Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Between Body and Spirit: Indian Influences on Modern Japanese Art(2024) Chiu, Chao Chi; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation contributes to ongoing examinations on modern transcultural exchanges between Japan and other Asian countries in the field of Japanese art by investigating the influence of India on itinerant Japanese artists throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, it challenges prevailing assumptions that Japanese artistic engagement with foreign culturesoperated entirely within an imperialistic context. Among the many Asian countries that served as sources of artistic inspiration for Japan, India stood out from the rest because of its esteemed spirituality in the eyes of Japanese intellectuals. Contemporary Japanese writings emphasized India’s importance as the birth place of Buddhism and framed the South Asian country as a bastion on Asian spiritual fortitude against the influx of Western materialism. Consequently, India also attracted Buddhist artists across Japan to visit its ancient temples and museums to its art. While these Japanese abroad expressed their admiration towards India’s religiosity and adherence to keeping its traditions alive, they also fantasized about the exoticism and corporeality embodied in Indian art and contemporary locals. Such fantasies were visualized intheir works in visual icons such as half-nude females with elaborate poses, Buddhist figures, including the Buddha himself, with exaggerated Indian ethnic features, and tropical plants and animals representing a long-lost past. I argue that Japanese adaption of Indian styles and themes into their art was characterized by a precarious harmony between spiritual and corporeal elements in the artist works. Furthermore, each artist defined “spirituality” and “corporeality” in distinct way, which led to diverse approaches. My dissertation revolved around four artists as case studies: Arai Kanpō, Nōsu Kōsetsu, Ishizaki Kōyō, and Sugimoto Tetsurō. By examining the careers, writings, and artworks of each artist, I will highlight how Japanese artists interpreted Indian materials and utilized them to create unconventional works. Furthermore, I would contextualize these artists’ work in the development of Japanese perspectives toward India throughout the twentieth century, expressed through contemporary writings that praised India for its spiritual fortitude but also denigrated them as an inferior Asian country. Examining the artists’ life and works in connection to changing perspectives towards India, Buddhism, and religious art in modern society, this dissertation explores the nuances of Japan’s artistic interaction with foreign materials beyond the context of colonialism and imperialism.Item WIFREDO LAM IS LIN FEILONG(2024) Pearson, Dominic M; Saggese, Jordana; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The paintings of the renowned artist Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) are sites for the intersection of modernism and multiculturalism. Inspired in part by Lam’s citations of African influence, many modern art historians consider Lam in terms of his engagements with syncretic Afro-diasporic religious practices in the Black Atlantic world, such as Santería in Cuba and Vodun in Haiti. However, scholars have not adequately explored his relationship to the Asian diaspora. Lam’s unique identity as a product of the Chinese diaspora remains greatly understudied. While most analyses mention Lam’s Chinese ancestry solely in terms of his biography, this thesis examines the artist’s production in the early 1940s from the perspective of his formalist, familial, and conceptual Chinese influences. More specifically, I highlight details from his landmark 1942 painting The Jungle that explicitly depend upon Chinese calligraphy, hieroglyphics, and historical events. Using documentation from Lam’s closest companions, artist interviews, biographies, and visual analysis, I underscore connections between his painting techniques and his Chinese spiritual practice derived from the I-Ching. Taken together with his brushwork and symbolism, Lam’s work invites us to look more closely at the influence of Chinese culture throughout his career.Item Zhang Daqian’s Landscape Painting Style in the Taiwanese Period (1976–1983)(2024) Cheng, Haojian; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Zhang Daqian (張大千 Chang Dai-Chien), one of the few internationally renowned Chinese artists of the twentieth century, captivated a global audience with his eclectic blend of styles that masterfully merged the ancient with the modern and the Chinese with the Western. His Taiwanese period (1976–1983) stands out as a unique phase in his career, when he created a remarkable fusion of styles. Despite its significance, this period remains largely underexplored in Western scholarship. This thesis begins with an account of each stylistic period in Zhang’s career before his Taiwanese period, emphasizing the foundations that underpin Zhang’s stylistic convergence. I then analyze his stylistic characteristics in the Taiwanese period, setting them in the context of Zhang’s political views, his unparalleled status in Chinese art historiography, his relationships with Eastern patrons and connoisseurs, and his response to detractors who cast doubt upon his artistic prowess in old age. The thesis concludes with a comprehensive interpretation of Zhang Daqian’s Panorama of Mount Lu 廬山圖, which, I argue, masterfully epitomizes his life’s voyage and final years in Taiwan.Item Formative Figures: Elderly Women in The Art of Rembrandt and His Leiden Circle(2024) Hughes, Alyssa Marie; Wheelock, Jr., Arthur K.; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the roles of personal connections as well as social and cultural influences in the paintings, etchings, and drawings of elderly women that Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) and his circle made in Leiden. Together, as part of the creative exchange they developed during the 1620s and early 1630s, Rembrandt and his early comrade Jan Lievens (1607–1674) created many images of aged women that are exceptional in their compassionate character. Rembrandt also shared his fascination with these subjects with his first student, Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), whose later genre scenes that feature older women, from the 1650s and 1660s, are similarly humane. Through an examination of their portrayals of these subjects in their tronies, history paintings, and scenes based on everyday life, and the interactions they had in Leiden, this dissertation seeks to provide a greater understanding of the body of influences that shaped these artists’ distinctly sympathetic approach to elderly women in their art.Item Embodied Ecologies: Performance Art and Environmentalism, 1970-1990(2024) Nguyen, Melanie; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how U.S. artists used performance strategies in their work to critically examine human relations with the natural world in the 1970s and 1980s. It is structured around three case studies: Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939), and Maren Hassinger (b. 1947), each of whom worked at the intersection of performance and environmental art and has been neglected by histories of these movements. This dissertation contextualizes these artists’ work within the history of American environmental activism and contemporary environmental theory that refuses a binaristic divide between the human and nonhuman. During this period, the exclusive focus of mainstream environmental groups on conservation and wilderness protection was challenged and broadened to incorporate concerns about pollution, public health, and racial equity. Responding to this time of rapidly shifting conceptions of the natural environment and increasing awareness of the deleterious effects of toxic pollution on human bodies, these artists took on animallike personae, mimed the work of environmental laborers, and created movement in response to natural materials to scrutinize the relationship between their bodies and nature. Among the first to center women and women of color artists in environmental art history, this study challenges traditional narratives of postwar American art that position environmental and performance art as distinct fields. In bridging performance and environmental art, this dissertation renegotiates the boundaries of environmental discourse and how it circulated in advanced art of the period, moving beyond a narrow focus on Land art in the American West. The coda explores how this work has great relevance in the art of today, as artists respond to natural threats that again feel immediate and experienced differently across socioeconomic groups.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 Evolution and Eternity in the Landscape of Defeat: Yokoyama Taikan and Mt. Fuji(2023) Mastrandrea, Magdalena; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The end of the Fifteen Year War in August 1945 abruptly dismantled the ideology of art in service of the empire that established Japanese painters had worked under for over a decade. During this time, Yokoyama Taikan, a figurehead of the Nihonga painting genre who infamously called on artists to support the war effort, displayed hyper-nationalist paintings of Mt. Fuji, an icon synonymous with the nation of Japan. As droves of American Occupiers entered the country following Japan’s surrender, artists like Taikan quickly began to adjust their public image to avoid consequences. Yet only two years later, Taikan painted and displayed Landscape of the Four Seasons, an 88-foot-long scroll painting progressing through scenes of mountains, forests, rivers, and most notably, beginning with Mt. Fuji. Although painted in the midst of the Allied Occupation of Japan, when all Japanese media was subjected to strict censorship, Taikan’s use of Fuji at the beginning of this composition blatantly recalls his wartime paintings of the mountain. Despite this, he successfully exhibited Landscape of Four Seasons at the 1947 Japan Visual Arts Academy exhibition, or Inten, the first full-scale Inten since Japan’s surrender. In my analysis of this image, I begin by introducing compositionally similar Mt. Fuji paintings from before the war’s end to establish Taikan as a vehemently nationalistic artist who glorified the empire in the image of Fuji. Through examining the iconography and display of Landscape of the Four Seasons, painted in the dramatically shifted political climate of 1947, I argue that the image of Mt. Fuji, only recently associated with extreme nationalism and militarism, evolved rapidly after Japan’s surrender into a symbol of hope and resilience. The idealistic, symbolic nature of Nihonga painting allowed Taikan to exploit Fuji’s new meaning in defense of his wartime endeavors. Therefore, his Occupation era landscapes of the exact same subject matter evaded suspicion. Landscape of the Four Seasons is evidence of this phenomenon and of Taikan’s full reentry into the mainstream Japanese art world because of its display in the Inten, where it attracted significant attention. In addressing this, I explore the evolution of Mt. Fuji as an icon in the eyes of the Japanese and Americans alike, defining its new symbolism in the postwar period.Item Swinging, Stillness, and Self-Reflection: An Experiential Approach to Campanian Oscilla(2023) May, Mekayla; Gensheimer, Maryl B.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Modern studies of Roman oscilla, in their focus on the Latin etymology of the term and their treatment of the iconography as standardized Dionysiac imagery, neglect the animation of—and subsequent viewer engagement with—the objects themselves. Oscilla were double-sided marble reliefs suspended in the intercolumniations of predominantly domestic atria and peristyles. This thesis develops an experiential methodology to study the oscillum’s form, context, and disposition and examines their presence in elite and sub-elite houses and in atria and peristyles. The traditional view has characterized oscilla as commodified ancient agrarian ornaments that depict standardized imagery fit for a garden space; I argue in this thesis that the oscillum’s presence within such inherently social spaces as the Roman atrium and peristyle warrants more scrutiny. No two discovered oscilla are the same, and it is the varied imagery and forms that visually and mentally stimulate the Roman viewer as he waits in the reception spaces of the atrium and peristyle to conduct business with the head of the household.I discuss the oscilla programs of three Campanian houses, where oscilla are displayed in various parts of the Roman house, in houses of diverse social strata, and in different levels of quality. My first case study, the House of the Telephus Relief in Herculaneum, offers an opportunity to begin reconstructing a wealthy ancient viewer’s cognitive experience as four tondi oscilla are reinstalled in situ. These oscilla depict scenes of active movement, urging the viewer’s physical engagement alongside his intellectual recognition of proper decorum in the socially and politically charged space of the atrium. In my second case study, I investigate the oscilla program in the peristyle of the House of Marcus Lucretius in Pompeii, where images of solitary masks and instruments provoke theatrical participation and recollection; the oscilla frame and simultaneously disrupt the framing of the theatrical garden to draw attention to the aristocratic viewer’s participation in social performances. Finally, at the House of Fortune in Pompeii, a freedman involved in trade commissioned numerous albeit poor-quality oscilla that pair scenes of conflict with those of cooperation to convince the viewer of the patron’s social and civic participation in the domestic sphere. Together, these case cases demonstrate the oscillum, a unique double-sided and suspended decorative object, inherently mobile and mutable, offered multifaceted experiences between the object’s two sides and for many different types of Roman viewers.Item Nature and Power: The Game Sill Lifes of Jan Weenix (1641-1719)(2023) Altizer, Kathleen Joanna; Wheelock, Arthur K; Colontuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Dutch artist Jan Weenix (1641-1719) was the most successful game painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Specializing in large-scale still lifes that foregrounded naturalistically depicted game arranged before ornate garden views, these innovative images were highly sought after by wealthy merchants, Dutch nobles, and German princes alike. Despite the renown of Weenix’s art in his own time and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these paintings have never been the focus of in-depth critical analysis. Scholarship on Weenix has mostly concentrated on his early Italianate landscapes and his wall panels, while interpretations of his game paintings have almost exclusively focused on their place within the long tradition of dead animal painting in Northern art, beginning with sixteenth-century Flemish market scenes. This dissertation departs from this approach by arguing that Weenix’s game paintings are best understood within the dramatic cultural shifts and political upheavals of William III’s stadholderate (1672-1702). It was during this period that Weenix first specialized in game paintings. At this time, estate ownership, hunting, and garden design were becoming newly significant performances of authority, wealth, and power, both among members of the wealthy merchant patriciate and at William III’s court. Tracing Weenix’s evolution as a game painter alongside the cultural-political history of Dutch hunting practices and gardens, I explore the nuanced ways in which Weenix’s art drew from a myriad of contemporary visual sources to stylistically and conceptually promote his patrons’ belonging to a community of pan-European elites. I show how merchant collectors sought out Weenix’s game paintings as representations of estate ownership, which had become an increasingly significant marker of inherited wealth and dynastic privilege among the merchant class. In the same period, hunting and garden art became invested with new political meanings as Stadtholder William III made hunting a centerpiece of Dutch court life for the first time, while his courtiers developed magnificent gardens to celebrate his military achievements. I prove that Weenix’s art directly refers to these activities and spaces, enabling those inside and outside the court to adopt the imagery of political power to promote their own status. Combining a sustained visual analysis of Weenix’s game paintings with an in-depth study of his patronage, I demonstrate how Weenix’s art reflected and furthered the aspirations of his patrons, and consequently participated in the construction of elite social identities. I conclude that, through Weenix’s art, collectors claimed the right to to exercise control over nature, identifying themselves with pan-European nobility and ultimately illustrating their participation in the establishment of cultural and political hegemony over their domains.Item By the Book: Early Modern Women's Artistic Education and the Silent Instruction of Print Culture(2023) Haselberger, Mallory Nicole; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Across early modern Europe, the use of the hand as a tool, full of vigor, and comparatively, attentive to both medium and content, remained at the forefront of artistic practice. For many artists, particularly women, a question of refining the skilled work of the hand became central to understanding the gendered nature of art itself and the limits of contemporary artistic education. This thesis broadly considers the changing nature of women’s artistic education between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guided by the work of the woman artist through print culture and self-instruction. With central case studies exploring the artistic texts of Giovanna Garzoni, Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron, and Catherine Perrot, this thesis traces the private means by which women artists utilized rising access to print culture for artistic instruction in domestic spaces, commensurate with mass production and expansion of printed volumes in Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.