From Florence in the 15th century to New York in the 20th, this course traces the imaging of the city in western art.
Artists have been documenting the man-made environment of the city since the Renaissance when it appears as a site of worship in religious art. Over the centuries the city symbolises national pride, the seat of power, the cultural centre of society. After initially considering images of the city in earlier centuries, the main focus of the course will be on the development of the metropolis as an urban phenomenon, post-Industrial Revolution from 1860-1960. As such, the city develops as the centre of commerce, consumerism and capitalism: a site of leisure, pleasure and tourism. In contrast, we will also examine the negative, indeed dystopian aspects of the city as a place of alienation, isolation and anonymity inhabited by the dispossessed and the decadent.
In the early 20th century, avant-garde artists involved in new modern movements become fascinated with the concept of the city as in a constant state of flux and represent it variously as fragmented, futuristic and surreal. Consideration will be given to such works as celebrations and/or critiques of city life in all its computations: from the Futurists’ utopian view of the city as a machine; de Chirico’s metaphysical cityscapes of the imagination; to Hopper’s melancholic scenes of loneliness of the city- dwellers in the twilight zones of New York. In addition, through the work of, for example, Grosz, Dix, Nash and Moore we will examine the corruption and destruction of the city resulting from two world wars and the aftermath.
