Study at the University of Sydney with our world-renowned scholars and award-winning teachers in partnership with key cultural institutions on campus and across Sydney. If you are a current art history or Sydney College of the Arts student, or interested in studying Art History we have a study pathway for you. Visit the Art History Discipline Site today. Take advantage of the international programs and events of the Power Institute and study in the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library. Study objects of art in the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney College of the Arts Galleries or Verge Gallery on campus, at galleries and institutions across Sydney, or in Fieldwork intensives in Berlin or Paris. The Art History Major is the perfect pathway to postgraduate studies in Art Curating and a career in the arts and cultural sector.
Art is a profound and persistent human impulse. Art History explores the history of making, viewing and experiencing works of art and architecture. It asks key questions such as 'what is art for?', 'what does art mean?' and 'how does art function in broader culture?' These questions will be part of a dynamic encounter with complex and compelling works of art. Find out more about the Undergraduate Art History Major HERE.
National Gallery London
Intensive July
ARHT3681 Fieldwork: Art and the City in Berlin Associate Professor Donna Brett, Read more about the unit here:
Image: Tom Loveday
This unit takes students out of the classrooms and into major world cities to explore not only the history of architecture and public space but also the galleries, collections and artworks housed in the city. It offers a vital opportunity for students to learn with and from artworks, buildings, spaces and monuments in situ. Fieldwork may take place in Summer or Winter Intensive periods. THIS UNIT IS FULLY BOOKED with a waiting list BUT LOOK OUT FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR 2026 IN PARIS.
Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor in Art History and Chair of Discipline. Donna came to the University of Sydney in 2014 after a career in the arts and art museum sector. Her research specialises in the history of art and visual culture with a particular interest in photographic history and how the medium is employed within systems of power, media and public spectacle.
Semester 1
ARHT1001 Style & Substance: Introducing Art History (Core Unit) Dr Mark De Vitis
Rachel Ruysch, Still life with flowers in a glass vase (detail), 1716, oil on canvas, 48.5 x 39.5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Taking a diverse, global view of art making from the Ancient to the Modern world, ARHT1001 will introduce students to key philosophical and methodological approaches in the field of Art History. As our experiences are increasingly mediated through a variety of visual platforms, this course will help students develop critical perspectives on visual communication. The development of professional skill sets will be a key focus. As such, the course serves as an essential introduction to Art History for those considering a career in the arts, education, or the museum and design sectors. Mark De Vitis specialises in the study of cultures of dress and dressing, both past and present, and the visual and material culture of the early modern world.
ARHT2636 Contemporary Indigenous Art (selective)
Betty Kuntiwa Pumani, Antara, 2020, installation view, The National 2021: New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, synthetic polymer paint on linen
The new has no meaning without the old, and the radical newness of the contemporary Indigenous art movement is underpinned by cultural practices dating back 50, 0000 years.Through in-depth visual analysis of individual artists and art-producing communities, you will consider the distinct Indigenous art practices and relate them to issues of cultural and political sovereignty, colonisation, lands rights and representation. Problematising the historical and contemporary reception of Indigenous art, the unit prioritises Indigenous modes of value and reflects on the deep systems of knowledge that continue to inspire artists, curators and scholars. This unit will be taught in collaboration with First Nations scholars, artists and curators.
Roger Benjamin is an internationally renowned art historian. His research fields have included Matisse and the art of the Fauves; French Orientalist art and colonialism 1830-1930; contemporary Australian art, and contemporary Australian Indigenous art.
ARHT2674 Fashion and Dress: Past and Present
This unit offers an introduction to the study of dress through the discussion of major theories and methodologies that inform current scholarship in the field. With a focus on designers, wearers and cultural practices of dressing the body, the unit will question how dress communicates as a form of visual expression.
Mark De Vitis specialises in the study of cultures of dress and dressing, both past and present, and the visual and material culture of the early modern world.
Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, Viktor &Rolf ‘Soir’ Fall/Winter, 2019
ARHT3633 Australian Art: Mainstream to Marginal (selective)
SodaJerk, still fromTERROR NULLIUS_, 2018. HD video; 54 minutes.
What are the current debates and issues driving Australian art, film, and visual culture? In interrogating present-day cultural perspectives, this unit examines, analyses and reinterprets the relationship between colonial and contemporary imagery through screenings, on-site gallery visits and the study of works held in university and other local art and film collections.
Keith Broadfoot lectures on modernism and Australian art, including theories of spectatorship.
ARHT3646 (selective) Dr Yvonne Low
Caption: Hiroharu Itaya Night procession of one hundred goblins c1820 (detail), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Asian Collection Benefactors Fund 1995 This unit investigates key debates about the visual culture of East Asia and explores the rise of modernities in parts of East Asia. It provides a thematically-grounded survey of issues, movements and artistic developments spanning the early modern and modern periods. Focus is paid to the role of cultural production in forging links within and across societies and more broadly, the relation of art with political, social, technological and economic change. Critical attention will also be given to the global interaction between Asia and the West, and its impact on ideological and theoretical frameworks that govern processes of image-making.
Yvonne Low specialises in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diaspora culture and transnationalism, feminisms in Contemporary art, women’s history, and digital methods.
Semester 2
ARHT1002 Shock of the Now: Global Art since 1900 (Core unit)
Teamtaught by Dr Keith Broadfoot, Associate Professor Donna Brett, Dr Yvonne Low, and others.
Hannah Bronte, Still I Rise, 2018
Art shapes our cities, streets, galleries, phones and minds. It is now made with every conceivable material, and sometimes none at all. It shocks, challenges, soothes, entertains, engrosses and overwhelms us. This unit charts the history of Modern and Contemporary Art across the world, as it is shaped by and shapes society, politics and environment. It shows current concerns in art , with materials, landscape, self-image, politics, and the body are grounded in a century of global experiment.
This team-taught unit frames a century and a half of art-making by marking some of the key turns in artistic production and art historical thinking. This is set against the background of key moments leading to the rise of the global avantgarde commencing in the nineteenth century with the development of photography, new ways of seeing thanks to developments in colour theory and technologies leading to a turn toward the modern. We explore key moments in the turbulent twentieth century framed by war, fascism, major shifts in people across the globe, and the rise of America as the new centre of art in the post-war period. We investigate parallel modernisms, shifting the emphasis away from a Euro-American emphasis to explore the embrace of modernist principles in Asia. Next we consider the postmodern and contemporary periods of art by exploring the cultural and artistic revolutions of the 1960s-80s, Aboriginal art as central to the contemporary debate, and lastly we look at the tensions between the development of the digital in Contemporary Hollywood Film, photography and video, and the turn to relational art and identity politics. It is a jam-packed semester that promises a dynamic look at what constituted a vibrant, powerful, shocking and revolutionary period of global art making.
Keith Broadfoot lectures on modernism and Australian art, including theories of spectatorship.
Donna West Brett is Chair of Art History and specialises in modern and contemporary art, with a specific research focus on the photographic medium.
Yvonne Low specialises in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diaspora culture and transnationalism, feminisms in Contemporary art, women’s history, and digital methods.
ARHT2671 Art, Race and Resistance 1788-Now (selective) Professor Mary Roberts
Hew Locke, The Procession, Tate Britain, 2022
This unit critically analyses the visual culture of modern imperialism and cultural histories of resistance. We engage diverse artistic practices and multiple geographies: from imperial city planning in the metropole to parodic street theatre in the colonies; from exoticized and primitivist colonial imagery to the visual culture of wars of resistance. This unit engages with post-colonial and Indigenous perspectives, critical race theory and debates about global histories of art as tools for critically analysing the visual histories of economic and territorial imperialism, as well as their contentious contemporary legacies.
Mary Roberts specialises in nineteenth-century British and Ottoman art with particular expertise in Orientalism, the history of artistic exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe and the culture of travel.
ARHT2680 Why Art Matters (CORE unit) Professor Mark Ledbury and Dr Ariel Kline
Barbara Kruger, We will no longer be seen and not heard, 1985 (detail), Chau Chak Wing Museum Collection. Why Art Matters explores the importance of art in the world, through object-based seminars, lectures and student led presentations. It asks why art is so fundamental to human experience, and how we might study it and articulate its importance. It builds key art historical skills of recognition, analysis, interpretation and expression, and introduces students to a wide variety of different material objects and artworks. The course is taught in small group streams, largely in the Chau Chak Wing museum and will help all majoring art history students build confidence and skill in researching, analysing and communicating about art.
Mark Ledbury's comprehensive research focus spans eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art, including artists Francois Boucher, Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Baptiste Greuze; as well as questions of genre in visual art and methods of art history.
Ariel Kline is a PhD graduate of Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Of Monsters and Mirrors: Painting and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” centers on heroism and monstrosity as fragile poles that organize and—at times—disrupt the racial, ethical, and political imaginations of British art. Her research interests include art and empire, queer theory, critical race theory, and kitsch.
ARHT3679 First Nations Art (selective)
Terra Visiting Professor
Yiribana Galleries at the Art Gallery of NSW
This unit explores the range and depth of First Nations Art globally with special attention to the Indigenous Art and visual culture of Australia and North America. It is designed to explore not only the material and formal features of First Nations' art but the social, cultural and spiritual traditions in which it is embedded and the understandings of time, space and country that inform First Nations art. It also explores the debates that have surrounded the notion and definition of "First Nations" art in recent years.
ARHT3662 On Photography and the Wretched Screen (selective) Associate Professor Donna Brett,
This unit will draw on a wide range of photographic material, including university and museum collections, to examine the pivotal role of photography in recording and shaping our image-culture across diverse global contexts. The unit will engage with key debates to examine the social, cultural, theoretical, historical and art practice contexts of the photograph as an image and as an object. Key theories from Walter Benjamin to Hito Steyerl will be used to interrogate themes of memory, documentary and the real, witnessing, conflict, gender and sexuality, decolonisation, and the digital.
Donna West Brett is Chair of Art History and specialises in modern and contemporary art, with a specific research focus on the photographic medium.
Image: Catherine Opie, Pig Pen, 1993
ARHT3680 Text, Image, Sound: Islamic Book Arts (selective) Dr Peyvand Firouzeh
This unit provides a thematic study of historical and contemporary book arts in the Islamic world, drawing on the art of painting and calligraphy as well as key texts to engage with the foundational interrelations between text, image, orality and other forms of sensory experience. Starting with early Qur’ans, we move to pre-modern illustrated manuscripts, and modern and contemporary works of art inspired by manuscript cultures, exploring histories of authorship, portraiture, patronage, workshop practices, audience and perception, as well as the collecting and display of manuscripts in museums. Several site visits to Sydney’s various collections offer opportunities for object-based learning.
Peyvand Firouzeh teaches on a wide range of arts in the Islamic world, including both religious and non-religious material culture: from poetry and painting to sacred places, talismans and everyday objects. Her classes offer innovative hands-on, object-based learning to engage with important questions in the field of art history. As a student, you will get a chance to access behind-the-scenes contemporary and historical collections in Sydney, connect with contemporary artists and curators, and experience a breadth of topics and visual materials from the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, and beyond.
Image: Presenting the horse-riding cat to King Khusraw, Iran, 1648. The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.
Honours
SACE4111 Theory and Method
Team Taught across Art History, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Media and Communications
Aziz Hazara, ‘Bow Echo’, 2019. Installation view for the 22nd Bienale of Sydney (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photograph: Ken Leafore, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia.
The study of art, film, media, performance and text often requires theories and methods that cut across several disciplines. In this unit, experts will demonstrate interdisciplinary readings of critical theory and you will build and critique your own reading list. Researchers will also discuss their own research projects with you, providing an inside look at the pragmatics of cutting-edge research. Whether you are looking for assistance writing about critical theory or methodology in your thesis, or you are searching for what connects university research to everyday life, this unit gives you skills to contextualise your research in a broader intellectual landscape.
ARHT4113 Art is the Issue: Histories and Theories
This unit concentrates on key developments in the history of art history as a discipline. The seminar centres on selected polemical texts and disputes in the discipline, to demonstrate that much of what all art historians do is contested and problematic. From the question of what we should study to the always vexed question of 'how' we should study it, the aim of this unit is to give you a sense of both the history and the problematic of the discipline in which you will be engaged whether you intend careers as scholars, researchers, curators, or art writers.
Image: Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia 1514
Roger Benjamin is an internationally renowned art historian. His research fields have included Matisse and the art of the Fauves; French Orientalist art and colonialism 1830-1930; contemporary Australian art, and contemporary Australian Indigenous art.
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