Art History Major Concentration (B.A.) (36 credits)
Offered by: Art History & Communications (Faculty of Arts)
Degree: Bachelor of Arts; Bachelor of Arts and Science
Program credit weight: 36
Program Description
The Major Concentration in Art History concentrates on analysis of forms of visual and material culture from ancient to contemporary times. It provides a grounding in diverse fields and methods of the discipline.
Degree Requirements — B.A. students
To be eligible for a B.A. degree, a student must fulfil all Faculty and program requirements as indicated in Degree Requirements for the Faculty of Arts.
We recommend that students consult an Arts OASIS advisor for degree planning.
Note: For information about Fall 2025 and Winter 2026 course offerings, please check back on May 8, 2025. Until then, the "Terms offered" field will appear blank for most courses while the class schedule is being finalized.
Complementary Courses (36 credits)
3-15 credits from the following list, as an introduction to methods, theories, and practices in diverse fields of the discipline:
| Course | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| ARTH 302 | Aspects of Canadian Art. | 3 |
Aspects of Canadian Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An examination of selected subjects relevant to a specific period of art in Canada. | ||
| ARTH 305 | Methods in Art History. | 3 |
Methods in Art History. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An introduction to the main methodologies used in the analysis of the work of art: formalism, iconography/iconology, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism. | ||
| ARTH 315 | Indigenous Art and Culture. | 3 |
Indigenous Art and Culture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An examination of the work of selected First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists in Canada. | ||
| ARTH 339 | Critical Issues - Contemporary Art. | 3 |
Critical Issues - Contemporary Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. A critical examination of contemporary art from Abstract Expressionism to Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Land art, and Body art. Focuses on the development and critique of modernism, the dematerialization or art, the blurring of art and popular culture, the artist as shaman, temporality, and aesthetic redefinitions of subjectivity. | ||
| ARTH 357 | Early Chinese Art. | 3 |
Early Chinese Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Survey of Chinese art and visual culture during the pre-imperial and early imperial periods (1500BCE-900CE). A wide range of visual images and media (painting, architecture, inscription, funerary art) will be examined in the historical context of the rise and development of the empire. | ||
21-33 complementary credits chosen from among departmental course offerings as follows:
- A maximum of 12 credits may be at the 200 level.
- A minimum of 3 credits must be at the 400 level or above (excluding ARTH 490 Museum Internship Museum Internship).
Note: Courses in studio practice cannot be counted toward the Major concentration.
| Course | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| ARTH 200 | Introduction to Art History 1. | 3 |
Introduction to Art History 1. Terms offered: Summer 2025 Selected introductory survey of the history of art. | ||
| ARTH 202 | Introduction to Contemporary Art. | 3 |
Introduction to Contemporary Art. Terms offered: Summer 2025 A critical survey of contemporary art and theory, from 1945 to the present focusing on pivotal issues such as anti-war politics, feminism, sexual diversity, AIDS awareness, discourse of multiculturalism, debates about modernism and postmodernism, post colonialism, technology, and globalization. | ||
| ARTH 204 | Introduction to Medieval Art and Architecture. | 3 |
Introduction to Medieval Art and Architecture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Surveys the arts from late Antiquity to the fourteenth century in Western Europe. Focuses on the body and space to introduce artistic and architectural concepts, practices, and styles from the late Roman, Byzantine and Carolingian empires to monastic and royal patronage of the French Kings. | ||
| ARTH 205 | Introduction to Modern Art. | 3 |
Introduction to Modern Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. The course is an introduction to the modern period in art history which begins around 1750. It examines the development in both painting and sculpture and relates to changes in the social and political climate of the times. | ||
| ARTH 207 | Introduction Early Modern Art 1400-1700. | 3 |
Introduction Early Modern Art 1400-1700. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Surveys visual culture of early modern Europe across various social spheres and geographical locations. | ||
| ARTH 209 | Introduction to Ancient Art and Architecture. | 3 |
Introduction to Ancient Art and Architecture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Survey of ancient art and architecture: pre-historic Europe, ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Focus is on issues of political power, gender, sexuality, race, the formation of individual and group identities, and the relation between the body and social space. | ||
| ARTH 215 | Introduction to East Asian Art. | 3 |
Introduction to East Asian Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Introductory survey of some of the major developments in the visual arts of Japan, China, and Korea. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity of artistic traditions in East Asia and the intersections among these traditions. | ||
| ARTH 223 | Introduction Italian Renaissance Art 1300-1500. | 3 |
Introduction Italian Renaissance Art 1300-1500. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Surveys the changing role of the artwork in Renaissance Italy in its social, political, and religious contexts. | ||
| ARTH 225 | Introduction to Seventeenth - Century Art. | 3 |
Introduction to Seventeenth - Century Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Examines the functions and uses of a wide range of visual forms in relation to the European and global expansion of urbanism, absolutism, colonialism, capitalism, diplomacy, slavery, missionary activity, and religious conflict in the seventeenth century. | ||
| ARTH 226 | Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture. | 3 |
Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Paintings, prints, sculpture and architecture produced in Europe in the 'long' eighteenth century, with an emphasis on major artists. Themes include the teaching of art and its display, the emergence of 'publics' for art, and eighteenth-century aesthetics. | ||
| ARTH 300 | Canadian Art to 1914. | 3 |
Canadian Art to 1914. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Canadian art from the pre-contact period through the colonial and nation-building centuries until the onset of the First World War. Emphasis will be placed on the diverse cultural influences that have been brought into contact in Canada. | ||
| ARTH 302 | Aspects of Canadian Art. | 3 |
Aspects of Canadian Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An examination of selected subjects relevant to a specific period of art in Canada. | ||
| ARTH 310 | Postcolonialism. | 3 |
Postcolonialism. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Examines selected art historians who respond to postcolonial theorists and analyse how paintings, sculpture, buildings, and visual culture participated in or resisted European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. | ||
| ARTH 314 | The Medieval City. | 3 |
The Medieval City. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Towns and cities in the Middle Ages as architectural entities, their urban planning and development; main building types, profane and ecclesiastical: castle, defence works, town halls, houses, cathedrals, churches and monasteries; the role architecture played in forming a society. | ||
| ARTH 315 | Indigenous Art and Culture. | 3 |
Indigenous Art and Culture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An examination of the work of selected First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists in Canada. | ||
| ARTH 321 | Visual Culture of the Dutch Republic. | 3 |
Visual Culture of the Dutch Republic. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Examination of the functions of visual culture in merchant capitalist society, and the changing status of art, artists and patrons after the Protestant reformation. A wide range of visual imagery (from Rembrandt and Vermeer to popular culture) will be linked with 17th-century economic, historic, religious, colonial, scientific and literary developments. | ||
| ARTH 323 | Realism and Impressionism. | 3 |
Realism and Impressionism. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. The course is an investigation into Realism and Impressionism, the principal artistic movements between ca. 1840 - 1880. | ||
| ARTH 325 | Visual Culture Renaissance Venice. | 3 |
Visual Culture Renaissance Venice. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Distinctive visual culture in the context of Venice's singular topography and reputation for licentiousness and toleration. | ||
| ARTH 326 | Studies in Manuscript and Print Culture. | 3 |
Studies in Manuscript and Print Culture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Positing a dynamic relationship between manuscript and print culture and social experience, this course focuses on new forms and uses for printed imagery before the electronic age. Issues to be addressed include: the relationship between word and image, reading and viewing practices and visual and textual transmission, the history of the book and the consequences of technological change. | ||
| ARTH 336 | Art Now. | 3 |
Art Now. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Recent art practices from the 1980's to the present - installation art, new media arts (video, digital and internet art), recent developments in performance, photography, and painting. Introduces students to the key fields of research of current art: postmodernism, representation, visuality, identity, embodiment, sexuality, memory, (bio)technology, intermedia, and globalization. | ||
| ARTH 338 | Modern Art and Theory: WWI - WWII. | 3 |
Modern Art and Theory: WWI - WWII. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An examination of the historical avant-garde (dada, soviet constructionism, and surrealism), Duchamp, and abstraction up to Abstract Expressionism. Examines how post-WWI art practices negotiate the intertwining of aesthetics and revolution, art and mass culture, modernism and modernity, imagined and material space, gender and sexuality, horizontality and verticality. | ||
| ARTH 339 | Critical Issues - Contemporary Art. | 3 |
Critical Issues - Contemporary Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. A critical examination of contemporary art from Abstract Expressionism to Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Land art, and Body art. Focuses on the development and critique of modernism, the dematerialization or art, the blurring of art and popular culture, the artist as shaman, temporality, and aesthetic redefinitions of subjectivity. | ||
| ARTH 352 | Feminism in Art and Art History. | 3 |
Feminism in Art and Art History. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. A consideration of the impact of feminism on recent art history, focusing on the examination of gender constructions in art and theory. | ||
| ARTH 353 | Selected Topics in Art History 1. | 3 |
Selected Topics in Art History 1. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Study of a special field in the History of Art and Architecture taught by a visiting scholar. | ||
| ARTH 354 | Selected Topics Art History 2. | 3 |
Selected Topics Art History 2. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Study of a special field in the History of Art and Communications. | ||
| ARTH 356 | Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art. | 3 |
Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Examination of modern Chinese art and visual culture from the 1920's to the present. Emphasis will be placed on the formation of the artistic avant-garde in the 20th century and its relation to socialist and post-socialist mass culture. | ||
| ARTH 357 | Early Chinese Art. | 3 |
Early Chinese Art. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Survey of Chinese art and visual culture during the pre-imperial and early imperial periods (1500BCE-900CE). A wide range of visual images and media (painting, architecture, inscription, funerary art) will be examined in the historical context of the rise and development of the empire. | ||
| ARTH 358 | Later Chinese Art (960-1911). | 3 |
Later Chinese Art (960-1911). Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Survey of art and visual culture in later imperial China from Sorlg to Qing dynasties. A broad range of media (e.g. painting, calligraphy, print, architecture) will be examined to explore the development of literati aesthetics and its intersections with the arts of the court, the temple, and the marketplace. | ||
| ARTH 360 | Studies in the Photographic. | 3 |
Studies in the Photographic. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. The course provides an introduction to the history of photography while considering its relation to major movements in the history of painting from the time of the invention of photography, in 1839, to the present day. | ||
| ARTH 368 | Studies in Northern Renaissance Art 01. | 3 |
Studies in Northern Renaissance Art 01. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. | ||
| ARTH 411 | Canadian Art and Race. | 3 |
Canadian Art and Race. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Examination of impact of colonialism on Canadian art and visual culture from contact to the present. Emphasis will be placed on role of racial marginalization and privilege in issues of cultural access, representation, production and reception. | ||
| ARTH 420 | Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 1. | 3 |
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 1. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An advanced study of selected topics in the History of Art and Architecture. | ||
| ARTH 421 | Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 2. | 3 |
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 2. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Selected topics in art and architecture. Topics vary by year. | ||
| ARTH 422 | Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 3. | 3 |
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 3. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Selected topics in art and architecture. Topics vary by year. | ||
| ARTH 425 | Arts of Medieval Spain. | 3 |
Arts of Medieval Spain. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. This course examines the arts of medieval Spain from the late antique 'barbarian' invasions through the fifteenth century. Within this broad span, particular attention will be paid to key themes, including historiography, the centrality of pilgrimage for shaping artistic practice, and the concept of 'convivencia' among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. | ||
| ARTH 430 | Concepts - Discipline Art History. | 3 |
Concepts - Discipline Art History. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Methodologically focused examination of critical concepts for art historical study. | ||
| ARTH 435 | Early Modern Visual Culture. | 3 |
Early Modern Visual Culture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. A study of the works of Rubens, Van dick and Velasquez. | ||
| ARTH 440 | The Body and Visual Culture. | 3 |
The Body and Visual Culture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An examination of modern and contemporary redefinitions of corporeality in art, theory and visual culture. The course focuses on the dissemination of the body in the context of late capitalism and ongoing developments of image, information and biotechnologies. Interdisciplinary perspective establishing a dialogue between art and science. | ||
| ARTH 447 | Independent Research Course. | 3 |
Independent Research Course. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Supervised independent research on an approved topic. | ||
| ARTH 457 | Brushwork in Chinese Painting. | 3 |
Brushwork in Chinese Painting. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. The seminar takes an in-depth look at the function and meaning of the brushwork in traditional Chinese painting. Analysis of paintings will be combined to close readings of theoretical texts in translation. | ||
| ARTH 473 | Studies in 17th and Early 18th Century Art 04. | 3 |
Studies in 17th and Early 18th Century Art 04. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Studies in 17th and early 18th century art. | ||
| ARTH 474 | Studies in Later 18th and 19th Century Art 03. | 3 |
Studies in Later 18th and 19th Century Art 03. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Studies in later 18th and early 19th-century art. | ||
| ARTH 490 | Museum Internship | 3 |
Museum Internship Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. The Museum Internship is intended to provide direct exposure to museum collections and practical experience in the museum setting for students interested in museum professions. Individually designed in consultation with the professor in charge of internships and the appropriate personnel at one of the Montreal museums. | ||
| ARTH 501 | Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture. | 3 |
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Focused investigation of a special topic in the history of art and visual culture. | ||
| ARTH 502 | Advanced Topics in Art and Architectural History. | 3 |
Advanced Topics in Art and Architectural History. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. Focused investigation of a special topic in the history of art and architecture. | ||
Note: In addition to architectural courses given by the Department, program students are encouraged to consider courses given in the School of Architecture and the departments of East Asian Studies and Philosophy which may, upon consultation with the Department, be regarded as fulfilling part of the requirements.
| Course | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| ARCH 250 | Architectural History 1. | 3 |
Architectural History 1. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. The study of architecture and cities from ancient times to 1750. | ||
| ARCH 251 | Architectural History 2. | 3 |
Architectural History 2. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. The study of North American architecture and cities from 1950 to the present. | ||
| PHIL 336 | Aesthetics. | 3 |
Aesthetics. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An introduction to issues central to aesthetic theory; the nature of aesthetic judgment, perception of the aesthetic object, the nature of the art object. | ||
| PHIL 436 | Aesthetics 2. | 3 |
Aesthetics 2. Terms offered: this course is not currently offered. An advanced discussion of issues in aesthetics. | ||