UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item New Womanhood and the Bauhaus: The Avant-Garde Photography of Lucia Moholy(2019) Chamberlain-Stoltzfus, Eleanor Janet; Mansbach, Steven; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the years 1922–1928, Lucia Moholy operated as an independent photographer at the Bauhaus School in Germany, capturing images of students’ and masters’ art objects, inventively recording the defining architectural elements of the school, and pursuing her own experiments in portraits and photograms. Immersed in the dynamic, radical environment of the Bauhaus, Moholy explored the potential for modernist representative photography. From images capturing the avant-garde building designs of the Bauhaus to portraits sensitively exploring the phenomenon of the New Woman, Moholy’s oeuvre demonstrates her innovative engagement with contemporary artistic and cultural concerns. This dissertation seeks to reclaim Moholy’s place as the foundational figure for photography at the Bauhaus and argues for the radicality and unrestrained modernity of her artistic output. Given the continued effacement of Lucia Moholy’s significant contribution to German modernism, this dissertation serves as a historiographical correction. Asserting Moholy’s central importance to the development of a photographic discipline at the Bauhaus, I demonstrate her impact as a pioneering female professional photographer in a field dominated by men. Moholy’s portraits and architectural photographs serve as testament to her unique experience of the Bauhaus and celebrate both the institution’s and her own modernity, and the free lifestyle each advanced. For younger female photographers who would matriculate at the Bauhaus, Moholy served as a powerful exemplar for considering the world through a multivalent female perspective, unrestricted by the domineering masculinity of the Bauhaus. In reconsidering Moholy’s oeuvre, I also situate her contextually within the German avant-garde and consider the individual interpretations of New Womanhood by Moholy and her contemporaries. Moholy’s photographs possess a rich multiplicity of meaning, revealing layers upon layers. They are simultaneously experimental portraits of people and buildings, grounded in Weimar avant-garde expression, and memorializations that build a concrete history and contribute to the Weimar cultural archive. Arguing for Moholy’s innovation, her engagement with avant-garde trends in 1920s Europe, and her creation of a representational modernism, this dissertation interrupts the canon of Modernist scholarship and prompts a rethinking of Lucia Moholy’s contribution to photographic experimentation at the Bauhaus.Item Competing Constructivisms: Modern Architecture and Design in Japan and Korea, c. 1925-1940(2015) Kim, Suzie; Mansbach, Steven A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on a set of dynamic Japanese and Korean architects and artists who, during the interwar period, actively adopted and transformed the principles of Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and International Architecture into their own artistic style. This study provides the first comprehensive study of the multifaceted connections between Europe, Japan, and Korea to explore the richness of this relatively underrepresented, but decisive, modern aesthetic impulse. Prior to and during the period of the activities of the two major architectural groups in Japan, Bunriha Kenchikukai (1920-1928) and the Sousha (1923-1932), Yamaguchi Bunzo (1902-1978), the leader of the Sousha, demonstrated a strong commitment to Marxism and promoted gorishugi kenchiku (rationalist architecture), which acted on his vision of social transformation through a rationalist and functional approach to architectural design. In contrast, Yamawaki Iwao (1898-1987) enjoyed a rather socially neutral perspective of Constructivism and searched for a synthesis between the principles of the Bauhaus style and traditional Japanese interior designs of private houses. Furniture designer Kurata Chikatada (1895-1966), the leader of Keiji Kobo (1928-1940), employed the idea of standardization derived from the Bauhaus workshops, and tried to find a way to mass-produce handcrafts. Whereas Yamaguchi, Yamawaki, and Kurata used Constructivism to open up a wide field of modernist opportunity and inventiveness, Korean architects and artists, who worked under circumstances defined mostly by the colonial status of the nation, embraced the international movement only in a rather informative and redemptive way--a "local" way to assert a suppressed national dynamism. The first generation of Korean architects, which included Park Gil-ryong (1898-1943) and Park Dong-jin (1899-1981), suggested a way to incorporate the qualities of Constructivist style into Korean homes. Korean artists Lee Sun-seok (1905-1986) and Yoo Youngkuk (1916-2002), who studied in Tokyo during the 1930s, adapted the Constructivist style to suit the local customs and artistic conventions of Korea after they returned to their homeland. This comparative study will provide new insights into the history of modern architecture and design in Japan and Korea and a reassessment of the significance of these architects and designers who, from the mid-1920s, contributed to make Constructivism internationally recognized.Item "A New Unity!" The Art and Pedagogy of Josef Albers(2004-08-10) Adler, Esther D; Mansbach, Steven A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Josef Albers had an extensive and prolific career, both as an artist and a teacher. He was a crucial member of the faculties of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Yale University, producing a varied and ground-breaking body of his own work simultaneously. Albers's pedagogical philosophies were remarkably consistent throughout his teaching career, and all of his artwork reflects these philosophies to some degree. However, the artist's early engraved glass works, created while at the Bauhaus, and his later, architecturally-based sculptures were by far the most successful in communicating his message of the orderly, reasoned world he hoped transform through his art. Josef Albers was intent on challenging his viewer's "way of seeing," and he was able to accomplish this through his works with underlying architectural connections. These works allowed him to control the way they were perceived, and, by extension, the world seen figuratively through them.