Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History PDF Download

Author: Akela Reason
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812241983
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The first book-length study to explore the Philadelphia realist artist's lifelong fascination with historical themes, this examination of Eakins reveals that he envisioned his artistic legacy in terms different from those by which twentieth-century art historians have typically defined his art.

Author: John Davis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118542495
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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Book Description
A Companion to American Art presents 35newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars that explore themethodology, historiography, and current state of the field ofAmerican art history. Features contributions from a balance of established andemerging scholars, art and architectural historians, and otherspecialists Includes several paired essays to emphasize dialogue and debatebetween scholars on important contemporary issues in American arthistory Examines topics such as the methodological stakes in thewriting of American art history, changing ideas about whatconstitutes “Americanness,” and the relationship of artto public culture Offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution and currentstate of the field of American art history and suggests futuredirections of scholarship

Author: Elizabeth L. Lee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150134689X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In 1901, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens proclaimed in a letter to Will Low, “Health-is the thing!” Though recently diagnosed with intestinal cancer, Saint-Gaudens was revitalized by recreational sports, having realized midcareer “there is something else in life besides the four walls of an ill-ventilated studio.” The Medicine of Art puts such moments center stage in order to consider the role of health and illness in the way art was produced and consumed. Not merely beautiful or entertaining objects, works by Gilded-Age artists such as John Singer Sargent, Abbott Thayer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are shown to function as balm for the ill, providing relief from physical suffering and pain. Art did so by blunting the edges of contagious disease through a process of visual translation. In painting, for instance, hacking coughs, bloody sputum, and bodily enervation were recast as signs of spiritual elevation and refinement for the tuberculous, who were shown with a pale, chalky pallor that signalled rarefied beauty rather than an alarming indication of death. Works of art thus redirected the experience of illness in an era prior to the life-saving discoveries that would soon become hallmarks of modern medical science to offer an alternate therapy. The first study to address the place of organic disease-cancer, tuberculosis, syphilis-in the life and work of Gilded-Age artists, this book looks at how well-known works of art were marked by disease and argues that art itself functioned in medicinal terms for artists and viewers in the late 19th century.

Author: JamesH. Rubin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351550721
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Introducing the concept of music and painting as 'rival sisters' during the nineteenth century, this interdisciplinary collection explores the productive exchange-from rivalry to inspiration to collaboration-between the two media in the age of Romanticism and Modernism. The volume traces the relationship between art and music, from the opposing claims for superiority of the early nineteenth century, to the emergence of the concept of synesthesia around 1900. This collection puts forward a more complex history of the relationship between art and music than has been described in earlier works, including an intermixing of models and distinctions between approaches to them. Individual essays from art history, musicology, and literature examine the growing influence of art upon music, and vice versa, in the works of Berlioz, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Rodin, Debussy, and the Pre-Raphaelites, among other artists.

Author: Jeremiah William McCarthy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244282
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Featuring paintings by American icons like Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, this book illustrates the ways American artists have viewed themselves, their peers, and their painted worlds over 200 years.

Author: Asma Naeem
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298985
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Out of Earshot offers a reconfiguration of three of the nineteenth century’s most prolific painters: Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), and Thomas Dewing (1851–1939). Asma Naeem considers how these painters turned, in ways significant for their individual artistic ventures, to themes of sound and listening throughout their careers. She shows how the aural dimension of these artists’ pictures was an ideological product of period class, gender, cultural, racial, and technological discourses. Equally important, by looking at such materials as the artists’ papers, scientific illustrations, and technological brochures, Naeem argues that the work of these painters has complex and previously unconsidered connections to developments in sound and listening during a period when unprecedented innovation in the United States led to such inventions as the telegraph and phonograph and forged a technological narrative that continues to have force in the twenty-first century. Naeem's unusual approach to the work of these three well-known American artists offers a transformative account of artistic response during their own era and beyond.

Author: Karen L. Georgi
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271062479
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
American Civil War–era art critics James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William J. Stillman classified styles and defined art in terms that have become fundamental to our modern periodization of the art of the nineteenth century. In Critical Shift, Karen Georgi rereads many of their well-known texts, finding certain key discrepancies between their words and our historiography that point to unrecognized narrative desires. The book also studies ruptures and revolutionary breaks between “old” and “new” art, as well as the issue of the morality of “true” art. Georgi asserts that these concepts and their sometimes loaded expression were part of larger rhetorical structures that gainsay the uses to which the key terms have been put in modern historiography. It has been more than fifty years since a book has been devoted to analyzing the careers of these three critics, and never before has their role in the historiography and periodization of American art been analyzed. The conclusions drawn from this close rereading of well-known texts challenge the fundamental nature of “historical context” in American art history.

Author: Amy Werbel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154703X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description
Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.

Author: Dawn Robinson
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Pamela Colman Smith is the mysterious artist behind the most renowned tarot deck in the world, for many years forgotten. In a revival of interest in esoteric artists and accessible tarot, curiosity about Pamela is now on the ascendant, but there are still many unanswered questions, especially concerning her later life. Born in London to American parents, Pamela was a prolific illustrator and artist who mixed with the great and good of art and theatre, among them W. B. Yeats and Bram Stoker. 'Adopted' by actress Ellen Terry, she spent some years with the Lyceum Theatre crowd, also working as an exotic storyteller, known as Gelukiezanger, in bohemian London. People have questioned her sexuality, her ethnic origins and alleged synaesthesia, assuming her to be biracial and lesbian. These are discussed but the biggest mystery of all is why she converted from mysticism to Catholicism in 1911, removing herself from vibrant London to the isolated Lizard in the west of Cornwall. There, living in relative obscurity, she evangelised Catholicism in a heavily non-conformist area, before moving to Bude in her sixties.

Author: Thomas Eakins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831792
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The young Thomas Eakins's most revealing letters—published here for the first time The most revealing and interesting writings of American artist Thomas Eakins are the letters he sent to family and friends while he was a student in Paris between 1866 and 1870. This book presents all these letters in their entirety for the first time; in fact, this is the first edition of Eakins's correspondence from the period. Edited and annotated by Eakins authority William Innes Homer, this book provides a treasure trove of new information, revealing previously hidden facets of Eakins's personality, providing a much richer picture of his artistic development, and casting fresh light on his debated psychosexual makeup. The book is illustrated with the small, gemlike drawings Eakins included in his correspondence, as well as photographs and paintings. In these letters, Eakins speaks openly and frankly about human relationships, male companionship, marriage, and women. In vivid, charming, and sometimes comic detail, he describes his impressions of Paris--from the training he received in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme to the museums, concerts, and popular entertainments that captured his imagination. And he discusses with great insight contemporary aesthetic and scientific theories, as well as such unexpected subjects as language structure, musical composition, and ice-skating technique. Also published here for the first time are the letters and notebook Eakins wrote in Spain following his Paris sojourn. This long-overdue volume provides an indispensable portrait of a great American artist as a young man.