Angels in the Americas: Paintings of Apocryphal Angels in Spain and its American Viceroyalties
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Eloise Quinones-Keber
Around the mid seventeenth century paintings of individual angels became popular in the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain (essentially present-day Mexico and Central America) and the viceroyalty of Peru (originally most of South America excluding Brazil). However, the names and representations of individual angels found across the Spanish Empire do not correspond to the few narratives that appear in the Bible, which only mentions the angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael by name. Some of these series of paintings include angels labeled as Jehudiel, Barachiel, and Uriel, who are mentioned in Jewish texts such as the Talmud and the Cabala, as well as other texts written around the first century but considered apocryphal or non-canonical by the Catholic Church, such as the Book of Enoch. Although these images were relatively popular in Spain and Mexico, their representation was far more abundant in South America.
The Politics of Scholarship: College Art Association and the Uneasy Relationship between Art and Art History 1911-1945
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Patricia Mainardi
This dissertation examines the critical role that the College Art Association (CAA) played in the early development of art history and studio art education as academic disciplines in U.S. colleges and universities. Although CAA initiated a variety of projects after its inception in 1911, this study focuses on the association's journals, specifically the Bulletin of the College Art Association, The Art Bulletin, Parnassus, and College Art Journal. Serving as journals of record for art and/or art history, these publications functioned not only to provide an ongoing exchange of ideas related to the visual arts in higher education, but also to validate authorities and scholars, particularly art historians, and their academic institutions. As a result, certain individuals and schools became prominent in the visual arts. My study therefore addresses not only the histories of art history and studio art, but also the relationship between CAA and its supporting institutions.
SPECTATORSHIP AND THE SCREEN AS INTERFACE: FRENCH ART USING TELEVISION, VIDEO, AND THE PROJECTED IMAGE FROM THE LATE 1960s TO THE PRESENT
Author:
Stephanie Jeanjean
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation reconstructs key moments in the history of video-based art in France from the late 1960s to the present day, focusing on the changing relationship between the viewer and the screen, as tested by artists using television, video and the projected image. This study examines the relationship between art and politics by considering how cultural policy along with socio-economical and techno-political frameworks have affected the concept of an ideal viewer. I argue that in France, from the late 1960s to today, the idea of spectatorship changes from a politicized subject who receives a clear message to an autonomous participant invited to interact with the screen as interface, in increasingly apolitical projects. Little known in France and rarely addressed in Anglophone scholarship, the history of French video-based art, and of its politics of spectatorship, constitutes an alternative narrative that departs from the dominant Anglo-American model, and suggests a different understanding of what constitutes a socio-politically informed art practice.
Colombian Artists in Paris, 1865-1905
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Katherine Manthorne
ABSTRACT
Philosophers, Artists and Saints: Ernst L. Kirchner and Male Friendship in Paintings, 1914-1917
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation emphasizes the profound role of Friedrich Nietzsche's early publications on the artist Ernst L. Kirchner's theories and artwork in contrast to interpretations that focus on the overriding influence of the philosopher's late work Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Sunappu: A Genre of Japanese Photography, 1930-1980
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation discusses the development of sunappu photography from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, demonstrating its importance to the history of Japanese photography and art. Sunappu is a Japanese photographic term that began to be used in the mid-1930s, derived from the English word "snapshot." In the broader meaning of the term, it signifies instantaneous photography taken with a hand-held camera. Sunappu, however, often took on narrower connotations, referring specifically to candid photographs of people unaware of the presence of the camera. First and foremost, sunappu describes a photographic technique. However, it also constitutes a genre of Japanese photography with historical roots stretching back to the mid-1930s.
The Legacy of Constructivism in Poland: Geometric Abstraction Before and Behind the Iron Curtain
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Rose Carol Washton Long
This dissertation situates the legacy of Constructivism in Polish painting during the 1920s and in the mid-1950s, both before and behind the Iron Curtain. The material and ideological conditions of geometric abstract art are examined within the context of the East and West and across the pre- and postwar divide. I address the troubled reception of Constructivism through the prism of the artist Henryk Stazewski (1894-1988), one of the key contributors to the history of Polish art before and after World War II. If during the prewar years Stażewski attempted to invest painting with collective, universal, and international force, in the postwar period he choreographed the process of reception by exhibiting his works at home. I argue that Stazewski was aware of the ambivalent status and depoliticization of geometric art rooted in Constructivist aesthetic, and wanted to restore its socially constructive and political dimension by - paradoxically - isolating himself in an already isolated state.
John Martin (1789-1854) and the Mechanics of Making Art in a Commercial Nation
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Patricia Mainardi
This dissertation reinterprets the career of the English artist, John Martin (1789-1854). Challenging the popular characterization of him as an apocalyptic visionary opposed to modern commercial and industrial society, this study argues that Martin, in fact, was the only major artist of his time to speak out in favor of the modern science of political economy and its core concepts of competitive individualism, self-interest, and technological innovation. While many of Martin's artist contemporaries incessantly - and futilely - petitioned the government for financial assistance for "historical painting" on the grounds that state protection was necessary if the highest category of painting (according to the civic humanist theory of art) was ever going to flourish in commercial Britain, Martin argued that "historic painting" was "dead as an art," and continually adapted his style, media, and subject matter to meet the demands of the art market. This dissertation contends that once we consider Martin's career from the perspective of someone who believed adamantly in modern political economy, his status in the history of British art as a Romantic visionary who believed that modern commercial society was immoral and corrupt will fall away.
Framing the Nation: Nation Building, Resistance, and Democratization in Korean Photography, 1945-2008
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation examines photography in Korea since 1945, focusing on the medium's relation to the processes of nation building, civic resistance, and democratization. The dissertation evaluates a number of types of photograph, ranging from war photographs to family portraits to art photography. These assessments are informed by the ways in which photography has articulated, and in turn been shaped by, social, political, and technological shifts in Korean society. Korea's history since 1945--a history of liberation, war, nation building, and civic struggle against authoritarian military governments--parallels the culture's development of photography and its various practices. The relationship between photography and nation building and photography and democratization is thus crucial to the history of both the nation and the medium: photography does not merely re-present Korean life; it is an integral part of it. The investigation is organized chronologically, following the progression of South Korea's social and political development and treating the distinct formative periods in the nation-building process as backdrop and cultivator for the photographic works that emerged from each era.
30,000 Reasons to Remember: Artistic Strategies for Memorializing Argentina's Disappeared
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Katherine Manthorne
This dissertation traces the construction of memorials from 1976-2009 dedicated to the victims of state-sponsored terrorism under the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, now known collectively as the disappeared, and the creation of new paradigms in public art and memorialization practices in Argentina. I examine a typology of memorials to the disappeared and analyze the spatial power dynamics in the public realm under the dictatorship and in the democratic era. This dissertation is the first scholarly text to focus on the history of patronage and the range of visual forms in Argentine memorials to the disappeared.