Art History & Archaeology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2744
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Item Made Visible: Women Artists and the Performance of Femininity in Modern Japanese Art, 1900-1930(2024) Wies, Lillian T; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a new framework for understanding individual Japanese women artists’ work and the systems of gender oppression that characterized modern Japanese art. It does so by engaging with the visualization of Japanese women artists in the early twentieth century. In response to societal anxiety about the increase of women artists in the perceived male domain of the professional art world, women artists were pressured to conform to standards of normative femininity. Those standards, I argue, can be united under a single archetype, the “female artist,” which came to dominate the visual representation and social imagining of women artists. This study offers a nuanced investigation into the reciprocal relationship between women artists and the “female artist” by focusing on four establishment women painters: Kajiwara Hisako, Shima Seien, Yoshida Fujio, and Kametaka Fumiko. Chapter One establishes the ideological grounding that defined women artists by their gender and pressured them to perform hegemonic femininity, thereby creating the marginalized “female artist” archetype. Chapter Two explores the “female artist” as a visual type, established through photographic reproductions of women artists in women’s magazines and by a painted representation of the type by Kajiwara Hisako. The chapter evaluates the complex ways women artists participated in the construction of the visual type, arguing that women made micro-adjustments to the type that valorized women’s artistic skill even as they upheld oppressive gender ideals. Chapter Three details Shima Seien’s use of self-portraiture to protest the dehumanizing elements of the “female artist” archetype and assert an alternative vision of herself as an artist and individual. Chapter Four considers Yoshida Fujio’s embrace of the “female artist” as part of a journey towards personal and artistic self-determination. The Coda uses the case study of Kametaka Fumiko and the false attribution of her self-portrait, Hanare yuku kokoro, to her deceased husband, Watanabe Yohei, to reflect on how the “female artist” archetype continues to diminish women artists’ position within scholarship. The goal of this study is to make visible the diverse ways modern Japanese women artists negotiated systemic gender discrimination in an effort to recover a sense of their agency and individuality.Item NEITHER WOMAN NOR MAN: NEGOTIATIONS OF THE THIRD SEX IN WESTERN VISUAL CULTURE, 1900-1930(2022) Cope, Ashley Lynn; Korobkin, Tess; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As concepts that differ across history and between cultures—even diverging radically within a single time and place—sex, gender, and desire are most accurately understood when examined through a historically and culturally specific lens. This thesis directs that lens towards the intersection of sexology and art in early-twentieth-century France with a specific interest in representations of the third-sex subject in visual culture. Classified as neither women nor men by sexologists, members of the third sex at the turn of the twentieth century occupied a turbulent middle-ground between masculinity and femininity, and defied sexual and romantic social norms. Early sexology produced a plethora of images to serve as evidence of the innate nature of sexual desire and gender identity, and queer artists consuming sexologists’ work responded in kind with artistic works that grappled with theories of gender and sexual identity. This study deepens art historical engagement with images that contributed to and were influenced by sexology discourse in the early-twentieth century; artists like Romaine Brooks, Berenice Abbott, and Claude Cahun negotiated sexological theories about sex and gender in artworks that challenge binary conceptions of identity and make visible the third-sex subject.Item THE BINARY GAME: EMANCIPATORY ACTION IN THE PERFORMANCES OF YOKO ONO AND TAKAKO SAITO(2021) Rasmussen, Claire; Saggese, Jordana; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the ways in which the artists Yoko Ono and Takako Saito used intermedia art to communicate a vision of racial and gender equity. My study will draw from archival materials and personal correspondence, and will focus on three main works: Yoko Ono’s Morning Piece (1964/1965), Takako Saito’s Flux Chess series (c. 1965), and Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set (1966). I argue that Ono and Saito associate gender with ideologies of peace and care characterize the phenomenology of their performances, imbuing feminist ethics into the very structure of the performance itself. I argue that Ono and Saito reinterpret gendered power dynamics to create new forms of social relationship centered around feminist values.Item AMBIGUOUS BODIES: GENDER NON-CONFORMITY AND BODILY TRANSFORMATION IN EARLY MODERN ITALIAN ART(2020) Berkowitz, Sara K.; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines images of ambiguously gendered human bodies in early modern Italian art (1600-1750). Specifically, it explores how artists rendered bodies that underwent a physical change, transforming from conforming men and women into ambiguous or gender-fluid entities. However, the alterations to these figures’ forms did not relegate them to the period’s third category of gender, the hermaphrodite. Rather, they entered into liminal spaces between the defined boundaries of male and female. Focusing on Italy and its interactions with other European centers, including England and Spain, I explore the ways in which artists constructed a new visual language for the portrayal of ambiguously gendered bodies by turning to a variety of novel sources. In particular, I examine artists’ use of medical knowledge from treatises on congenital diseases, anatomical illustrations, and surgical manuals. In combination with artists’ use of classicizing myths and religious doctrines, these medical sources enabled artists to render figures as recognizable derivations from the natural order, while still retaining attributes of their humanity. Three case studies demonstrate how these issues manifested on the painted surface: Jusepe de Ribera’s portrait of Magdalena Ventura and Her Husband (1631); Jacopo Amigoni’s Musical Portrait Group: The Singer Farinelli and Friends (1750–1752); and Giovanni Andrea Coppola’s altarpiece Martyrdom of Saint Agatha (1650). The subjects of these paintings—hirsutes (figures whose hair covers the entire body or face), castrati (male singers who were castrated before reaching puberty so that their voices would remain at a prepubescent height and pitch), and Saint Agatha (an early Christian virgin martyr whose breasts were amputated) demonstrate how slippages between conforming male and female bodies existed across early modern life and belief. Drawing from the fields of Art History, Social History, Gender Studies, History of Medicine, and Literature, this dissertation elucidates the early modern preoccupation with understanding bodily difference—a preoccupation, I argue, of equal importance for artists, philosophers, and medico-philosophers as studying and representing the ideal Renaissance body. This project, therefore, presents an opportunity to reconsider the parallels between early modern definitions of non-conforming bodies and issues surrounding gender identity in contemporary society.Item Beautiful Fictions: Composing the Artificial in the Work of Mickalene Thomas(2015) Shine, Tyler; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis considers three paintings by the contemporary African American artist Mickalene Thomas. I argue that Thomas uses collage to analyze and highlight the socially constructed nature of identities and surroundings. I propose that collage functions in three ways in Thomas’s work: as a medium, an artistic strategy, and a metaphor for the multiple states of being in the world. Thomas refracts the art historical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life through a black, queer, female lens that presents the complexities of black female subjectivities. However, the paucity of critical literature on Thomas’s work is indicative of a broader problem in contemporary art historical discourse when interpreting works by Black artists and often requires these artists to foreground their cultural and physical differences. This thesis redresses the simplistic interpretations of Thomas’s work by demonstrating the breadth and depth of her conceptual interests and in doing so argues that her works are propositions for how we might conceptualize the history of art.Item Through the Looking Glass: Race and Gender in the Reception of Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Mark Tobey(2012) Gohari, Sybil Elizabeth; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through an examination of the art world reception of four nonfigurative American artists, this dissertation determines that concerns about race and gender are ever-present, and affected how onlookers interpreted the artists' creations. By focusing on the critical, academic, and market reception of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Norman Lewis (1909-1979), Alma Thomas (1891-1978), and Mark Tobey (1890-1976), I conclude that the malleable components of race and gender, elements connected by difference and relegation, fluctuate in the reception. As such, at times race and gender manifest overtly, while at other times, they play indirect roles in the reception of the artists. Further, my work illuminates the fact that later critics and scholars recycled the terminology and ideas about race and gender included in the early reception. I form a nuanced picture of the lives, careers, and output of these artists, underscoring the subjective and manipulated aspects of reception. This layer of detail distinguishes this dissertation from other studies of these artists. I adopt key methodologies, which enable this close consideration of the fine distinctions in their reception. Feminist analysis, reception theory, and auction market analysis uniquely intersect to create a complicated yet clarified picture of reception as a confluence of manipulation factors. I unravel the concept of "art world," to show that this entity is composed of a variety of subgroups, with diverse opinions. The recognition of these variations enables this nuanced understanding of reception. This aspect of my work, as well, is distinctive, and even has broad applications within the field of art history. Exploring in detail how critics and scholars interpreted and constructed the artists and their output, I present the mechanics of race and gender in the reception of four diverse artists. I underscore the structures of power inherent in the categories of identity, and how hierarchies are used to integrate and relegate artists to the margins. This dissertation shows that even within the scope of nonfigurative art creations, interpreters infuse race and gender into their readings of the objects. My work demonstrates the extent to which identity was a core value for twentieth-century critics and scholars.