Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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.
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Item Art as Architecture: Abstract Modernist Painting Techniques and the Viewer Experience(2023) McClure, Katherine; Tilghman, James; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The reciprocal relationship between art and architecture has been a longstanding practice in the design process of both fields. The geometric forms, textures, and colors of various forms of art, but especially painting, have been known to inspire the architectural design process. Similarly, the shape and environmental experience of buildings can inspire or host works of art. Certain paintings, like those of Mark Rothko, are often cited in foundational architectural courses as examples of comprehensive and layered forms suggestive of architecture. However, these references are not typically taken beyond the parti phase in the early stages of architectural design. But how far can this reciprocal inspiration be taken? How can architecture evolve as not just a place for art, but as art itself? This thesis will explore the ways in which the abstract modernist painting techniques of the late works of Mark Rothko can affect the compositional form and experience of a mixed-use artist residency in Georgetown, DC.Item VERY ANXIOUS PEOPLE: ALICE NEEL’S LATE PORTRAITS(2022) Callahan, Maura; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the mid- to late 1960s, as her previously underrecognized work as a painter started to secure visibility in the art world, the American portraitist Alice Neel (1900-1984) began to minimize her subjects’ physical environments, often leaving the surrounding area a blank white field. She instead concentrated her paint within the figure, the boundaries of which became emphasized by a vivid blue outline. This attention to the figure and its borders reveals a critical nuancing of the humanist ideals her paintings purportedly defended. Rather than merely affirming the autonomy of the human subject, Neel's late portraits suggest an anxiety toward the coherence of selfhood and its sheltering within the body. This essay considers a small selection of these paintings, created between 1965 and 1982, alongside the work of preceding and contemporary artists who used portraiture to work through Western culture’s shifting conceptions of the human subject to different ends. These studies ultimately explore the possibilities and limitations of portraiture in revealing and validating the subject, and how these challenges were negotiated by Neel during the culturally transformative decades which coincided with her late career.Item Love-cheek, Azteca(2015) Hamami, Aydin; Klank, Richard; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The act of painting is one of a physical, visceral nature, in which the intangible is made tangible, removed from our world in such a way as you allow us an abstract viewership, and intimately tied to our own physicality. The mind of the painter is one that must be simultaneously present and absent from the world of the moment. The following is a recounting of events that have led to the understanding of studio practice that my work exemplifies today, and a dissection of the significance of the actions of the artist within the studio space as well as in relation to the art object at its end.Item Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) and the Art of Reform(2015) Cody, Steven Joseph; Gill, Meredith J; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) distinguished himself within the city of Florence as a painter of considerable talent. He worked within a variety of religious institutions, creating altarpieces rich in theological complexity, elegant in formal execution, and dazzlingly brilliant in chromatic impact. This dissertation analyzes six of those altarpieces, offering a cross-section of Andrea's working life and stylistic development. Approaching the artist's career from this perspective provides modern audiences with a valuable glimpse into his strategies for marrying his own social ambitions to the spiritual teachings that informed ecclesiastical art. These strategies evolved as Andrea learned from each artistic commission he undertook, each altarpiece that he produced in dialogue with educated patrons and learned religious advisors. Over the course of his career, he himself privileged with increasing sophistication theological texts concerned with the idea of reform. I argue that Andrea's stylistic development as a painter describes this process of spiritual education. This argument reconsiders the established conventions of the art-historical monograph, as it adds significantly to the broader scholarly discussion of Renaissance religious art, shedding fresh light on early modern theories of subjectivity and sensation.Item Painting: Despite(2010) Horjus, Timothy James; Richardson, W. C.; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Painting: Despite" is an exploration into the possibility of continuing to paint despite the constancy of digitized images in our everyday and their effect on our ability to process images. Our contemporary culture is one primed for the consumption of images, but one woefully unable to understand them. This inability is for many the reason for the 'death of painting.' The paintings in the exhibit evoke a space that is fractured unstable and in a state of flux. Within the framework of past romantic notions concerning painting, its progress, and purported death, these works posit a new position for painting. The position for painting is one of duality. The works are paintings, but are not a continuation of the history of painting, instead referring only to what has come before through stylistic tendencies and knowingly taking part in a culture where the time for contemplation is no longer validItem Evolution and Ambition in the Career of Jan Lievens (1607-1674)(2006-06-05) DeWitt, Lloyd; Wheelock, Arthur K.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Dutch artist Jan Lievens (1607-1674) was viewed by his contemporaries as one of the most important artists of his age. Ambitious and self-confident, Lievens assimilated leading trends from Haarlem, Utrecht and Antwerp into a bold and monumental style that he refined during the late 1620s through close artistic interaction with Rembrandt van Rijn in Leiden, climaxing in a competition for a court commission. Lievens's early Job on the Dung Heap and Raising of Lazarus demonstrate his careful adaptation of style and iconography to both theological and political conditions of his time. This much-discussed phase of Lievens's life came to an end in 1631when Rembrandt left Leiden. Around 1631-1632 Lievens was transformed by his encounter with Anthony van Dyck, and his ambition to be a court artist led him to follow Van Dyck to London in the spring of 1632. His output of independent works in London was modest and entirely connected to Van Dyck and the English court, thus Lievens almost certainly worked in Van Dyck's studio. In 1635, Lievens moved to Antwerp and returned to history painting, executing commissions for the Jesuits, and he also broadened his artistic vocabulary by mastering woodcut prints and landscape paintings. After a short and successful stay in Leiden in 1639, Lievens moved to Amsterdam permanently in 1644, and from 1648 until the end of his career was engaged in a string of important and prestigious civic and princely commissions in which he continued to demonstrate his aptitude for adapting to and assimilating the most current style of his day to his own somber monumentality. Lievens's roving and acquisitive character expressed itself in his dynamic Flemish-style landscape drawings after 1660. These much-vaunted works have drawn attention away from how Lievens systematically fulfilled his ambitions as a history painter. This dissertation seeks to address the imbalanced view of Lievens's later career by examining his character and ambitions and success in light of the language his early patrons and biographers used to discuss his talent and self-confidence.Item The Black Exotic: Tradition and Ethnography in Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Art(2005-08-29) Childs, Adrienne Louise; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study of select works by Orientalist artists Jean-Léon Gérôme and Charles Cordier charts the trajectory of the idea of the black exotic and investigates the symbolism of black figures in Orientalist painting and sculpture. Representations of blacks in Orientalist art served a complex and nuanced function as nineteenth-century European artists fashioned the exotic. At the nexus of traditional tropes of blackness and the new science of ethnography, they were a critical tool used to construct an imagined Orient within the context of Orientalism--the phenomenal passion for the exotic in the nineteenth century. Blacks were multifaceted figures that evoked sexuality, servitude, degradation, and primitive culture while providing decorative beauty and the allure of difference. The trope of the exotic black is rooted in a tradition of representing Africans dating back to the Italian Renaissance. By the nineteenth century ethnographic approaches to race permeated Orientalist ideologies and affected a qualitative shift in how black figures operated in visual culture. Through a critical analysis of the relationship between exoticism and blackness, this study addresses the need for a more specialized interpretation of how attitudes towards race were encoded in nineteenth-century visual arts.Item Beyond Realism: History in the Art of Thomas Eakins(2005-01-25) Reason, Akela M.; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Art historians often associate Thomas Eakins's realist depictions of modern life with the artist's most rational tendencies. In these images, Eakins's scrutiny of his subjects seems to verge on the scientific. Consequently, many of these works have been studied in terms of Eakins's devotion to understanding and replicating the tangible world around him, marshalling as evidence the artist's meticulous methods of preparation, his scrupulous study of anatomy, and his literal use of photographs. The sense that Eakins's creativity was always bounded by reason has contributed to the canonization of these modern life subjects. While these images reinforce the notion of Eakins's almost scientific faith in the real, they do not include many of the works that the artist deemed most important. Concurrent with these modern life subjects, Eakins also completed works that engage with historical subject matter. Although these images have often been dismissed as unimportant to Eakins's career, the artist numbered many of them among his best. Ranging from his colonial revival subjects of the 1870s and 80s to his reprisal of William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River in 1908, the historical works span the length of his career and engage in a dialogue with his more familiar realist images. This dissertation examines how in each decade of his career, Eakins used historical subject matter to assert his most deeply-held professional beliefs. A complex amalgam of tradition and modernity, each of these historical themes relates to Eakins's creation of a professional identity as an artist. I explore how Eakins's consciousness of the art historical tradition specifically influenced these works as well as guided the trajectory of his career. With respect to this tradition, Eakins believed that life study and hard work bound all great artists togetherpast, present, and future. Eakins advanced this notion by his insistent placement of the historical works in major venues alongside his powerful images of doctors and rowers. In his desire to become part of the art historical tradition himself, Eakins hoped that his historical subjects would continue to speak for him after his death.