The Birth of Modernism: From Revolution to the White Cube

Prof. Maya Balakirsky

Тuesday, 16.00—17.30 (Semester B)

Course Abstract

This course offers a bold rethinking of modernism’s emergence in visual culture, tracing its complex roots from the revolutionary ferment of the late 18th century to its institutionalization in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Far from treating modernism as a linear progression of styles, we approach it as a contested field of political transformation, epistemological rupture, and aesthetic reinvention.

Rather than beginning with the usual parade of “-isms,” we open with Diderot’s Encyclopédie—a visual and intellectual matrix that illuminates how Enlightenment ideals shaped the production and dissemination of knowledge. From there, we follow the pressures that reshaped art’s function and meaning through revolution, industrialization, urbanization, and empire.

The course privileges critical theory and interdisciplinary methods, emphasizing thinkers who have interrogated the myth of aesthetic autonomy, including Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives. While our central aim is to engage deeply with individual works of art and their formal and conceptual complexity, we also foreground their embeddedness within the historical matrices of ideology, power, and perception.

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Sample topics

Enlightenment Media: Knowledge and the Rewiring of Vision // Power and Ornament: Imperial Aesthetics and Bourgeois Fantasy // Institutional Aesthetics and Canon Formation // The Aesthetics of Emotions: Romanticism and the Sublime // Haussmannization, the Flaneur, and the Urban Gaze // Realism and Class Consciousness // The Impressionists, Modern Life, and Commodification // Landscape and Loss: Nature, Nostalgia, and Capitalist Vision // The Avant-Garde as Critique and Anti-Institution // The Fragmentation of the Subject // The Revolution of a Single Artist and Mythologies of Artistic Genius // Dada, Surrealism, and the Unconscious // Museum and Markets: Instituting Modernism

Bibliography

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Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin Books, 2008.

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