American Art and Architecture Commons^™

The Woman Behind The Whitney, Breanna Epp

Honors Theses

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as a prominent sculptor and patron to artists in the early 1900s. Her art collection was the largest of American art at the time, and she led the nation into an appreciation of its own native art. Native in this context specifically means any art that was made in America, not strictly art made by the indigenous people of the Americas. Tackling her entire life, from growing up in the Vanderbilt family to her death, I provide an overview of her interactions with the art …

Bonded By Nature: The Prevalence Of Landscape Subjects Within Abstract Expressionism And Their Sources In American Art, Aileen F. Marcantonio

Theses and Dissertations

Landscape subjects reappear throughout Abstract Expressionism. Although it is often overlooked, landscapes were perhaps a natural subject for a group of artists that were known to work from their environment. When we focus on the landscape subjects, we gain a better understanding of Abstract Expressionism and its place within the canon of American art.

Dating Deborah Hall: A Portrait Reconsidered, Brian E. Hack

Publications and Research

The elaborate, full-length portrait of Deborah Hall (1766, Brooklyn Museum) is one of the landmarks of Colonial portraiture, having earned its place in the canon for the pictorial innovations displayed by its creator, the enigmatic William Williams (1727-1791). The dominant narrative holds that Hall, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Philadelphia printer David hall, tends her roses in an imaginary Garden of Love, surroundings Williams adapted from symbols of beauty and chastity found in emblem books of the period. The scholarly assumption is that the painting served to promote Deborah's marital suitability to potential suitors visiting the Hall residence. The current …

Painting, Geography, And The Body: Charting The First Two Decades Of Mary Corse’S Art, Sarah A. Meller

Theses and Dissertations

Mary Corse has always maintained her position on the periphery, and her work has generally been excluded from art historical scholarship. This study illuminates the ways in which the first two decades of Corse’s practice were in fact in dynamic dialogue with broader impulses and concurrent trends operating at the time.

American Encounters: Art, History, And Cultural Identity, Angela L. Miller, Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, Jennifer L. Roberts

Books and Monographs

American Encounters provides a narrative of the history of American art that focuses on historical encounters among diverse cultures, upon broad structural transformations such as the rise of the middle classes and the emergence of consumer and mass culture, and on the fluid conversations between "high" art and vernacular expressions. The text emphasizes the intersections among cultures and populations, as well as the exchanges, borrowings, and appropriations that have enriched and vitalized our collective cultural heritage.

A "Peculiarly American" Enthusiasm: George Bellows, Traditional Masculinity, And The Big Dory, James W. Denison Iv

Honors Projects

A “Peculiarly American” Enthusiasm: George Bellows, Traditional Masculinity, and The Big Dory investigates the portrayal of masculinity in the oeuvre of the much-lauded yet enigmatic American painter George Bellows (1882-1925). Rather than relying on Bellows’ urban works for source material, a significant portion of this investigation is conducted via a case study of Bellows’ 1913 panel The Big Dory, a scene of fishermen pushing a boat into the North Atlantic off Monhegan Island, Maine that the artist painted during a sojourn on the island in the months after his involvement in the landmark Armory Show in New York. The …

Funny Pages: Comic Strips And The American Family, 1930-1960, Dahnya Nicole Hernandez

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis examines a selection of American newspaper comic strips from approximately 1930 to 1960. At the height of their runs, many strips appeared in upwards of a thousand newspapers in the United States alone, and syndicates crafted and adjusted the content of these strips according to their image of the average American. This work discusses the pop cultural significance of these strips as well as the traditional American values revealed through each of them. Three strips in particular are the focal point for this thesis: Blondie, created by Chic Young in 1930, Little Orphan Annie created by …

'Not Unworthy Of His Hand': Crossing Borders In Benjamin West's A Drayman Drinking, Lauren K. Lessing, Terri Sabatos

Faculty Scholarship

In May 1797, Benjamin West—President of the Royal Academy, Historical Painter to the Court of King George III, and Surveyor of the King's Pictures—exhibited a small genre painting titled A Drayman Drinking at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in London. It was one of seven paintings West exhibited that year, and the only one overlooked by the reviewer for the Times. The critic's oversight may have stemmed from the unprecedented number of paintings on view (nearly twelve hundred, four hundred more than were hung the previous year) and the resulting overcrowding of the principle exhibition room. Through his …

Framing Cultural Capitalism: William Wilson Corcoran And Alice Walton As Patrons Of The American Art Museum, Kelsey E. Tyler

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In 2011, Alice Walton opened what is now considered to be among the most important American art collections in the country, in a museum called Crystal Bridges, in Bentonville, Arkansas. What is remarkable is not only the exorbitant amount of money spent to open the museum - over $800 million dollars - but also that she was the primary financier. William Wilson Corcoran, a mid-nineteenth-century banker, in many ways is a better comparison than Morgan or Gardner, as like Walton he intended to found a museum dedicated specifically to American art. His museum, which he hoped would become a national …

Art Walk, Gallery Of Contemporary Art

Sacred Heart University Art Collection

The Collection is comprised of a wide range of donatedart works—paintings, prints and sculpture. Works in The Collection are installed on campus so thatstudents, faculty, staff and visitors encounter original works of art everywhere—in public areas, such as hallways and common rooms, as well as in private offices throughout the University. As a result, art has become apart of the daily lives of everyone at Sacred Heart University.

To assist in appreciating a selection of the art displayed on campus, the essay Looking at Contemporary Art is included in this brochure.

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Getting At The Rapture Of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly And Visual Experience, Leo J. O'Donovan Sj

Research Resources

Leo J. O'Donovan offers an art-critical account of the American artist Ellsworth Kelly including a comprehensive overview of his career and his attention to color and to vision. O'Donovan explores context and situation to raise questions of painterly color and atmosphere:

Citation:

Leo J. Donovan, "Getting at the Rapture of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly and Visual Experience." In: Babette Babich, ed., Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Hermeneutic Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 295—300.

The Portrayal Of The Negro In American Painting, Bowdoin College Museum Of Art

Museum of Art Exhibition Catalogues

The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting (1964) is an exhibition catalogue documenting an art exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, curated by Marvin S. Sadik.

Iconographic Complexes Of American Art In Relation To Current Art Education, Arthur J. Schneider

Art & Art History ETDs

The problem of this study is to locate the principal images employed in the art of the New World with the purpose of reestablishing the function of such elements integral to a modern realism in American art.