Hannah Gadbois teaching Modern Art: An Introduction for Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Introduction
Modern Art: An Introduction (Chicago)
1104 West Thorndale Avenue
Chicago, IL 60660
From Claude Monet’s ethereal waterlilies to Jackson Pollock’s turbulent drip paintings, modern art is marked by a concerted rejection of the past. Using a variety of visual methods, modern artists attempted to revolutionize not just art-making, but our way of engaging with a world marked by the triumph of industrial capitalism, the rise of communism, the catastrophic impact of two world wars, and the spread of mass consumer culture. Breaking from traditional artistic conventions, they pushed the boundaries of abstraction, experimentation, and expression leading to a profound reassessment of the value and function of art itself. But with works ranging from Hugo Ball’s cardboard lobster costume, through Diego Rivera’s revolutionary murals, to Barnett Newman’s sublime color field paintings, modern art is just as diverse as it is rife with tensions and contradictions. What, then, is modern art? What makes it modern? Is its revolutionary potential to be found in its autonomy as captured by the formula “art for art’s sake” or in its explicit politicization? What forms did modern proposals for artistic revolution take? Why were they eventually exhausted? And, why did we post-moderns stop throwing the past overboard?
In this course we will survey the entire trajectory of modern art beginning with the rise of abstraction in 1870s French Impressionism all the way to the waning of modernity with Pop Art in the late 1960s. We will engage with a variety of art movements including Surrealism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism, Brazilian ‘Cannibalism,’ and Japanese Gutai among others. Readings will draw from a broad range of historical sources and later scholarship, prioritizing primary sources in the forms of artist manifestos. Authors will include art historians like T.J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, and Linda Nochlin as well as philosophers and cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin, György Lukács, Roland Barthes, Victor Shklovsky, and Sadiya Hartman.
Course Schedule
Wednesday, 6:30 - 9:30pm CT
February 04 — February 25, 2026
4 weeks