This course explores artists' complex renderings of the humanity of city life from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Art represents the city in ways that go beyond quantifiable measures, serving as a record of subjective experience and providing a rich picture of how humans live in cities such as St. Petersburg and London.
Poet Charles Baudelaire celebrates how crowds impact his imagination. Author Daniel Defoe dramatizes the freedom the city offers people who want to change their identities. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believes that the city is like the mind: a receptacle for the past, as well as for hidden lives and passions.
The course also includes an examination of how urban culture has changed, from commercial to industrial to corporate.