American Art History

Before the Movies is the first book about American screen entertainment in the pre-movie era.  Illustrated with 330 color pictures, it is a comprehensive survey of the American artists who created early magic lantern stories and songs for the screen. The book concentrates especially on Joseph Boggs Beale, a pioneer in the field, and demonstrates that Beale almost single-handedly created American-made screen entertainment for the generation before the movies.  The provenance, attribution, dates, and usage information for each of Beale's 2,073 images is provided.

Magic lantern shows were certainly a common form of American entertainment in the 1890s. This study focuses on the presentation of lantern shows in one small city in one period in 1895, documenting each presentation.  Types of presentations and lecturers are discussed.  From this sample a very rough estimate is made of the number of lantern shows in America in a year.

Joseph Boggs Beale was the leading creator of illustrated lantern imagery for the American magic lantern, and a master of narrative art.  In his youth he contributed to the creation of a large transparency celebrating the freeing of slaves in Maryland---a huge backlit painting hung on a building in the center of Philadelphia. This article explores the effect that working on this  lighted image might have had on Beale's later artistic development as a magic lantern artist.

Drawing on the trade journals of touring lecturers, we discuss ideal venues, advertising, types of lecturers, experience and education, agents, touring, pay, lantern technique, and reviews.  The second part of this article, published with the same name in the same journal (Summer, 2015), provides detailed information on each of 388 eminent illustrated lecturers, listed alphabetically in Appendix A.

Summarizes information drawn from the professional journals of the lecturing industry, giving  dates, subjects, popularity, background of illustrated lecturers. The second of two articles with the same title.  Traces the rise and fall of the Illustrated Lectures.  Provides detailed information for 288 major lantern lecturers, listed alphabetically in Appendix A.

Survey of the major "illustrated lecturers" (magic lantern showmen) of the Chautauqua movement, a very large American educational effort of traveling performers and lecturers, 1870-1920, at its height reaching a third of the population each year. Based on a review of lecturers' brochures in the Library of Congress (LOC) Chautauqua collection.  Describes the lecturers' methods and general subject categories (Science, Nature, Music, Religion, etc.), dates, reviews, audience.  For each of the 238 Eminent Showmen, gives name, brochure LOC number, date, subjects covered, a description of the brochure content, and background---listed alphabetically in Appendix A.

Resumen El artículo es un acercamiento al mobiliario doméstico de dos espacios de la casa: la sala y la alcoba. A partir de fuentes de archivo, iconográficas y bibliografía se hace una reconstrucción de cómo eran ambas estancias en las viviendas habaneras en los dos primeros siglos de

This exhibition features Abstract Expressionism from the permanent collection of the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, CT. The catalog includes a curatorial essay and object labels for Jimmy Ernst, Hale Woodruff, Romare Bearden, Theodoros Stamos and Louise Nevelson.

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In the face of financial disaster, Dr Lydgate attempts to share his concerns with his wife, Rosamund, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871). Rosamund's refusal to engage with the crisis, or to sympathise with her husband's despair, is repeatedly presented by Eliot as a preoccupation with inanimate, decorative objects: Rosamund 'turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantelpiece'. 1 The mid nineteenth-century novel increasingly explores what it means to own, collect and display objects, and how personal and public lives can be constructed and defined by 'things'. Recent critical discussion has examined the significance of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the subsequent international exhibitions, as a catalyst for, and an expression of, new ways of producing and consuming objects. 2 These dazzling exhibitions, in conjunction with the foundation of the South Kensington Museum (1857), began to formulate principles of design and models of taste ...

Inspired by the Willey Disaster of 1826, a landslide in the White Mountains that killed an entire family living in Crawford Notch, both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Cole produced works of art commemorating the event. Hawthorne's story "The Ambitious Guest" and Cole's painting The Notch of the White Mountains are usually read in light of their cultural significance, most often as contributions to a nationalist aesthetic that sought to celebrate American landscapes-and the history and legends associated with them-as the basis for distinctly American art forms. But applying ideas about the evolutionary basis for environmental preferences, as described in articles by Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen and Stephen Kaplan, gives us a different way to account for the lasting appeal of these classic works of landscape art and environmental literature. Recognizing the importance of habitat selection to any species, Orians and Heerwagen outline the "savanna hypothesis," "prospect-refuge theory," and the temporal and spatial frames of reference as they account for our intuitive and subconscious preference for certain landscapes. Kaplan describes a four-part "preference model," discussing the appeals of coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery in determining our landscape preferences. Together, their analyses demonstrate why we are drawn to landscapes which offer both access to resources and protection from predators, which allow us to see without being seen, and which offer the promise of successful inhabitation. Successful artists and writers like Cole and Hawthorne know how to appeal to these innate, genetically-imprinted preferences for certain kinds of environments. Landscape art, then, in all its forms, succeeds not only by invoking cultural themes and influences but by appealing to human nature.

“Signing Dynamics of the Signature Rocks” establishes more clearly than has been done the character of a significant but not yet fully explained phenomenon of one of the most iconic episodes in the history of the United States.  From 1839 to the 1870s, approximately 400,000 Euro-Americans made the overland passage from the Missouri River to the Pacific, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of signatures inscribed onto the immense rock formations that were often used as landmarks along the way--the signature rocks--one rock alone being said in 1860 to have 40,000 to 50,000 signatures.  Most trail historians have noted the practice and generally taken it for granted, seeing only a mindset inclined toward what might be called straightforward graffiti or “ego.”  However, the fact that mass signing is not found elsewhere in the expansionist culture of the time but only in what was known then as “Indian Country” suggests a deeper motivation, at least for some, for this unique social manifestation.
Strongly based on primary sources and visual images from within emigrant culture, this study concludes that mass signing was motivated by a number of cultural dynamics of self-assertion, most notably a sense of trespassing (manifested as simple fear, an awareness of consumption of Indian resources, and/or a sense of contributing to the destruction of the traditional Indian way of life as a result of this consumption), a sense of participation in a great historical movement (whether manifest destiny or a more general sense of a great moment in history of the country), “vainglory” (a superficial awareness of the individual’s own achievements in crossing the continent), and, for the vast majority, the dynamic of tourism (viewing the great landmarks not just through the lens of traditional “curiosity” but now also loosely motivated by the Romantic ideas of landscape and the sublime).  At the same time, though in a limited way, the signature rocks became sites of emigrant-Indian contention, with now one side and now another overwriting the inscriptions of the other.

Though not in the mainstream of American art, Philip Evergood (1901-1973) was an unusually talented artist. Labeled expressionistic, surrealistic, and even gothic, he was really an aesthetic lone wolf with a restless, quizzical glance, a slightly halting but resonant voice (distinguished by a trace of Etonian accent), and a somewhat suspicious manner that quickly dissolved into a sparkling and mischievous

Liberated from anachronistic discourse that reduces her to the category of overlooked (but now bankable) female minimalist, Castoro's early work situates her in comparison to a whole other group of contemporaries, the older artists showing and being reviewed during her formative years. She attended art school at the end of the 1950s, was taught by artists of Abstract Expressionist sensibilities. Yet she belongs to the generation of artists who rejected angst, raw emotion or mysticism as the basis of painterly expression, who renounced symbolism and metaphor, and were generally skeptical about subjective content. Her paintings reflect both influences.

In 1773, James Bowdoin III (1752-1811) and Ward Nicholas Boylston (1747-1828), both from Boston, set sail for Italy, where they devoted several months to following the prescribed route on the Grand Tour. Bowdoin was the son of a merchant who was later elected governor of Massachusetts and also a founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Boylston was connected to several wealthy merchant families in the city. Boylston kept an extensive diary of their trip, documenting dinners at the homes of various dignitaries and visits to monuments, churches, and major art collections. Their tour began in Naples, where they frequently attended gatherings at the residence of Sir William Hamilton (1731-1803), and then moved to Rome under the guidance of James Byres (1734-1817), the noted Scottish art dealer. Although no records of purchases have been traced during this trip, Bowdoin refers to paintings in letters to his family and it is likely that he bought works that would become the basis of his art collection. The collection, donated to the college he founded in Maine in 1794, includes what is almost certainly the first group of old master drawings brought to America. Through the letters written by both gentlemen, as well as Boylston’s diary, we can reconstruct the development of Bowdoin’s ideas on art during the trip and how this affected his selection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture for what would become one of the earliest influential university art museums.

Over the centuries philosophy has treated art and, more generally, images, with caution and hostility. In the Greek tradition, Plato presented art as twice removed from reality, as a bad simulacrum, a mere resemblance of resemblances. Reality is the world of pure form and idea. When a craftsman makes an object, he imitates the ideal form of that object, the tableness of tables. A painting of that table, on the other hand, is a poor imitation of the object, one more step removed from reality. This poverty, this distance of art from truth, makes it a secondary and dangerous concern, an accessory and supplementary activity. Plato excludes art and artists, poetry and poets from the realm of reason and good government and inaugurates the ancient quarrel between art and poetry on the one hand, and philosophy and truth. This 'ancient quarrel' is well known and has been repeatedly commented upon.' What has been discussed less is the relationship between the aesthetic and the practical, in its moral and legal aspects. Law mimes philosophy in its reservations about, if not downright hostility to, art and images. In the Greek tradition, Plato again stated in the Laws that 'when a poet or a painter represents men with contrasting characters he is often obliged to contradict himself, and he does not know which of the opposing speeches contains the truth. But for the legislator, this is impossible, he must not let his laws say two different things on the same subject.f Indeed, for Plato, the supreme achievement of the mythological Egyptian legislator was to realize that certain movements, tunes and artistic representations were harmful to the young and to legislate a list of good and acceptable styles and forms. 'Painters and everyone else who represents movements of the body of any kind were restricted' to those forms to such a degree that, according to Plato, paintings and reliefs produced ten thousand years earlier were identical to those created at his time.' The Judaic tradition and biblical law, on the other hand, are even stricter with art and images. God insists that man shall make no 'graven images, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth'. But the people created the golden calf and danced and played around it. When Moses descended from the mountain and saw the idol he was furious; he broke the tables of the law, the visual icons of God's word, he burnt the calf and ordered the children of Levi to 'slay every man his brother,

This article examines the entanglement of weather, physicality, and racial discourses in the early-19th-century landscape paintings of British-American artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848). In particular, Cole’s picture "Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga" (1826-29) reveals how his use of violent phenomena such as storms as compositional elements resulted from environmental aesthetics that framed the encounter between man and weather as a White experience of sublime terror. As such, contrary to studies framing Cole as a “proto-environmentalist”, this essay argues that the artist’s long adherence to the sublime as a pictorial mode, manifested in works like Gelyna, actually undermined the relevance of his many commentaries about environmental destruction.

Frame designed by White, c. 1900. Gilded wood and applied cast ornament; opening size, 17½ by 21'¼ inches. The ornament is composed of rows of classical architectural elements. Several variations of this design are found framing bronze reliefs by Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by courtesy of Eli Wilner and Company, Period Frames and Mirrors.

Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting War News from Mexico made while a student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, is one of the most iconic American images from before the Civil War (1861-1865).  Traditionally, it has been seen as little more than a genre painting of American life by the noted genre painter, an idealized depiction of the American "middling sort" (an extended, upwardly mobile version of the middle class today).  But what has gone completely unnoticed is that Woodville systematically adapted every single figure and the basic composition from an even better known painting from a more noted genre painter to produce his work, the 1822 Chelsea Pensioners (receiving war news from Waterloo) by David Wilkie.  What has also gone unnoticed is that War News from Mexico is not at all an idealized depiction of the American middling sort, but rather a rigorous critique of explosive social and political situation in the United States on the verge of the American Civil War.
Whereas Chelsea presents an idealized depiction of the British "common sort," one that acts to "reinforce an hierarchical status quo," according to the British scholar David H. Solkin, War News, perhaps because of Woodville's perspective from the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany, presents a critical, even edgy view of American democracy and its middling sort.  If Woodville's adaptation of Chelsea for an American context (reception of the war news of the Mexican-American War) meant Americanizing it, Americanizing it meant "democratizing" it.  However, in general, far from simply being a question of "celebrating" the right of each adult white male to express his own political opinion through the democratic process, War News presents American democracy in all of its complexity with respect to the crossroads at which the nation found itself as a result of the imminent impact of the Mexican-American War (the admission of new Southern states) on that inherent contradiction within American democracy: slavery.  Specifically with regard to Chelsea, the democratization of War News meant a replacement of the British common sort (none of whom in Chelsea would have had the right to vote until 1918) with the American middling sort (all of whom, except the African American and the woman, would have had the right to vote in national elections by the time of War News).  It meant the distinct absence of a universal affirmation of the war news that is the ostensible subject of the image, completely contrary to its source, Chelsea.  And it meant a representation that was not only not idealizing like Chelsea but that was explicitly self-critical, from the implication of an impending national crisis brought about by a failure of true democratic ideals to unsophisticated behavior and tobacco juice spit out on the floor.
It was an unsettling tale for those of Woodville's contemporaries who cared to read closely, one in which serious challenges to American democracy--old political ideals versus new expansionism, human rights versus states' rights, freedom versus slavery--were not hidden under the glad tidings of victorious war news from afar.  Rather, brought to a head by the Mexican-American War, these smoldering political issues were deftly phrased in the tale told by Woodville of the democratized reception of war news from Mexico, a tale whose conclusion could be contemplated by understanding contemporaries only with the greatest foreboding.

Der wissenschaftliche Katalog erschien anlässlich der Ausstellung „Piranesis Antike – Befund und Polemik“ im Walraf-Richartz-Museum in Köln (25. Okt. 2013 – 26. Januar 2014). Er thematisiert anhand der Auswahl von 17 Radierungen den sogenannten Griechen-Streit, bei dem Piranesi in teils polemisch geführten Debatten mit seinen Zeitgenossen die kulturelle Überlegenheit der altrömischen Kunst und Architektur gegenüber der griechischen verteidigte. Nicht nur mit seiner ihm unverwechselbaren künstlerischen Manier mittels dramatisierender Perspektiven, Lichteffekten und Monumentalisierungen, sondern auch durch die sorgfältige Dokumentation archäologischer und bautechnischer Details arbeitete er die Größe und Originalität der Denkmäler noch in ihrem Verfall heraus. Zu den mit äußerster Akribie wiedergegebenen und mit Legenden und erläuternden Texten versehenen Denkmälern zählen Brücken (Ponte Lugano bei Tivoli), Triumphbögen (Titusbogen und Septimius-Severus-Bogen), Tempel (sog. Sibyllente...

The article focuses on graphic reproductions in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Italian Journey. This travel account gives a clear sense of how important prints were as part of Goethe's education and preparation for the encounter with classical Roman monuments. As the text itself was edited and rewritten thirty to forty years after the journey itself, however, prints also became crucial in the attempt to remember that journey. In other words, the author of the Journey, in contrast to the youthful traveler, no longer sees engravings of Rome, but Rome through engravings. The discussion takes as a point of departure Goethe's vast collection of prints, still kept in Weimar. Measured up against the references in the travel journal, prints not only reflected his impression of monuments, but also structured those impressions, as the elderly man looks back and reassembles his memories to make an official account of his life. However, it is too easy to ascribe this reliance on prints to a fading memory-on the contrary. As he grows into old age, Goethe's idea of graphic reproduction evolves in parallel with his increasingly refined theories of nature. His growing preference for prints depicted as ruins reflects the aging author's own sense of change and transformation.

Der im Titel verwendeten Begriff des "Indianers" subsumiert als fiktiver Oberbegriff der Kolonisatoren sämtliche Bewohner Nord-und Südamerikas. 1 Im Zuge der Abgrenzung der Euro-Amerikaner und in der Beschreibung des kollektiven "Andersseins" bezeichnete man den Ureinwohner als "Indianer" und umging die Unterscheidung zwischen den unterschiedlichen ethnischen Gruppen, obgleich die unterschiedlichen Kulturen wahrgenommen wurden. Native Americans, Ureinwohner und Indigene verwendet, im Fall der europäischen und euro-amerikanischen Vorstellung der Begriff des "Indianers", der Einfachheit halber ohne Anführungszeichen. Im Augenblick der "Entdeckung" des amerikanischen Doppelkontinents im Jahr 1492 stieß die Alte Welt Europas mit der Neuen Welt Amerikas zusammen, mit der es bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt keinen kulturellen Austausch gegeben hatte. In Europa, wo das "Fremde" seit der Antike Thema der Auseinandersetzung war, setzte nun eine intensive und medial vielfältige Auseinandersetzung mit den Indigenen ein. 2 Erste künstlerische Visualisierungen entstanden im Kontext der spanischen Chroniken, im Laufe der Zeit entwickelte sich daraus eine eigene, neue Bildtradition heraus. Den Europäern kam in der Malereien, in Zeichnungen und Illustrationen stets eine überlegene Rolle zu, während die Indigenen in den Bildkonzepten, mittels Ikonografie sowie Parametern für Hierarchisierung und Typisierung, als "Exoten" dargestellt wurden. Im Kontext

Nouveaux mondes, anciens mondes, mondes perdus : représenter et médiatiser la Préhistoire dans l'art et la culture visuelle américains INHA-Institut national d'histoire de l'art 2 Rue Vivienne 75002 Paris-Auditorium 7 & 8 avril 2022 This event is free and open to the public | It will be held in French and English Colloque / Conference Image: Hilaire Hiler, Oil on masonite mural study for the Aquatic Park Bathhouse and Casino in San Francisco, ca.

На початку 2020 року в харківському видавництві IST Publishing IST Publishing вийшов переклад книги «Повернення реального» американського арт-критика і теоретика мистецтва Гела Фостера. Вперше опубліковану 26 років тому в CША, цю книгу наразі в Україні варто було б поставити в теоретичний центр триваючої дискусії про актуальний стан арт-критики в Україні. Як не парадоксально, але однією з причин виявлення цієї дискусії стало публічне обговорення проекту «ДАУ» Іллі Хржановського одразу після того, як фільмографічна складова проекту стала масово доступною. Авторка тексту не має на меті намір включати цей матеріал в перелік висловлювань з приводу «ДАУ», а радше пропонує відслідкувати ті критичні стратегії, які, як наслідок, сформувалися в українській інтелектуальній спільноті, використовуючи для цього те середовище ідей, яке було актуалізоване завдяки виданню «Повернення реального» Гела Фостера в Україні.

depicts a brief, imaginary episode in which a woman and her son encounter the artist Thomas Hart Benton while he paints his murals in the Missouri capital building. He shows them the sections that relate to Kansas City, educating them (as well as the reader) about the seedy, enterprising, and ever-resourceful midwest town during the Depression. This project serves a three-fold purpose; firstly, it provides an historical sketch of this multi-faceted city in a new-- and hopefully, more engaging-- manner than the typical text book. But the graphic novel is more than a simple historical retelling: it serves as a brief look into Benton’s conceptualization of what art can and should do. In the story, he says, “Art serves a function, just like a hammer or wrench. It records the history of the people. ” Later critics consider Benton as much an important social historian as a famous Regionalist artist. He reveals the mundane and the sordid, not only the majestic; in doing so, he “shows us Mi...

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The Section of Fine Arts' Art-in-Architecture program created public and permanent cultural artifacts that expressed and recorded American beliefs, values, and stories for future generations. Many of these artworks have been saved. Sadly, others have been neglected, mistreated, or forgotten. This project focuses on The Section's post office art installations in Michigan. The Section of Fine Arts, one of FDR's New Deal programs of the Depression era, operated under the auspices of the Treasury Department. The program utilized symbols of the common man to tie together a nation's scattered and often isolated communities, to promote a common heritage and purpose, and to relate the past to the present while giving hope for the future. The documentation of these art-in-architecture projects is essential as is the need to conserve them. Although challenging, the effort is vital to insure the survival of these records of an important and distinctive American chapter. iv

This hand-colored lithograph p:oduced under Audubon's supervision by 1.T. Bowen of Philadelphia WIS IIJDOJ13 the first American lithographs from the artist's extraordinuy folio of life-sized watercolors entitled The Birds 0/ America. Audubon begllll to collect and draw birds as a child in Prance. Sent to his father', plantation near Philadelphia at age 18 "to develop a sense of seriousness md responsibility,' yOlDlg Audubon instead found 1imitlesI opportunities to observe and explore the natural world that so enchanted him. The famous illustrations resulting from his travels document hundreds of species that abounded in North America. Notice the nst', admirable resourcefulness in deploying the long neck of the Wltooping CrQlte through the picture space.

African-American Texans expressed ethnic as well as regional pride by their efforts to participate in the 1936 celebration of the state's centennial. Business and educational leaders, primarily from the African-American community in the Dallas area, lobbied the state legislature and Centennial officials to ensure proper representation of their race. Their efforts were manifest in the erection of the Hall of Negro Life Building-an exhibit displaying the progress of African-Americans in Texas and throughout the nation1-and the unprecedented participation of African-American performers at the third National Folk Festival held from the 14th through the 21st of June 1936 at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. The significance of their actions went beyond the Centennial era. Indeed, Texas Civil Rights leader A. Maceo Smith recalled that, for many African-American Texans, the Centennial "was the kickoff of the real Civil Rights thrust in Texas."