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A Historic Supernova: The Paintings Of Fernando De Szyszlo, 1959 To 1973, Samuel Rushing

Art History Theses and Dissertations

With a career spanning seven decades, Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo garnered domestic and international acclaim for his specific of abstract art, which melded together a multitude of source materials, from the techniques and compositional structures of European and American modernism to pre-Columbian indigenous visual and material culture and other Latin American modernists, such as Rufino Tamayo and Joaquín Torres-García. This thesis will focus attention on a specific time period, 1959 to 1973, during which he stridently applied this melding process, in combination with titles that specifically related indigenous subject matter. What that melding or synthesis process and its many …

Miming Modernity: Representations Of Pierrot In Fin-De-Siècle France, Ana Norman

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the commedia dell’arte character Pierrot through the lens of gender performance in order to decipher the ways in which he complicates and expands understandings of gender and the normative model of sexuality in fin de siècle France. Beginning with a case study of a chromolithograph by Jules Chéret, the first chapter of this thesis traces the perceived relation between Pierrot and the bohemian artist, and the underlying tensions between the male dominated artistic sphere and increasingly emancipated women. In contrast, Chapter II complicates the dominant impression of Pierrot’s association with the artists of bohemian Montmartre, and instead …

"Silent Salesmen," Skeptical Consumers: American Images In A Divided Berlin, 1949-67, Lauren Richman

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the visual language of American cultural images disseminated in Cold War Berlin and investigates how such institutional, lens-based media played a role in the country’s grappling with its postwar identity. Divided Berlin, with porous borders from 1949 to 1961, embodied a “final frontier,” “Western showcase;” a synecdoche of larger American geopolitical interests during a time when information and images defined the Cold War. Existing art historical studies of Cold War-era visual propaganda emphasize the prototypical East/West, communist/capitalist dichotomies, but often do not focus on the impact of the United States as Germany’s most prolific western occupier.

Across …