The Riddle of the Sphinx or "It Must Be Said": Charles Demuth's My Egypt Reconsidered

dc.contributor.advisorPromey, Sally M.en_US
dc.contributor.authorWalz, Jonathan Fredericken_US
dc.contributor.departmentArt History and Archaeologyen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2005-02-02T06:45:41Z
dc.date.available2005-02-02T06:45:41Z
dc.date.issued2004-12-14en_US
dc.description.abstractMy 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.en_US
dc.format.extent38908166 bytes
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2101
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledArt Historyen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledCharles Demuthen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledMy Egypten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledEgyptomaniaen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledreligionen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledperformanceen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledportraiten_US
dc.titleThe Riddle of the Sphinx or "It Must Be Said": Charles Demuth's My Egypt Reconsidereden_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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