College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Uncoiling the Laocoon: Revealing the Statue Group's Significance in Augustan Rome(2007-12-10) Hwang, HyoSil Suzy; Venit, Marjorie S; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since its rediscovery in Rome in 1506, the Laocoon has raised issues regarding its date, its owner, its status as a Roman copy of a Greek original, and which literary account it reflects. It was not until a telling inscription with the names and patronymics of the artists was found on a statue group at Sperlonga that the same atelier working there was found responsible for creating the Laocoon. This led prosopographical experts to date the sculptors' activity to the early decades of the Roman Empire and while this date has been accepted by most scholars of Hellenistic art, the implications of situating the Laocoon in this period has not been fully explored. This thesis examines the statue group in conjunction to other artistic and literary projects under Augustus, and determines that the Laocoon functioned as a symbol of past struggles overcome in order for Rome's glory to be realized.Item Nou La, We Here: Remembrance and Power in the Arts of Haitian Vodou(2007-11-27) Brice, Leslie Anne; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Haitian Vodou is vast, accumulative, and constantly in flux, drawing from many sources and traditions as it adapts to changes in the world, as well as to the needs and imaginations of its adherents. With its origins in west and central Africa, along with the strategies for transformation that are at the heart of many religions there, Vodou developed into its current form as a response to forced transatlantic migration, enslavement, encounters with Amerindian traditions, Catholicism, Freemasonry, the complications that emerged in the quest for liberty, the consequences of a successful slave revolt, and the establishment of an independent state. It is largely the last three points that contribute to Vodou's strong military ethos, and with that, Vodou's focus on liberation. Based on field research between 2000 and 2004, in Washington, D.C. and in Haiti, this dissertation examines Vodou visual arts in relation to Haiti's revolutionary history, and how the arts articulate related themes of militarism, liberation, and resistance. Central to this study is remembrance, or the active and purposeful remembering of diverse lived experiences that practitioners evoke, express, and promote through visual and performing arts. Remembrance includes the historical, socioeconomic, political, and sacred realities that shape Vodou practice today and thereby provides a larger context for interpreting visual expressions. Equally important to this interpretation is the sacred world, which includes the spirits, the ancestors, and Vodou cosmological principles. Along the lines of remembrance and the sacred world, this dissertation examines the sacred spaces, altars, and power objects that practitioners create with their own aesthetic sensibilities and cosmological interpretations. It considers how practitioners actively remember and engage the past to empower themselves and their communities in the present. By weaving together the historical, social, the political, and the cosmological, along with an emphasis on practitioner agency, this dissertation underscores the transatlantic scope of Vodou visual creations. In doing so, it brings into focus just how pragmatic this religion and its objects are, and suggests how visuality offers people a sense of self-determinism in their lives.Item Hoe schilder hoe wilder: Dissolute Self-Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art(2007-11-26) Cartwright, Ingrid; Wheelock, Arthur K; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the seventeenth century, Dutch and Flemish artists presented a strange new face to the public in their self-portraits. Rather than assuming the traditional guise of the learned gentleman artist that was fostered by Renaissance topoi, many painters presented themselves in a more unseemly light. Dropping the noble robes of the pictor doctus, they smoked, drank, and chased women. Dutch and Flemish artists explored a new mode of self-expression in dissolute self-portraits, embracing the many behaviors that art theorists and the culture at large disparaged. Dissolute self-portraits stand apart from what was expected of a conventional self-portrait, yet they were nonetheless appreciated and valued in Dutch culture and in the art market. This dissertation explores the ways in which these untraditional self-portraits functioned in art and culture in the seventeenth century. Specifically, this study focuses on how these unruly expressions were ultimately positive statements concerning theories of artistic talent and natural inclination. Dissolute self-portraits also reflect and respond to a larger trend regarding artistic identity in the seventeenth century, notably, the stereotype "hoe schilder hoe wilder" that posited Dutch and Flemish artists as intrinsically unruly characters prone to prodigality and dissolution. Artists embraced this special identity, which in turn granted them certain freedoms from social norms and a license to misbehave. In self-portraits, artists emphasized their dissolute nature in self-portraits by associating themselves with themes like the Five Senses and the Prodigal Son in the tavern. These playful, inventive and sometimes challenging self-expressions present a unique vision that broadens our perception of what it meant to be an artist in the Dutch Golden Age.Item Illusion and Disillusionment in the Works of Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter: Picturing (Post)Modern Life(2007-11-19) Adams, Virginia; Mansbach, Steven A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study is a meta-critique of the discourse surrounding the emergence of large-scale, color photography around 1980 and the concurrent "return to painting" through an examination of the art praxes of Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter. As Western avant-garde art shifted from conceptual practices toward large-scale, figurative painting and photography during the late 1970s and early 1980s there developed a vociferous discourse that, to a large degree, was highly critical of the changes that were taking place. The most strident aspect of the discourse emanated from fundamentally Marxist critics and academicians who viewed the turn to more aesthetically-based art forms as an undesirable capitulation to the political hegemony of the conservative administration in the United States, and to a burgeoning and increasingly international art market fueled by improving economic conditions. This criticism looked less than carefully at the art and the stated positions of the artists. This study mines the critical writings about both Wall and Richter in order to illuminate the discourse and elucidate the limits of art-historical writing that arises from rigid theoretical positions. It focuses particularly on the writings of Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss and Jean-Francois Chevrier. The writings of Wall and Richter are also given considerable weight and their voices are invoked as full participants. The works of Wall and Richter involve inextricable combinations of photography and painting in very different ways, and the role of medium within the discourse is examined. In addition, the artists' references in their works to art forms of earlier periods in the history of Modernism are also considered. Although this study focuses on the period 1976 to 1990, it pays considerable attention to connections between early twentieth century German and Russian theories of montage and the art of Jeff Wall, and Wall's illuminated transparencies are emphasized. The geographic scope of the study includes North America and West Germany, where much of the controversy about the "return to painting" was generated, and where exhibitions of the work of both Wall and Richter occurred frequently during the study period.Item A RIVETING "ROSIE": J. HOWARD MILLER'S WE CAN DO IT! POSTER AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE(2007-07-17) Wong, Hannah W; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)J. Howard Miller's World War II poster depicting a woman who flexes her arm, displays her bicep, and declares, "We Can Do It!," has been reproduced in the form of bobbleheads and action figures and on surfaces ranging from totebags to human skin. Strangely, while this well-known image has been addressed prolifically in popular culture materials, it has not received much scholarly attention. Scholars have published very little about the poster itself, its creator, J. Howard Miller, his body of work, the poster's function, place in history, and even its subject matter. The purpose of this thesis is to construct this much-needed overall historical and theoretical framework for interpreting Miller's poster within its World War II milieu and its usage in current American visual culture. While my thesis is concerned with gathering basic information about the poster and its immediate 1943 context, my project also explores the object's "second career," its post-war rise to celebrity.Item Mass Media is the Message: Yoko Ono and John Lennon's 1969 Year of Peace(2007-06-04) Bari, Martha Ann; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1969, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, multimedia artist Yoko Ono and rock star John Lennon instigated a series of idiosyncratic artistic events designed to spread a universal message of peace. What all these events had in common was the couple's keen desire to act as catalysts for change and their willingness to exploit their own celebrity to do so. They had just survived a scandalous year in London in a fishbowl of publicity where the popular press savaged Ono and Lennon's love affair and resulting separate divorces. Dealing with the insatiable media had become part of their everyday lives. Why not use this pervasive attention to publicize their own cause and carry their message of peace throughout the world? This simple premise launched a private peace campaign whose artistic message has achieved cult status in our popular culture. This dissertation examines how Yoko Ono and John Lennon's 1969 Year of Peace unfolded, how the media covered it at the time, and how people remember it today. By considering the couple's art events within the context of the 1960s and then following the path of certain images as they wend their way to the present, Ono and Lennon's art acts as a core sample of sixties culture and its legacy. My study situates this artwork against the backdrop of Lennon's megawatt rock star celebrity, within the spirit of Fluxus (of which Ono was a founding member), and in the context of the anti-war movement of the time. In a larger cultural sense, I use Ono and Lennon's art as a touchstone to explore ideas about gender and ethnicity, the sixties counterculture, the language of everyday life, the nature of celebrity, the psychology of marketing, the role of mass media in society, and the control and manipulation of imagery.Item Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907): Reconstructed Rebel(2007-05-09) Fleming, Tuliza Kamirah; Promey, Sally; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Thomas Satterwhite Noble was a Southerner, a member of slave-owning family, a confederate soldier, and an artist who painted history paintings relating to slavery and freedom in the United States. Between 1865 and 1870, Noble created a series of paintings that directly confronted white America's ambivalent feelings with regard to the issues of slavery, emancipation, and integration--earning him the moniker "reconstructed rebel." The American Slave Mart, 1865 was the first monumental treatment of a slave auction by an American painter and effectively launched his career as an artist of national recognition. Noble was strongly influenced by his French teacher and mentor, Thomas Couture, and his seminal painting Decadence of the Romans when he painted The American Slave Mart. Two years later, buoyed by his success of his first history painting, Noble created the contemporary history paintings Margaret Garner and John Brown's Blessing. Both paintings featured individuals who risked themselves and those they loved in the pursuit of freedom and liberty. In 1868 Noble The Price of Blood, A Planter Selling His Son, a painting which revealed the Southern practice of slave owners selling their slave/children for profit. In 1870, Noble painted a simplified replica of The American Slave Mart titled, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis. This painting was created at a very difficult time in the artist's career and represents a desire for him to be seen as part of the greater Cincinnati community. Thomas Satterwhite Noble: A Reconstructed Rebel examines how Noble's African American imagery reflected and interpreted issues concerning slavery in the upper South, the internal slave trade, miscegenation, and abolition. This study shifts the scholarly emphasis on Noble's oeuvre from discussions relating to the manner in which African Americans were portrayed before and after slavery to how these images were perceived by contemporary reconstruction audiences.Item Paul Cézanne and the Making of Modern Art History(2007-04-26) Orfila, Jorgelina; Hargrove, June E.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The application of art historical methodologies to the study of Paul Cézanne in the 1930s brought about significant changes in the way the artist's art and biography were understood. Art history was institutionalized as an international academic discipline under the pressure of the ideological struggle that preceded the Second World War. This process promoted the incorporation of modern art as part of the disciplinary field. The use of categories of analysis developed for the examination of historical manifestations helped to assimilate modern art into a narrative that extolled the continuity of the Western tradition. This dissertation examines the writings and careers of art historians who published books on Cézanne in 1936 in Paris: Lionello Venturi, the first catalogue raisonné of the work of the artist, Cézanne, son art, son oeuvre; René Huyghe, a monograph, Cézanne; and John Rewald, Cézanne et Zola, which became the accepted biography of the artist. In addition, Rewald's photographs of the sites Cézanne painted were instrumental in introducing space (as perspective) as a category for the analysis of the artist's landscapes, thus helping to establish its link to the Western tradition. The site photographs epitomize the new approach to documentation and the changes in museography that accompanied the transformation of art history. The arrival of émigré art historians to the United States favored the identification of the hegemonic art historical discourse with an anti-totalitarian ideology. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized in 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art. The exhibition, which established Cézanne as a key figure in the development of modern art, associated modern art with the fight against Fascism. This dissertation studies a previously ignored period of the history of the institutionalization of art history and provides arguments for the debate on the epistemological foundations of the discipline and its relationship with museography and art criticism. By questioning these foundations, the dissertation disentangles Cézanne's work from the ideological constructs that were affixed to his art by the interpretations proposed in the 1930s and suggests new avenues for understanding it.Item Art as Lived Religion: Edward Burne-Jones as Painter, Priest, Pilgrim, and Monk(2007-04-25) Crossman, Colette M.; Pressly, William L; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents the first analysis of religion in the life and work of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) and establishes its centrality to his creative practice, identity, and reception. As a young man, he dreamed of taking holy orders and founding a monastic brotherhood. After forgoing the priesthood, he ornamented countless churches as an ecclesiastical designer and maintained a proclivity for painting Christian iconography, leading contemporaries to proclaim him one of the world's great religious artists. Today, however, using an outmoded lens that characterizes the nineteenth century as a period of precipitous religious decline, most art historians assume Burne-Jones reflects the conventional narrative of lost faith and doubt. Confusing institutional affiliation with personal belief, they have overlooked his unorthodox views, which defy the customary parameters of denomination or broad, theological movement, yet signal an ongoing, complex spiritual commitment. Moreover, misperceiving the secular as a necessary condition of modernity, some have expunged the religious from his art in an anxiety to legitimize his place in the modernist canon. Methodologies of lived religion and practice, however, offer a new means of understanding Burne-Jones. Reconsidering belief as something often expressed beyond the confines of corporate worship and creed, as behaviors and discursive patterns occupying spaces of vocation, creativity, identity, and the everyday, demonstrates that art served as a vehicle for enacting his spiritual convictions. In the overlapping, and at times conflicting, guises of a priest mediating the divine, an artist-monk for whom labor is a devotional act, and a pilgrim seeking salvation, Burne-Jones cast his artistic practice as a religious vocation meant to improve the world through the redemptive power of beauty and, in the process, secure divine favor. In addition to explicating the religious role art-making served for Burne-Jones, this project seeks to reclaim his altarpieces' liturgical functions and reconstruct how Christian audiences adapted and consumed his art for various didactic and devotional purposes. Such analysis underscores his objects' multivalency and the subjectivity of sacredness. Consequently, Burne-Jones's example provides evidence that religion was not necessarily disappearing in the Victorian age, but was being transformed and exercised in increasingly personalized ways.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.