UWA Handbook 2024

Unit Overview

Description

This unit prepares students for honours work and careers in the art world by developing research skills in the use of primary sources. It does so by investigating over several centuries and continents the peculiar fortunes of the 'reversed painting' defined as a painting that depicts another painting that the spectator sees from the back, most famously in Velazquez's Las Meninas. This complex pictorial motif is an example of a 'meta-image' that complements current interest in doubled, folded, dialectical, anachronistic and potential images. The special interest of the reversed painting is that its invention is bound up with the dialectic between the visible and the unseen in Gothic art and the origins of painting on canvas in the early Renaissance. At each stage of its development up to Roy Lichtenstein and the present, it provides deep insight into changes in the relationship between viewers and visual worlds, and so into the institutional history of Western painting itself. Since the motif is appropriated in many examples of mainstream cinema and television productions ranging from Citizen Kane and The Thomas Crown Affair to The Sopranos, the unit also provides the opportunity to examine the institutional rivalry between painting and the moving image. These are integral to the increasing repertoire of complex imagery confronting graduates within the globalised and culturally diverse environment in which they will live and work. A unique primary source for the unit is the online thematic database affording students access to more than 2000 cross-referenced examples of reversed paintings from five centuries and all continents.

Credit

6 points

Details for undergraduate courses

• Level 3 elective

Outcomes

Students are able to (1) construct an institutional history from the medieval era onwards about the studios, galleries, academies, dealer's shops, auction houses, colonial settings and interactive art venues (from the late 1960s onwards) in which reversed paintings are depicted (the many aspects of the motif's inheritance within the contemporary globalised and culturally diverse environment in which graduates will live and work is a central focus of this unit); (2) evaluate a rich cross-section of advanced art historical approaches to Velazquez's Las Meninas from Michel Foucault's 1966 analysis onwards so as to understand the structure and meaning of classical painting and generate new theories and art historical narratives through primary sources; (3) formulate a general hypothesis about later reversed canvases that divides them into five major types—the hypothesis integrates a number of theories including Edmund Husserl's philosophical theory of the indeterminacy of hidden sides of objects, Irvin Goffmann's psychosocial theory of 'back regions', film theory on the 'off screen', and institutional, postcolonial and interactive theories of art; (4) analyse the history of art historical approaches to the interpretation of Las Meninas and so of classical painting; (5) seek out primary sources of reversed painting on the innovative unit databases so as to integrate in-depth anaylses of particular works with historical and theoretical arguments about their institutional settings; and (6) construct logical arguments about the institutional, structural and aesthetic history of the reversed painting within a variety of specified cultural contexts and theoretical frameworks.

Assessment

Indicative assessments in this unit are as follows: (1) two written assignments; (2) an oral assignment; (3) tutorial participation; and (4) active listening and constructive feedback. Further information is available in the unit outline.

Student may be offered supplementary assessment in this unit if they meet the eligibility criteria.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Winthrop Professor Richard Read

Unit rules

Prerequisites

MEMS2001 Classical Traditions and Transformations in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
or any Level 2 History of Art unit

Incompatibility

VISA2218 Painting into Film: The Reversed Canvas from Velazquez to Antonioni

Contact hours

lectures: 2 hrs per week
tutorials: 1 hr per week

Note

Enrolled students can access unit material via the LMS (Learning Management System).