Initial course offerings in the department focused on art of the Medieval period through the present, with particular focus on painting and graphic arts. 

The catalog stated that the department welcomed students from “elementary to graduate levels,” signaling that training graduate students was a priority from the start. The fact it was targeting men is apparent in the language of this first catalog, which noted that independent studies were open to any Ph.D. student pursuing “his” degree.

Oskar Hagen (1888-1957) founded the department, and he was the only faculty member for several years. 

John (Jack) Kienitz taught from 1938 through his retirement in the late 1960s. Kienitz’s expertise lay in modern and American architecture and the arts of China, and his offerings in these areas transformed the curriculum beyond its western roots and focus on painting, sculpture, and graphic arts. It also appears Kietnitz was the first to teach a standalone course on Frank Lloyd Wright (which has become a staple in the department).

James Watrous began teaching in 1938. Taking his doctoral degree under Oskar Hagen, Watrous was one in a long line of faculty who were once former students (Schmeckebier was also a former student). Watrous is known as an artist and founder of the Elvehjem Art Center – but his role in shaping the department’s curriculum is equally significant. 

Watrous added courses on technique into the curriculum, beginning with an undergrad “History of Art Techniques” course in 1940. Over subsequent decades, this course was broken down into specialized courses on different media and time periods.

Leading up to World War II (and during the war), the department regularly offered a “German Art” course, likely in response to contemporary happenings. The course dropped out of the curriculum after the War until it was revived again when Barbara (Suzy) Buenger was hired in 1976 and began teaching courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German art. 

After the war, additions to the course catalogs suggest the department was expanding beyond teaching the western canon  as well as to supporting other fields on campus. 

Watrous offered a British Art course in 1945 for the first time, likely to support the growing English department.

Kienitz began offering “History of Chinese Painting” and “The Fine Arts of China” in the late 1940s (they were offered regularly from this point on). “Chinese Pottery and Porcelain” came along in the early 1950s. 

The department also started regularly offering courses on art and architecture of the United States during this period. While a few courses had been offered on American art – including Hagen’s own “Development of American Art” in the mid 1930s – courses were offered with greater regularity beginning in the 1950s. And in 1960, Watrous offered the first course devoted to “American Painting.” 

The “Fine Arts of Japan” was the first course in Japanese Art, offered in initially in the early 1960s. 

Watrous began aggressively lobbying for building a museum by this point. As he did so, the department grew as if to prefigure the need for a larger faculty to teach with the new collection. As new faculty joined the department, they offered a greater variety of courses, which were often closely bound with their research expertise.

Frank Horlbeck (1924-2019) joined the department in 1958, teaching across the curriculum widely through his retirement in 1995. While he taught broadly, Horlbeck focused his energies on Medieval art and architecture.

Other faculty were added around the time of the Art Center’s opening in 1970, including Robert (Bob) Beetem (1927-2018), who taught nineteenth-century European Art and James Dennis (1932-), who specialized in the teaching of American art. 

Additional first time class offerings in the late 1960s include such notable subjects as Latin American Art, Buddhist Iconography, PreColombian Art, and Environmental Aesthetics. 

The opening of the Elvehjem Art Center (now the Chazen Museum of Art) meant faculty had the opportunity to work one on one with objects in association with their classes. 

And while much about the offerings remained the same, a few changes are notable.

One change is the addition of museum-focused classes. “Museum Training and Connoisseurship” was the earliest of these, offered first in 1974. 

Joan Mirviss (B.A. 1974) remembers this class fondly.

Another change is the frequency with which faculty used the museum’s collections in their teaching.

Warren Moon (1945-1992), started teaching ancient art around 1970; Moon was beloved for his teaching in the museum. This tradition of teaching with the Museum has continued unabated. 

Most notable after the museum opens is simply growth in number and array of courses being offered. This includes “proseminars” (undergraduate seminars) in topic areas of each of the faculty members, which becomes institutionalized by the early 1980s. 

Faculty members also “team teach” with greater frequency in the closing decades of the 20th century, especially on the introductory survey courses.

By the 1990s, the department had grown to the point that faculty were teaching based on their research specialty. 

Within these broad areas, faculty offered rotations of their courses based on medium (i.e., American painting one semester, American sculpture the next), time period or period style (“early” art of a geography versus “later” art of a geography), by a geography (arts of Britain), and sometimes by topic (i.e., Buddhist iconography). 

A few courses appear to have been short-term offerings by staff of graduate students, including Indian Art and a “Special Topics” course on Native American art. 

At the turn of the millennium, this pattern is upended again by faculty departures and new faculty hires as well as by shifts in the field, which grew to expanding interests in the visual and the material, including mass produced and more ordinary kinds of objects. 

The shifts in the field were accompanied by new initiatives in interdisciplinary hiring and partnerships off campus.

Jill Casid was hired as part of a “cluster hire” in Visual Cultures in the early 2000s in the wake of Mierzoff’s departure. Casid offered courses in visual culture that would lead to a steep rise in enrollments, and led to the Founding of the Center for Visual Cultures and Performance Studies.

Ann Smart Martin similarly was hired out of a cross-campus initiative in Material Culture with support of the Chipstone Foundation. This collaboration led to the development of a Certificate program and eventually, the founding of the Center for Design and Material Culture in the School of Human Ecology.

As new faculty members replaced colleagues who retired from the UW, course titles and seminar topics changed. You can read about the rest of the current faculty and their achievements by visiting the faculty page.