Research Areas: visual arts, tensions and crises in late medieval and Renaissance art
Reindert Falkenburg seeks to engage the entire faculty and student body in innovative and interesting research, exploring cross-discipline collaborations across the faculty and encouraging undergraduate students to participate in research.
Falkenburg's own research explores the visual arts primarily from the perspective of image/viewer relationships. He studies tensions and crises in late medieval and Renaissance art, in particular, the role of the visual arts in the aesthetic, religious, moral and spiritual formation of early modern man.
His scholarly interest regard especially works by 16th century Dutch and Flemish masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. His books include The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450-1550.
Currently, he is finishing a monographic study, titled Mirror of Mirrors: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Most recently, Falkenburg served as chair of the Art History Department at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Before that he was Professor of Western Art and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California; Deputy Director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History; and Research Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
Falkenburg teaches The Idea of the Portrait, a class on one of the most fundamental forms of human expression in art. Falkenburg holds his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, and masters and undergraduate degrees from Gronigen University in the Netherlands.
Courses Taught
These courses offer detailed engagements with key works of art - masterpieces to material culture across a range of media from different times and places - to develop the critical apparatus of visual analysis. They introduce the methods and fundamental concepts of art history by taking one work of art and constructing around it a web of diverse objects and practices that allow us to grapple with the meanings of art and its histories within global and trans-historical perspectives. Among the questions we ask throughout the course are: What is art? What is art history? What are the institutions that shape the practice and dissemination of art? How is art affected by histories of cultural exchange? What is the nature of tradition? The course will be conducted through both lecture and discussion. Evaluation will be through written assignments, PowerPoint presentations, and active class participation. No previous knowledge of art history is required.
Previously taught: Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024
Spring 2025;
14 Weeks Gina Junghee Choi
-
MW 12:45 - 14:00
Taught in Abu Dhabi
This course appears in...
Majors > Art and Art History
These courses offer detailed engagements with key works of art masterpieces to material culture across a range of media from different times and places to develop the critical apparatus of visual analysis. They introduce the methods and fundamental concepts of art history by taking one work of art and constructing around it a web of diverse objects and practices that allow us to grapple with the meanings of art and its histories within global and trans-historical perspectives. Among the questions we ask throughout the course are: What is art? What is art history? What are the institutions that shape the practice and dissemination of art? How is art affected by histories of cultural exchange? What is the nature of tradition? The course will be conducted through both lecture and discussion. Evaluation will be through written assignments, PowerPoint presentations, and active class participation. No previous knowledge of art history is required.
Previously taught: Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2023, Spring 2024
This course appears in...
Majors > Art and Art History
What does art do to us? This course centers on the concept of "Art and Agency," coined by anthropologist Alfred Gell, which holds that art works carry an agency factor that affects human beings - their mode of thinking, their emotions, their actions, their aesthetic experience. This concept has impacted the way art historians, in academia and the professional museum world, think about and display works of art. Through class discussions and visits to the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum, the course will examine a host of related ideas: the rhetorical concept of "energeia," camouflage, iconoclasm, "animism" in prehistoric rock art, Western and Asian landscape imagery, medieval relics and miracle imagery, anthropomorphism and witchcraft in the early modern period, and the idea of "living presence" in abstract expressionism.
Previously taught: January 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021
This course appears in...
Core Curriculum > Cultural Exploration and Analysis
Majors > Art and Art History > Art History Electives