ARTH 391 Art in Its Changing Context: The Aesthetics of Ugliness in Viennese Modernity

• Thursdays, 15:00-17:30
• EV-1-605
• Instructor: Kathryn Simpson

This interdisciplinary course will consider how and why the aesthetics of ugliness became so significant within Viennese modernity. Reviewing the historical and philosophical discourses surrounding beauty, ugliness, and art, we will grapple with the legacy of the aesthetics of the beautiful – including its links to classicism, idealism, and notions of “truth” – in order to situate the aesthetics of ugliness as a significant intervention into, and even rejection of, beauty. Based on this understanding of the disruptive and destabilizing forces of ugliness we will then examine the specific emphasis on ugliness within the visual, philosophical, and medical cultures of Viennese modernity. Figures studied will include the art historians of the famed “Vienna School” of art history (such as Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl); Viennese visual artists such as painters Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, as well as the architect Adolf Loos; musicians including Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg; and doctors, philosophers, and writers including Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and Arthur Schnitzler. We will also consider the imbrication of modern notions of ugliness in contested contemporaneous ideas about gender and sexuality, with particular focus on avant-garde articulations of ugly masculinity in Vienna in the early twentieth century.

There will be some thematic and chronological continuity between this course in the fall term and, in winter, ARTH 392, “Gender Issues in Art and Art History: Representations of Queerness in Weimar Berlin”; students may choose to enrol in both courses but are by no means obliged to do so.