What do Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s paintings, Nicki Minaj’s music videos, and eighteenth-century French lacquered chests of drawers have in common? This course examines the surprising continuities and tensions between Rococo, Camp, and Kitsch—three aesthetic modes associated with excess, artifice, frivolity, and “bad taste.” The revival of Rococo in contemporary art, pop culture, design, and fashion, as well as its deployment in U.S. state interiors, invites critical reflection on its historical meanings and enduring legacies. Examining the similarities and distinctions between the Rococo—known for its excess, unruly exuberance, and playfulness—and the aesthetic categories of Camp and Kitsch allows us to recover the historical meaning of the Rococo as a disruptive cultural language. Through analysis of artworks at the National Gallery, we move across centuries and media to interrogate how these categories have challenged canonical art. We trace the origins, revival, and transformations of the Rococo from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, paying particular attention to its relationship to class, consumer culture, and performance. Far from frivolous, Rococo, Camp, and Kitsch emerge as radical languages of counterculture.
This seminar examines ‘material thinking’. Relying, amongst others, on Tim Ingold’s anthropologies of making, Glenn Adamson’s histories of craft, and Pamela H. Smith’s studies of artisanal knowledge, the seminar interrogates how materials mediate between thought and practice. Rather than viewing matter as inert or subordinate to form, we will consider its agency in shaping artistic processes, aesthetic experience, and systems of knowledge. Focusing on the sensorial aspects of the production and reception of art, we will examine how substances such as pigments, binders, and different media —such as canvas, wood, wool, glass, lacquer, inject print or digital video— condition visual effect, technique, and meaning. We will focus on how distinctive materials endow artworks with specific meanings that both amplify and complicate their iconography and visuality. We will read primary textual sources at the Library closely to recover the cultural meaning of a range of materials: varnish,canvas, wood. etc. Ultimately, the seminar seeks to refine approaches to materiality that challenge conventional separations between mind and hand, idea, and substance, proposing material thinking as a mode of research that connects conservation studies, material studies, and art history.
This second-year BA module examined European art during the Age of Revolutions, a period shaped by profound political, industrial, social, and intellectual upheaval. Focusing on artists working in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain, the course explored how art responded to revolution, war, empire, and shifting social orders, while also considering new ideas about artistic freedom, subjectivity, spirituality, and the role of the artist in a rapidly changing world.
Teaching Assistant for the first-year BA Foundations course. Teaching covered Classical and Byzantine Art, The Renaissance: Italy and Beyond, and The Buddhist Arts of Asia, introducing students to major works, traditions, and methodological approaches across a broad chronological and geographical range.