Modern Art and Architecture Commons^™

Umberto Boccioni's States Of Mind, Sonya Shrier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Umberto Boccioni’s series the States of Mind (1911) and discusses how these works represent a breakthrough in the artist’s search to find a pictorial expression for concepts that occupied him throughout his career. The States of Mind exists in four complete iterations each comprised of three images: The Farewells, Those Who Go and Those Who Stay.The first set of oil paintings, begun in late summer of 1911, are in the Divisionist style and are in the collection of the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan. A set of charcoal and contè drawings on paper, likely completed in …

Expanding Experimentalism: Art And Popular Music At The Kitchen In New York City, 1971-1985, Sarah A. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores artists' engagement with popular music at the interdisciplinary alternative space, the Kitchen, from 1971 to 1985. It seeks a critical language to challenge institutional frameworks to account for the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between parallel and hybrid popular music and avant-garde performance practices.

Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.

Contesting Representations Of Gender And Womanhood In Mexico The Photomontages Of Lola Álvarez Bravo, 1935–1958, Alana Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993), a Mexican photographer, photojournalist, portraitist, and teacher created approximately thirty photomontages during the span of her fifty-year career. This thesis argues that Álvarez Bravo turned to photomontage during targeted periods of her career in order to contest and challenge prevailing discourses on motherhood and femininity. A close analysis of eight photomontages produced between 1935 to the last printed in 1958 make evident the manifold ways Álvarez Bravo represented gender as a contested, political, and personal concern.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Jared French's State Park: A Contextual Study, Emily Sachar

Theses and Dissertations

Jared French's State Park (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1946) uses the language of magic realism in mid-20th-century America, the egg tempera technique of the Quattrocento, and the theories of Carl Jung to explore a variety of themes: homosexuality, family and power. This thesis considers State Park within the contexts of the artist's circle and liaisons with Paul Cadmus and George Tooker; his photography work with Pajama; his friendship with E.M. Forster; and homophobia at mid-century.

Purism And The Object-Type: Tradition And Modernity, Art And Society, Jamie Morra

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the Purist object-type as a formal and social tool in interwar Paris. It’s establishment, definition, and use is analyzed through the work and writings of Amédée Ozenfant, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and Fernand Léger, via painting as the primary practice, and its further conceptual applications in architecture and film.

Franz Roh And Visual Juxtaposition In Foto-Auge, Irini Zervas

Theses and Dissertations

This study of Foto-Auge (1929) is grounded on the approach of Franz Roh and aims to unlock the book’s meaning through an analysis of layout and visual sequence. This thesis also demonstrates how Foto-Auge proclaims photography’s ability not merely to record, but to disrupt any sense of reality in images.

A Corpus In First-Person: Weegee And The Performance Of The Self, Emily Annis

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the varied platforms that the Austrian-born New York photographer Weegee engaged with to perform his public self-fashioning from the beginning of his career as a news photographer in the mid-1930s through the publication of his first two photo-books, Naked City (1945) and Weegee’s People (1946).

The Possibilities Of The Video Game Exhibition, Elizabeth Legere 2762328

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an examination of video games as an artistic medium, and of their current presentation in art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as an attempt to come up with better modes of presentation for them within a museum space. Using a general understanding of video game theory and aesthetics, it might be possible to begin to look at solutions to the issues posed by current methods of presentation and interpretation, and to examine whether video games’ complicated aesthetic and artistic importance can be better highlighted by a new mode of display …

I Like America: Painting In The Expanded Field, Isaac Aden

Theses and Dissertations

Using Structuralist theory, Krauss created a Klein group diagram. the diagram included site sculpture, construction, marked sites, and axiomatic structures.Could the same strategy be applied to painting? As I attempted to engage painting from a critical perspective, I formed of a body of work entitled Painting in the Expanded Field.

Gertrudes Altschul And The Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: Modern Photography And Femininity In 1950s São Paulo, Paula V. Kupfer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the work of German-born Brazilian photographer Gertrudes Altschul, who developed a body of modernist photography within the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) in São Paulo in the 1950s. It underscores her female and immigrant perspective during the transition from Pictorialist to modernist photography in the postwar years.

Dag Hammarskjöld And Modern Art: An Inquiry Into The Aesthetic Values Of The Second Secretary-General Of The United Nations, Shantala M. Dugay

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents original research and previously unpublished information that breaks new ground in the legacy of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. By providing a new historical perspective of Hammarskjöld’s aesthetic values, this study forges a place for him in art history as a patron and collector of modern art.

The Artist And The "Information" Machine: Conceptualism, Technology, And Design In 1970, Jeremiah William Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the dialectical relationship between conceptualism and design in the year 1970, by focusing on Kynaston McShine’s landmark exhibition Information, held at the Museum of Modern Art. Specifically, it centers on the understudied “information machine,” a film apparatus designed by Ettore Sottsass, Jr., for use within the exhibition.

Magazine Politics: Edgardo Antonio Vigo’S Diagonal Cero And Hexágono ‘71, Francisco Javier Rivero Ramos

Theses and Dissertations

This research looks at the magazines Diagonal Cero (28 issues, 1962 – 1968) and Hexágono ‘71 (14 issues, 1971 – 1974) edited by Edgardo Antonio Vigo (La Plata, Argentina 1928 – La Plata, 1997) in order to examine the forms of political commentary incorporated into the magazines.

Photographing The "Uncelebrated" Truth: The Newspaper Pm, New York 1940-1942, Nancy Wechter

Theses and Dissertations

The left-liberal NYC newspaper, PM, used photography with unprecedented transparency as a crucial element in its mission to inform ordinary working people, teach them to be literate about the photographic message, and encourage them to be a participating audience during the tense period just before World War II.

David Alfaro Siqueiros’S Pivotal Endeavor: Realizing The “Manifiesto De New York” In The Siqueiros Experimental Workshop Of 1936, Emily Schlemowitz

Theses and Dissertations

The Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, initiated by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) in 1936, is often considered a pivotal moment for the artist. This thesis unveils new documentation about the Workshop, illuminating heretofore-unobserved aspects of the group’s governance, political aims, and theoretical framework put forth by Siqueiros in his critical “Manifiesto de New York.”

Antithetical Commentaries On X, Y And The Disruption Of Being, Eva Rocha

Theses and Dissertations

Through discursive essays and poetic narrative, Antithetical Commentaries on X, Y and the Disruption of Being explores the tenuous relationship between modes of measurement and the struggle for human relevance in the post-contemporary digital age. In the introductory essay, “Not the Feather, but the Bird”, I give an overview of the inherent problems of object-oriented ontology, and how it relates to aesthetics and social issues of our times. In the Developmental Overview, I detail how I developed my installation approach and techniques, particularly with regard to the three-way dynamic of the artist:work:viewer relationship and how it can encourage …

Modernism Contested: Gego's Grids And The Aesthetics Of Temporality, Victoria L. Fedrigotti

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces Gego’s contestation of art historical modernism through examining her relationship to the modernist grid and to her modernist genealogy of Constructivism, Geometric Abstraction, and Kineticism. These two nonlinear developments subvert the teleological conception of progress presumed by Greenbergian modernism, and bring forth Gego’s own aesthetic conception of temporality.

The Politics And Aesthetics Of American Art During The Cold War: Commissions For Philip Johnson’S New York State Pavilion At The 1964-1965 World’S Fair, Alexandria Valera

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the social and cultural climate surrounding the art commissions for Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair. The research presented herein examines how the economic and cultural climate of 1960's America affected the architectural landscape at the World's Fair and how Johnson's Pavilion was integrated into it. Finally, this thesis examines how artworks by John Chamberlain, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and others responded to the commercial premise of the fair itself. This thesis argues that ultimately the artworks presented used the language of commercial art to critique the Fair and the …

Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press And Fluxus, Meghan A. Dellacrosse

Theses and Dissertations

"Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press and Fluxus," positions Knowles’ Big Book (1966) as a case study of historical methodology and interdisciplinary artistic practice in the post-war period. This comprehensive analysis of Big Book, a work of art no longer extant, contextualizes its publisher, Something Else Press through Dick Higgins’ concept of “intermedia,” and important lesser-known junctures relevant to Fluxus and the group’s leader George Maciunas are illuminated. Knowles' early and lesser-known silkscreen paintings are also examined.

Continuity And Change In A 19th Century Illustrated Devi Mahatmya Manuscript From Nepal, Katherine Smith

Theses and Dissertations

In the Hindu tradition of the Indian subcontinent, worship of the goddess has long been practiced as supreme embodiment of the divine. Around the second century, a Sanskrit Purana (ancient Hindu text that extols deities) titled the Markandeya Purana details the battles of the supreme Goddess Durga against the illusions and negative energy in the universe. This textual version of the Devi Mahatmya “Praise of the Goddess” serves as the foundation for the nineteenth century Nepalese illustrated Devi Mahatmya, commissioned by Tej Bahadur Rana from Pokhara district in Nepal. Because the folios closely follow the textual Devi Mahatmya, …

Fred Kabotie, Elizabeth Willis Dehuff, And The Genesis Of The Santa Fe Style, Jessica W. Welton

Theses and Dissertations

Those scholars who have overlooked the relevance of Fred Kabotie and the Santa Fe Style he developed have missed an important historical segment of early Native American painting. This dissertation underscores the convergence of diverse intellectual, artistic and cultural backgrounds, especially those of Kabotie and Elizabeth Willis DeHuff, his first art teacher, which led to the formation of the Santa Fe Style in 1918. This style was formative for Dorothy Dunn’s later Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School.

This first generation of the Santa Fe Style of watercolor painting was empowered by highly educated men and women, …

The Rhetoric Of Picasso, Matthew R. Sharp

Theses and Dissertations

Pablo Picasso was arguably the most famous and controversial artist of the twentieth century, and some of his most famous pieces were created during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in response to the horrible atrocities taking place in his homeland. "The Rhetoric of Picasso" by Matthew R. Sharp, filed December 2007, examines some of these works—including paintings such as Guernica and Weeping Woman —and theorizes their rhetorical force, using speech act theory as the theoretical lens. Based on common images and themes in Picasso's symbolism, it is determined that Picasso's works during the Spanish Civil War are expressive speech acts …

Florine Stettheimer: A Re-Appraisal Of The Artist In Context, Melissa (Liles) Parris

Theses and Dissertations

Florine Stettheimer was an independent painter and eminent "art hostess" among the avant-garde in New York City during the years between the World Wars. In 1916, Stettheimer rather suddenly affected a naive or unschooled style that did not fit within any academic or vanguard movement. This new style, what I have termed conscious naiveté, can be considered the genesis of Stettheimer's mature works. Contemporaneous critical appraisals after the shift in style undervalued the inventive modernity of her work and unfairly “feminized” her style.