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1. The post-war situation in American and European art and its historical context; Abstract Expressionism and Clement Greenberg’s formalism; Hard-Edge Painting, Color Field Painting, Art Informel, Tachisme, Lyrical Abstraction, and Art Brut.
2. Post-war art in Czechoslovakia. The 1950s and the doctrine of Socialist Realism. The official and unofficial art scenes. The second wave of Surrealism. The Ra Group. Independent artists. Modernism and art groups of the second half of the 1950s. Expo 58 and the Brussels Style.
3. Minimalism, Kinetic Art, and Op Art. The emergence of these movements and their leading representatives.
4. Neo-Dada and Nouveau Réalisme. Pop Art in Great Britain and the United States; new sources of art. Czech parallels. New Figuration and its European context.
5. Action Art, the Fluxus movement, programs, manifestos, and festivals. Body Art and Viennese Actionism. Conceptual Art and its challenge to the institutional framework of the art world. Czech responses to these artistic movements.
6. Land Art in Europe and the United States.
7. Introduction to Postmodernism. Criticism of Alfred H. Barr’s modernist (evolutionary) concept and Clement Greenberg’s formalism; the relationship of postmodern thought to the concepts of originality, authenticity, and the authority of tradition. Postmodern methods of appropriation and stylistic eclecticism. Definition of the two main tendencies of Postmodernism: critical (poststructuralist) Postmodernism vs. neoconservative Postmodernism.
10. Postmodern art in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Developments in art since the 1990s.
11. Installation Art. From Post-Minimalism to the art of degradation. Themes of identity, corporeality, and the subconscious in art from the 1970s to the 1990s. The contemporary concept of “sculpture in the expanded field.”
12. Art and electronic media; the medium of photography in the era of the digital image. Video Art and video installation from their beginnings to the present day. Developments worldwide and in the Czech lands.
13. Expanding geographical boundaries. Art in the era of Postcolonialism. The archival impulse, the historiographic turn, and modernology in art. Examining the institutional framework of art in the 20th and 21st centuries. The anthropological model of project-based art and the artist as curator. Contemporary forms of socially engaged and participatory art.