Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology

PDF

Washington University in St. Louis

Theses/Dissertations

Art

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis May 2018

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …


Imagining New Possibilities Through Social Practice, Sarah O. Hull May 2015

Imagining New Possibilities Through Social Practice, Sarah O. Hull

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

In my practice, I have significantly questioned the role of the arts in social change. I have explored various forms of social practice, especially political art,public art and community art. Social practice lives in-between the world of art and social action and can add an important voice to both. Still, social practice, (like all forms of art) is limited and cannot be the sole source of social change. It is by working with others already organizing for social change, but bringing in the unique skills and perspectives of an artist that social practice is most effective. In this thesis, I …


Benign Imperialists: Ethnographic (Mis)Representation By German Painter-Adventurers, 1840-1890, Sarah Hermes Griesbach Aug 2014

Benign Imperialists: Ethnographic (Mis)Representation By German Painter-Adventurers, 1840-1890, Sarah Hermes Griesbach

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, a new group of academic painters trained in Germany emerged as self-appointed ethnographic experts who sketched and painted heroic visions of a wild American West, and a similarly wild North Africa and Middle East. This group of artists, like their literary analog, traveled to the places they depicted. Artists Adolf Hoeffler (1825-1898), Carl Wimar (1828-1862), Friedrich Frisch (1813-1886), Adolf Schreyer (1828-1899) and Eugen Bracht (1842-1921) fused their artistic personae with their subjects to present themselves as ethnographic experts depicting scenes that asserted their own empirical authority as observers. They not only exhibited their …


The Performance Of Art: Picasso, Léger, And Modern Dance, 1917-1925, Amanda Holly Beresford Aug 2012

The Performance Of Art: Picasso, Léger, And Modern Dance, 1917-1925, Amanda Holly Beresford

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This thesis examines the phenomenon of easel painters designing for ballet companies in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. It focuses on the work of Picasso for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Léger for De Maré's Ballets Suédois between 1917 and 1925, and considers the consequences for these artists' studio practice of their involvement in dance theatre. Their work is situated in the historical context of Wagner’s influential notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk—total theatre synthesizing all the arts, including painting—and its reinterpretation by avant-garde theatre practitioners from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century. Picasso’s and Léger’s stage designs reveal the dynamic …