you build confidence in interpreting art by exploring topics such as beauty, the role of the artist, gender, the art market, and global art history-giving you fresh insight into what you see in galleries and museums.

Explore the way painters through history have used colours to create effects and convey meaning and emotions. Looking into the history of pigments, colour theory, and colour symbolism, this course focuses on an essential aspect of the art of painting.

Enjoy an introductory sample of Art History and develop some basic skills in formal and content analysis, material studies, and discussion of determinative factors such as patronage and politics.

Explore the first 150 years of photography, an art form that has changed our perception of the world. Learn about key artists, movements and theorists that have defined its history and shaped our contemporary reality.

Uncover hidden histories in art through the universal medium of drawing. Explore drawing’s significant role in shaping art and how artists including Leonardo, Rembrandt and Cezanne have been drawn to its expressive possibilities to make personal studies and autonomous works of art.

A brief introduction to Peggy Guggenheim's collecting practice and how it evolved into one of the most significant collections of modern art. From her revolutionary exhibition space in New York City to her transformation of the Venice Biennale, we will see how she saved modern art from the clutches of fascism.

Explore the art of the Harlem Renaissance from its historical context to its key artists and its impact on 20th century art and culture in the United States.