Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Filters

20041

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Walz, Jonathan FrederickSubject: search.filters.subject.Egyptomania

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Riddle of the Sphinx or "It Must Be Said": Charles Demuth's My Egypt Reconsidered
    (2004-12-14) Walz, Jonathan Frederick; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My Egypt, 1927, is one of the largest, best known, and arguably most misunderstood works by American modernist Charles Demuth. Past interpretations of the painting have focused on the visual similarity of the depicted grain elevators to architectural wonders of the ancient world and/or on the ironic juxtaposition of image and title. Building upon these analyses, this thesis proposes three nexuses of inquiry that illuminate My Egypt. Deriving from recent critical theory on gender and phenomenology, the first section of the thesis reads the image as a performative self-portrait. The second section considers the underexamined religious tradition of the artist as important to elucidating the picture's meaning. Finally, the third section investigates the artist's relationship to Egypt and the early twentieth-century phenomenon of Egyptomania, using seven associative connotations for the African country to explain the complexity of Demuth's masterpiece.