Course results for Curtin University Art history Subjects

Witness the impact history, aesthetics and politics has had on Indigenous Australian art practice. Visit the pre-colonial era. Examine artistic representations of The Dreaming. See how Indigenous Australians have wielded art to create commentary.

Travel back through centuries of art history. Traverse European and Eastern countries as you learn what inspired and influenced artistic movements. Identify hallmarks of artworks created under the banner of modernism, romanticism and expressionism.

Take a closer look at Australian art through the years. Jump from pre-colonial times to the dawn of modernism and through to today. Explore the successes of Aboriginal art on the global stage. Analyse it all from philosophical and historical viewpoints.

Engage with what beauty can mean in relation to philosophy and aesthetics. Look back on historical conceptions of beauty. Examine landscapes, religion and the body. Tie these thoughts back to how the art world has represented beauty across the ages.

Question the last fifty years of arts practice from social, political and cultural points of view. Put recurring themes in contemporary art up for discussion. Dig into modernism and post-modernism. Focus your art history study on theory and context.

Grow an understanding of humanity’s attitude towards landscape and beauty. Explore Japanese ideas of beauty and the natural world. Unpack the western ideal of the Garden of Eden and how it impacts historical and contemporary gardening practices.

Strut through the decades of the 20th century while examining the collision of art and fashion. Walk the catwalks of 1920’s Paris. Witness the birth of ‘cool’ fashion in the sixties. Analyse how fashion intersects with consumerism and visual culture.

Visualise the changing world of the 19th and early 20th centuries and discover its impact on artistic expression. Be there for the birth and death of the avant-garde movement. Measure the effects that rapid technological change had on the art world.