Peter Mark Wesleyan Mountains in the History of Art
Professor Combines Passions and Art; Students Publish Textbook on the Bailiwick
Editor Annotation: The author is this commodity is Peter Mark, a professor of Art History at Wesleyan Academy. He is author of five books about pre-colonial Africa, has taught in French republic, Germany, and Portugal. He lives in Connecticut and Strasbourg, France. He hikes, cross-country skis in the Catskills, the Vosges, and the Black Wood. He now climbs in the Italian Alps every summertime where he reports "the food is improve". We hope to publish the essays his students produce in his course, The Mountains and the History of Art, in the future.
In 2013, I decided to join 3 lifelong passions—hiking, climbing, and skiing—to my career every bit an fine art historian at Wesleyan University, by introducing a course on the mountains and the history of art. If y'all want to learn a new subject field, teach that subject.
Two central themes take emerged: mount passes are highways for motion of artistic styles, and the mountains are the apotheosis of "the Sublime." I expected also to teach my students basic hiking craft, replacing GPS with map and compass. Merely several of them are more experienced than me. 1 had climbed Mt McKinley, another was a mountain guide on Fundamental American volcanoes. I do good from my students' enthusiasm and their insights..
Since Moses climbed Mt. Sinai, peaks accept symbolized the Transcendent or the Holy. And since the first-century Romans constructed their Via Claudia Augusta across the Italian Alps, mountain passes have funneled the movement of people and culture. But interest in the peaks themselves dates just to the Enlightenment—the first climb of Mt Blanc was in 1786.
The mountains truly became a symbol of the Sublime, the Transcendent, in the 19th century. Wesleyan students study the Romantic era: the poetry of Wordsworth, Turner'due south magnificent mountain landscapes of chaotic storms, and Ruskin's philosophical writings about the natural world, all of which present mountains as a manifestation of the Sublime. In early on 19th Century America, "mountains" meant the Catskills. The crags and summits painted by Thomas Cole became a symbol of American identity—the wilderness, untrammeled and imperial. Just true Transcendence was nonetheless to be constitute in Europe, in the Alps. Some of the finest travel writing of the tardily 1800s comes from Marker Twain's account of the Alps.
Nosotros look at mountains as subjects for landscape painters, for poets, and for philosophical essays from Emerson to Twain. But we mix in a healthy dose of the history of mountaineering. Twain was 1 of the commencement authors to write on this discipline! We spend a week studying the British 1920s Everest expeditions. And we cover the history of skiing both in Republic of austria and in New England—some SeniorsSkiing.com readers will recall the ski school at Cranmore Mountain, where Hannes Schneider brought modern technique from the Vorarlberg to New Hampshire. Schneider's career, from ski teacher to film star in 1920s Austria, to refugee from Hitler, fills ane lecture.
Were I to teach "The Mountains and the History of Art" in German language, in that location would exist a wealth of literature, in English, less then. But my students have produced some wonderful essays for this course. At their suggestion, we decided to join a collection of the best essays. "Next autumn our book, "The Mountains and the History of Fine art" will be available both online via the Wesleyan University website and in a impress version, published past Wesleyan University Press.
Stay tuned for more insights about how mountains accept made an impact on fine art.
Credit: Peter Mark
Source: https://www.seniorsskiing.com/wesleyan-art-course/
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