Art History

Professors: Gil Smith, PhD and Gay Sweely, PhD

Art History provides as yet a service function to the University and the Department, offering courses that meet EKU's General Education requirements, and a minor available to any undergraduate degree candidate, in addition to those courses necessary to meet the art history requirements of the Department's degrees. The area's facilities include a large, theater-style lecture hall with back-screen projection capabilities run from a master board at the instructor's podium. In this room, slide, film, and video projection are available to the Department and the campus for any course or visiting lecturer needing these media for instruction. There is also a slide library comprising storage and previewing capacity for the more than 15,000 images that are on file by artist, medium, and cultural origin. Their use, by faculty for their classes and by students for study and presentation, is supervised by a member of the Art History faculty who is also responsible for updating the collection.

Classes in Art History begin with a two-course sequence offered every term in the history of world art from pre-history to the present. There follows a series of advanced courses, offered once every other year or so, that are arranged to cover the main chronological periods of Western art: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque/Rococo, and the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Art students and non-majors may select from these on the basis of interest, and occasionally a more specialized art history course (most recently on the history of the graphic arts) may be offered for elective credit in one of the Department's degree programs. For non-majors, there is also an introductory-level course in "Art Appreciation," covering the principles, techniques, and history of art, that is staffed by varying members of the faculty in Art.

Courses and descriptions

 ARH 390 - Survey of Art History I
I, II. Study of art from prehistoric times through the Gothic period.

ARH 391 - Survey of Art History
I, II. Study of art from the Renaissance to the present day.

ARH 492 - Greek and Roman Art
A. Study of the history of the classical Greek and Roman architecture, sculpture, and painting from the beginnings of Greek art to the time of Constantine.

ARH 497 - History of Modern Art
A. A specialized study of art and architecture in Europe and America from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

ART 496 - Nineteenth Century Art
Formerly ART 395. Study of major artisitc styles of the century, including neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, and post impressionism.