Was your Art History class an endless succession of names and dates and movements? Art History doesn't have to be that way! We discuss new (and much more compelling) approaches the study of art.

Wassily Kandinsky: 6 Minute Art History Video

Our cultural perspectives shape how we perceive art, including who we see as contributing to its most important movements. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll get to the truth behind the creation of modernism and bust...

Art is the perfect tool for activists to get across their message and make people pay attention. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll learn about the centuries-long practice of iconoclasm, how art intersects with protest...

The Blue Rider Group in 5 Minutes How: Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc Paved the Way for Modern Art & Were Devastated by World War I

The painting was just too complex and detailed to deal with in fifteen minutes, so I made it in three parts.



There are no records to tell us what Bosch or his contemporaries were thinking. There are so many theories...

Women were excluded from almost all cultural and social resources in the centuries from 1400 to 1900 when so much of the world's great art was created. And visual art was almost entirely a male industry before modern times. Having...

Empathy is a term we hear a lot, but what does it mean and how does it work? Looking back through art history, we find many moments when art has allowed us to share in the feelings of others, from Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to...

Host Sarah Urist Green shares 40 reflections about art, gathered in the course of a career in art, art history, curating, and making videos about all of the above.

With 2017 comes great change. Assignments are ending, but the channel is not! Starting in March we’ll be focusing on "The Case for" videos, Art Trips, and other art and art history related topics. We're also starting an Art Assignment...

This video is about Jenny Saville's self-portrait "Propped", but it's also about art history. It's about philosophy. It's about the role art plays in representation and cultural narratives. It's about a lot of stuff.

A rabbit attempts to play a church organ, while a knight fights a giant snail and a naked man blows a trumpet with his rear end. These bizarre images, painted with squirrel-hair brushes on vellum or parchment by monks, nuns and urban...

What’s the line between inspiration and flat-out appropriation? In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we grapple with questions about artistic originality and authenticity that have plagued the art world for hundreds of years....

What makes a painting worth millions of dollars? In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’re looking at the history behind today’s art industry and how we determine an artwork’s financial value. We’ll also learn how the big...

How do smartphones and 3-D models change how we experience art? And even history itself? In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll learn how technology is shifting the ways we think about art’s past, present, and future....

From sunsets to double rainbows, nature’s full of beautiful things. So it’s not surprising that artists have found inspiration in Mother Nature for millennia. What is surprising is the wide variety of human concerns that nature art has...

Art tells the story of humanity across societies and cultures, but keeping that art around for future generations can be a monumental task. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll learn how art historians preserve, restore,...

Art is often understood as a solitary act of personal expression. But art is also the basis for community from Alaska to Mali — and from gay rights advocates to Frida Kahlo appreciators. In this episode we’ll learn how community is...

In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll keep digging into the myth of the Great Artist, with whether we can—or should—separate artists’ personal actions and beliefs from the art they create. Art historians are exploring new...

Did you know Kandinsky had synesthesia and painted the colors that heard while he listened to music? Learn about Kandinsky and the time in which he created art.

Migration is central to human experience, and art history reflects that. Skipping through time and geography, we explore Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, Lapita pottery, the Akbarnama, and the Mexica codex "Tira de la Peregrinación,"...

The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck has baffled art historians ever since it was painted in 1434. It has been dissected and analysed, maybe more than any other painting in history, and in the process, become even more mysterious....

Edward Hopper’s world was New York, and he understood that city more than most people. He understood that, even though you may live in one of the most crowded and busy cities on earth, it is still possible to feel entirely alone....

For much of human history, people made art by trying to represent the world as it appeared around them. Until about 100 years ago, when a bunch of artists stopped trying to do that. It was shocking then and it still upsets and confounds...