Art History & Archaeology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2744
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Item Synthesizing Transcendental Painting: Race, Religion, and Aesthetics in the Art of Emil Bisttram, Raymond Jonson, and Agnes Pelton(2010) Rees, Nathan; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Three core artists of the Transcendental Painting Group, Emil Bisttram (1895-1976), Raymond Jonson (1891-1982), and Agnes Pelton (1881-1961), employed modernist painting styles in an attempt to create spiritually significant art. Although previous scholarship has focused on the artists' formal innovations, their work was imbricated in contemporary cultural politics, actively participating in discourses surrounding conceptions of race, religion, aesthetics, and the interrelation of each of these realms. Each drew from sources in metaphysical religious literature, especially Theosophy and related traditions. Their theories of ideal aesthetics for religious art, based on the supposition that artists could convey direct emotional experience through abstraction, reflected the Theosophical drive to overcome materialist philosophy by transcending the limits of physicality. Bisttram, Pelton, and Jonson also internalized Theosophy's promotion of syncretism as a guiding principle, and followed metaphysical religionists in advocating a combinative appropriation from diverse religious and artistic traditions. In particular, they relied on Theosophical conceptions of the importance of gleaning allegedly ancient wisdom as they addressed American Indian cultures of the Southwest. Their art created a hybrid iconography, combining symbolic elements from metaphysical religious sources with imagery derived from Southwest Indian cultures, asserting an integral relationship between the two, and advancing the perceived agreement between Native American and Theosophical religious systems as evidence of the truth of the latter. In addition to expressing metaphysical interpretations of Native American religions in their work, they promoted a transcultural aesthetic that posited American Indian art as an archaic and therefore "authentic" means of expressing of spiritual wisdom; they modeled their own abstract aesthetics in response to their encounters with Indian art. As they appropriated from Native American sources, they created images that celebrated the indigenous peoples of the Southwest as possessing unique and important religious knowledge. Their intent, however, was to advance Western culture forward by drawing from ancient sources to create a new, synthetic religion. The result was an art that referenced American Indian cultural practices and art traditions, but gave no voice to the original Native American artists, claiming to transcend the sphere of cultural significance and approach the level of "universal" meaning.Item "The Imagery of the Ear:" Listening and Sound in American Art, 1847-1897(2010) Naeem, Asma; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)America's soundscape underwent tremendous changes from the mid-nineteenth century on: not only in terms of the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph, but also with the noises heard in the city streets, factories, and countryside nearby. During this period, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing explored the intersection of auditory experience and artistic production, creating complex works that gave visual form to the changing nature of sound and listening. All three painters pursued the representation of aurality as career-long endeavors, and developed distinct approaches and pictorial syntaxes. Homer, whose life and artistic outlook were marked by his experience as a traveling Civil War illustrator, painted the everyday sounds of laborers in the American countryside and out at sea in terms of issues related to distance and signaling over space. At a time when a growing number of people were communicating with one another with the aid of such machines as the telegraph and telephone, Homer's long-distance aural exchanges probe the human desire for connectivity, and its converse, separation. Eakins piques our aural imagination with the physiognomic and sartorial acuities of his musicians and singers, not to mention the mimeticism of their actions, and attempts to pack the parallel visual and aural experiences of realism tightly into his paintings, despite the limits of the medium. Transferring his photographic experiments of stopping the human body in mid-motion to the painterly stopping of musical sound in mid-song, Eakins's works evince his personal form of transcription. Whereas Eakins sought to unify the eye, ear, and hand in one split second of representation, Dewing sought to fragment aural moments to pictorialize the psychic effects of listening, and promote the vaults of the imagination. Most notably through attenuated sonic transmissions and the idea of pause, Dewing's representations of women in airless domestic interiors and atmospheric landscapes frequently evince a "pulling apart" of sight and sound that render his depictions of music and speech strangely quiet and unsettling. At the same time, these suspended aural scenarios help to cabin the women he so often portrayed.Item 'Signature Drawings:' Social Networks and Collecting Practices in Antebellum Albums(2008-06-05) Heyrman, Joy Peterson; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Characterized in their own time as "miniature and easily-attainable works of art," drawings by American artists of the antebellum period were prized by fellow artists as mementi of friendship and by collectors as marks of the artist's hand. This dissertation presents a broad examination of the social meanings and contemporary contexts of these quietly communicative works of art. Using archival and documentary evidence, it investigates rich spheres of activity in the "social lives" of drawings. Special qualities of the medium and particularities of drawings exchange informed their reception. In the public sphere of business and social transaction between artists and patrons, drawings functioned as "social currency," building a community connected through gift-giving and competitive collecting. Albums of drawings reflected social networks and communicated the owner's privileged access to artists who practiced that particularly intimate form of expression. Drawings were also displayed in the antebellum parlor, a private setting encoded with aspiration to personal refinement and social position. In that sphere, drawings served a didactic, regulatory function, presenting sentimental and moral themes that provided a visual buffer to the turbulent public history of the time. My study reveals that many of the drawings collected in antebellum albums were originals for images subsequently reproduced as giftbook illustrations or prints. This dissertation demonstrates that antebellum viewers perceived drawing and writing as aligned, complimentary modes of expression; similar motivations thus informed the collecting of drawings and autographs. As the pantheon of eminent Americans shifted to include artists, their drawings were prized as signature works reflecting "temperament and quality of mind." American art history has directed little attention to antebellum-period drawings. When it has done so, it has situated them primarily as studio tools or as preparatory works for paintings. I argue that album drawings occupied a different register of value altogether, connected to literature, illustration, parlor entertainment, and the collecting of celebrity autographs during a period of explosive growth in the production of visual imagery and in media coverage of American artists. I propose a social and cultural history of the period centered on drawing collecting as a reflection of individual aspirations and social values.Item Nurturing Change: Lilly Martin Spencer's Images of Children(2008-04-22) Napolitano, Laura Groves; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is the first full-length study to concentrate on American genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer's images of children, which constituted nearly one half of her saleable production during the height of her artistic career from 1848 to 1869. At this time, many young parents received advice regarding child rearing through books and other publications, having moved away from their families of origin in search of employment. These literatures, which gained in popularity from the 1830s onward, focused on spiritual, emotional, and disciplinary matters. My study considers four major themes from the period's writing on child nurture that changed over time, including depravity and innocence, parent/child bonding, standards of behavior and moral rectitude, and children's influence on adults. It demonstrates how Spencer's paintings, prints, and drawings featuring children supported and challenged these evolving ideologies, helping to shed light not only on the artist's reception of child-rearing advice, but also on its possible impact on her middle-class audience, to whom she closely catered. In four chapters, I investigate Spencer's images of sleeping children as visual equivalents of contemporary consolation literature during a time of high infant and child mortality rates; her paintings of parent/child interaction as promoting separation from mothers and emotional bonding with fathers; her prints of mischievous children as both considering changing ideals about children's behavior and comforting Anglo-American citizens afraid of what they saw as threatening minority groups; and her pictures with Civil War and Reconstruction subject matter as contending with the popular concept of the moral utility of children. By framing my interpretations of Spencer's output around key issues in the period's dynamic child-nurture literature, I advance new comprehensive readings of many of her most well-known paintings, including Domestic Happiness, Fi, Fo, Fum!, and The Pic Nic or the Fourth of July. I also consider work often overlooked by other art historians, but which received acclaim in Spencer's own time, including the lithographs of children made after her designs, and the allegorical painting Truth Unveiling Falsehood. Significantly, I provide the first in-depth analysis of a newly rediscovered Reconstruction-era painting, The Home of the Red, White, and Blue.Item The Aesthetics of Intoxication in Antebellum American Art and Culture(2007-04-24) Jordan, Guy Duane; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation, The Aesthetics of Intoxication in Antebellum American Art and Culture, proposes an ambitious re-evaluation of aesthetics in the United States between 1830 and 1860 that locates the consumption of images in relation to discourses of excess, addiction, and dependency. I uncover the antebellum period's physiological construction of looking as a somatic process akin to eating and drinking and offer a new definition of aesthetic absorption not merely as the disembodied projection of the viewer into a pictorial space, but as the corporeal ingestion of the image into the mind of the viewing subject. I demonstrate how this heretofore unstudied and historically-grounded alignment of aesthesis and alimentation played a crucial role in the production and reception of antebellum literature and visual culture. To this end, my dissertation stands as a broad-ranging cultural history that features fundamental reinterpretations of major works of art by Charles Deas, Thomas Cole, Hiram Powers, and Frederic Church.