Crowds Appear For New Arts Survey

There were too many people in the basement lecture hall inside the Sackler Museum for the second class meeting of Literature and Arts B-10 yesterday.

Students spilled into the aisles and out the doors, but those who could hear Professor of Fine Arts Irene J. Winter praised the course for offering a new approach to surveying art history.

The class, "Art and Visual Culture: Introduction to the Historical Study of Art and Architecture," is not only a routine addition to the Core curriculum. It's also a major step in the restructuring of the Fine Arts department's course offerings.

Lit and Arts B-10 is the arts survey course students have sought unsuccessfully since the department stopped giving Fine Arts 13 after the spring of 1991. In addition to standards of Western art like the Parthenon and Michaelangelo, B-10 will discuss Indian, Japanese and other non-western art.

Winter and Professor of Fine Arts Henri Zerner conceived the course this past summer, partly to fill the void created by the loss of Fine Arts 13. That course drew 277 students the last time it was taught.

Winter and Zerner are quick to note that B-10 is distinct from Fine Arts 13. Instead of presenting art history as a straight-line history of Western painting, sculpture, and architecture, the new course will be "more thematic than chronolological," says Winter, who chairs the Fine Arts department.

The specific works covered, she says, are not as important as what they illustrate man and nature in art, art in its cultural context, and the work of art as a physical object.

"I do a lot in Indian art so I use pieces from India to illustrate non-Western forms," says Winter, adding that professors in years to come might teach works from their own specialties. "You teach best what you love best."

Students say the new approach is fascinating. "She [Winter] was concentrating on getting as to see art and how to look at it," says Grace Samodal '95. "It's very much a conceptual class and not just the hard facts." That's a welcome change, the adds from her concentration: biology.

History

In the late 1980s, Zerner says, professors came to agree that "Fine Arts 13 didn't work anymore. A general survey on western art no longes served as a good introducation."

The old class was a Harvard institution, having remained largely unchanged for decades. New professors and new ideas--especially multiculturalist perspectives--supplied in the momentum for a curriculum overhaul.

"Fine Arts 13 taught perhaps a valid chronological sequence, but it certainly wasn't the only valid one," Winter says. "It was also too big. No one in the English department teaches world literature."

"People didn't want to teach it because they thought is didn't make much sense anymore," Zerner says. "I certainly didn't want to Fine Arts 13 was boring.

At the beginning of yesterday's lecture. Winter noted the different attitudes of the new generations of art historians, "One friend of mine, a professor emeritus, asked me, Irene, are you teaching B-10 or P.C.-10?'"

Whether or not the new course is a symptom of intellectual trendiness, it's the envy of other schools that are still trying to move away from traditional surveys of Western art.

"We've been asked to do an article in Art Journal [about Lit. and Arts B-10]," Winter says. "There's lots of universities that are facing the same problems."

Zerner and Winter expect to conduct a lottery for places in the class. Enrollment is limited to 280 because of staffing limitations.