Art History & Archaeology
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Item Haarlem Tabletop Still-Life Painting, 1610-1660: A Study of Relationships Between Form and Meaning(2003) Gregory, Henry Duval V; Wheelock, Arthur K. Jr.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Scholars have considered Dutch still life and its meaning from a variety of methodological perspectives and have often reached different opinions on the prevalence of intentional moralizing meaning in these pictures. This study approaches meaning - that is, messages specifically religious or moralizing in nature - in still-life painting by focusing on paintings produced in Haarlem between 1610 and 1660 and assessing their capacity for meaning in terms of their visual structure and the objects featured in them. Drawing on a database of 630 paintings created for this study, I analyzed the patterns that developed in Haarlem tabletop still-life painting; from the objects and foods used in these paintings to their thematic types and compositional characteristics. The results of these analyses foster an understanding of the most typical forms of the Haarlem tabletop still life. However, these analyses also pennit one to identify works exceptional in visual structure and/or use of objects that convey unmistakable messages focused on christological and vanitas themes. A prime example of a painting with these qualities is a large canvas by the artist Willem Claesz. Heda (1635 - National Gallery of Art, Washington). The compositional structure in this picture focuses one's attention on a roll along the front edge of the table. A contrast between the roll and the rest of the table is evident: the latter has been consumed while the former is untouched. The presence of elements connoting transience - an extinguished candle and a broken berckemeier - underscores the allegorical nature of this painted table and sharpens the contrast between the roll as symbol of Christ and the rest of the table as a worldly, ephemeral indulgence. While most tabletop still Iifes painted in Haarlem between 1610 and 1660 were not overtly allegorical, a significant number were. The methodology in this study allows one to identify these paintings and assess the nature of their meaning.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 Perception, Space, Movement: Illusionistic Ceilings in Seventeenth-Century Rome(2019) Newman, Vianna; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The seventeenth century marked the emergence in Italy of a novel type of painted illusion: quadratura. Its practitioners created a new genre of art, with ceilings as its domain, which relied upon linear perspective and the real setting of the illusion to produce a sense of wonder in beholders and to persuade them of a rhetorical message. This thesis focuses on three illusionistic ceilings: the Apotheosis of Saint Clement, the Allegory of Divine Providence, and the Glorification of Saint Ignatius. In treating these works as varied manifestations of the same artistic and cultural milieu, this investigation produces a model, or foundational set of tools, with which to analyze the creation and reception of illusionistic ceilings of seventeenth-century Rome.Item The Global Invention of Art: Race and Visual Sovereignty in the Colonial Baltic World, 1860-1920(2019) Pushaw, Bart; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the role of art and visual culture in the Baltic Provinces of Imperial Russia, present-day Estonia and Latvia, between roughly 1860 and 1920. This period witnessed the unraveling of a strict social hierarchy that for centuries had long incubated a Baltic German elite, while suppressing the lives and aesthetic expressions of Estonians and Latvians. After the abolition of serfdom, dramatic social, political, and cultural gains transformed possibilities for indigenous Balts, yet most scholars suggest that art and visual culture were not concomitant with the rapid progress of the era. I reveal instead how images and the ability to assume the power of image-making—what one scholar has called “visual sovereignty”—were pivotal to changing these social stratifications. The dissertation examines the ramifications of the necessity to invent “art” when native languages possessed no word to designate “artist” or “painting” as late as 1900. Since Eurocentric models of art history have preconditioned us to accept the fine arts as intrinsically natural to society, we have no model to grapple with the reality that art could be epistemologically novel, as it was for Latvians and Estonians. Working at the intersection of art history’s global turn, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory, I extrapolate the discourses of seemingly disparate but simultaneous happenings across the globe to reveal that the art world of the colonial Baltic was a microcosm of global nineteenth-century debates about race, medium, and modernity. At its core, the study investigates how art assumes significance for disenfranchised populations. The first chapter reveals how indigenous thinkers invented “art” in relation to their spatial experiences, from public monuments to intimate wooden chests. The second explores why photography became the most valued of all visual media, while the third contextualizes how painting, once deemed foreign and culturally irrelevant, could suddenly assume viability by the 1890s. The fourth chapter examines how native artists deployed the conventional genre of landscape painting to transcend the contingency of race in cultural production after 1905. The conclusion offers directions for global art history, revealing the planetary ramifications of Baltic coloniality.Item Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals(2019) Yasumura, Grace Sayuri; Mansbach, Steven; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals is a meditation on the historical construction and persistent importance of race in the formation of American national identity and citizenship. Centering on an institutionally marginalized and academically neglected aspect of American art, this dissertation explores the depictions of non-white laborers, from images of African American sharecroppers to Mexican American migrant laborers that appear in scores of Treasury Section post office murals across the United States. Organized around three case studies, this work explores the different ways racialized identities were created, contested, and consolidated within the context of larger debates surrounding the relationship between labor and citizenship in the 1930s. This dissertation reads the murals produced under the Treasury Section as part of the New Deal’s epistemological regimes of intelligibility. In other words, these murals are to be understood as sites where collective identities are visualized and “correct” codes of social conduct are shaped in order to foster a particular vision of the citizens-subject. Treasury Section post office murals are therefore interpreted as part of a complex set of instruments deployed by the New Deal government as it sought to translate ideology into practice and thus actualize codes of racial and gendered conduct and ultimately modes of ideal citizenship.Item Plastic Fantastic: American Sculpture in the Age of Synthetics(2018) O'Steen, Danielle; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation considers the role of plastics as a sculptural medium in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. At this time, artists were turning to synthetics in large numbers and with great enthusiasm, in spite of wavering public opinion on plastics in the U.S. I argue for the significance of this “plastics moment” for the arts by looking closely at the work of four artists: Donald Judd (1928–1994), Eva Hesse (1936–1970), De Wain Valentine (b. 1936), and Frederick Eversley (b. 1941). I position their sculptures in the social context of synthetics in twentieth-century America. In their distinctive practices, Judd, Hesse, Valentine, and Eversley each used plastics with a pioneer’s zeal: working with local industries, creating new means of production, and even developing formulas for the materials. Plastic Fantastic is an interdisciplinary text, engaging scientific and cultural histories in conversation with American art scholarship. I focus on the production accounts of the objects to understand how these four artists took on the challenge of synthetics, and consider the diversity of substances used, looking at sculptures in Plexiglas, Fiberglas, and polyester resin. Using a technical approach to art history, I expand the literature on artworks from this period, which often omits material details and overlooks plastics’ place at this crux of sculpture in the U.S. My dissertation illuminates the important innovations of Judd, Hesse, Valentine, and Eversley to understand this juncture in the 1960s and 1970s, when American art found plastics.Item Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016(2018) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation.Item Between Temple and Tomb: Lararia, the Lares, and the Dead in Roman Pompeii (80 BCE-79 CE)(2018) Evans, Sarah Frances; Gensheimer, Maryl B; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Lares familiares were a group of ancient Roman gods worshipped at lararia, the shrines that stood at the center of domestic religion. In this thesis, I revisit a century-long debate and present new evidence, derived from the close observation of the design and representational elements extant on the material remains of temples, tombs, and lararia, for the previously proposed but recently rejected theory that the Lares familiares were the spirits of deceased ancestors. In opposition to the approach of previous publications, I place archaeological, rather than textual, evidence from Roman Pompeii in the forefront to examine what new conclusions might be drawn. In Part 2, I consider the elements of formal design that may connect lararia not only with temple architecture, but also with tomb design. In Part 3, I analyze a series of representational elements that may suggest a similar visual connection between the Lares and the dead.Item Robert Irwin's New Materialism(2018) Vetter, Michael Laurence; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the complete oeuvre of contemporary installation artist Robert Irwin from his early work in the 1950s to the present day. The first chapter considers his early paintings as well as his early sculptural objects, including his discs and acrylic columns made from 1968-70. The chapter considers the extent to which these works depart from the models of transcendence and interiority exemplified in late modernist painting. This analysis draws on recent writing in new materialist theory to challenge prevailing historiographic models that describe Irwin's interest in light and space as inferior to more "material" minimalist sculpture being made in New York City at the same moment. The second chapter includes Irwin's installation works for art museum and gallery spaces from 1970-2016, particularly his 1973 installations at the Panza Stables in Varese, Italy. This chapter considers the nature of the subject in Irwin's work, arguing that his installation pieces create a new, contingent model of human subjectivity that reflects contemporary developments in post-structuralist and new materialist theory. The final chapter examines Irwin's works for public and outdoor spaces from the early 1980s to the present day. This chapter considers whether Irwin's public works embrace or resist a spectacular mode of art viewing and consumption shaped by late capitalist aesthetics. In addition to a critical rehabilitation of Irwin's work, the dissertation concludes with a broader discussion about the nature of "critical" or politically progressive art at the turn of the 21st century, and about the limitations of earlier interpretive models that art historians have used to create hierarchies of value for postwar sculpture and installation art.Item Picturing Devotion in Dutch Golden Age Huiskerken(2018) Harrington, Margaret; Wheelock, Arthur K; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was officially Protestant, Catholics made up nearly one-third of the population. To circumvent laws prohibiting public worship, Dutch Catholics celebrated Mass in private homes converted into lavishly decorated huiskerken (house churches). Unfortunately, most huiskerken have been destroyed or poorly documented, and previous scholarship has examined altarpieces out of their historical contexts. This dissertation examines the decorative programs of two well-documented huiskerken: St. Bernardus in den Hoeck in Haarlem, rebuilt in 1638 and part of a large community of lay religious women (kloppen) in Haarlem, and ’t Hart, founded in 1663 in Amsterdam, and preserved today as the Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder (Our Lord in the Attic). This is the first English-language study of the complete decorative programs of these two huiskerken and their liturgical functions, and I argue that devotional paintings are best understood as pieces of these decorative programs, which included embroidered textiles, illustrated sermon manuscripts, and liturgical silver. I employ reception theory to show that the imagery in these two huiskerken aided the celebration of Mass and meditation of laypeople, especially lay religious women. The examples of St. Bernardus and ’t Hart demonstrate that the decorative programs of huiskerken are largely indebted to lay religious women, who acted as patrons and creators of devotional objects. I prove that crafts like embroidery and inexpensive engravings, commonly considered “low” art, in fact served as creative sources for “higher” art forms like paintings. Furthermore, I conclude that the use of imagery in huiskerken is more closely related to medieval devotional practices than has previously been assumed.