The purpose of this thesis is to identify essential characteristics of the first generation of Romantic landscape painters and painting movements in a given English-speaking country which followed the generation of Turner, Constable and Martin in England, and then trace how the second generation of Romantic-realist painters represents a different paradigm. For a paradigmatic construct of the first generation, the focus is on the lives and major works of the American arch-Romantic landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801--1848) and the Australian Romantic landscape painter Conrad Martens (1801--1878). The second generation model features the American Frederic Edwin Church (1826--1900), the Australian William Charles Piguenit (1836--1914), and the British Canadian Lucius Richard O'Brien (1832--1899). Cole and Martens, closer to their predecessors in England, created dynamic paradigm shifts in their new countries. Following them, the second generation of Romantic-realists produced a synthesis of romanticism, scientific naturalism, and nationalistic symbolism.

Charles Frederick Ulrich (1858-1908) is best-known today for his paintings of figures at work, exhibited in New York between 1882 and 1884. By portraying both males and females at their work tables, Ulrich was showing middle-class individuals occupied with tasks informed by both knowledge and culture. This thesis describes these works as a way of exploring the artist's New York career, especially in regards to such current issues as immigration, labor, and social awareness. Charles F. Ulrich left no diaries, journals, or sketches to aid in the investigation of his artwork and life. While no verbal clues exist, this study reveals how Ulrich's work is filled with visual signs that invite interpretation. Not surprisingly, since he was raised in a household of German immigrant parents and spent several years of artistic training in Munich, Ulrich's pictures manifest, above all else, the strength of his German heritage.

<p> This study examines the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, its history, educational mission, and the ways in which its collection of primarily African American art can be used as an art education resource. The data collection for this qualitative case study included questionnaires focusing on the collection and the Center&rsquo;s history and mission, in-depth interviews with three Center administrators and one visual artist, informal personal communication, and observational notes. All data was examined using content analysis. Respondents indications concluded that the mission and goals of the Center grew out of its WPA beginnings and was primarily to support the artists and to educate the community about the value of African American art; that the Center&rsquo;s education mission revolved around its educational programming; that the art collection had been used in the past to teach about the Black Power Movement and makes references to important events in history; and that the Center&rsquo;s relationship to the community was multi-faceted and included outreach to local schools in after-school art programs. </p><p> The center&rsquo;s art collection, because of the themes inherent in many of the works, make important connections to key events in American history such as the WPA, WWII, the Great Depression and the Black migration that facilitates meaning making across the life span. The study&rsquo;s results provided evidence of the South Side Community Art Center&rsquo;s role as not only a repository for regional and national African American art and artists, but also as an educational hub for visual culture, art study and relevance for contemporary life themes.</p>

Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989) is best-known as a fashion photographer, her photographic life encompassed a pattern of art and documentary ideas interwoven over a forty-year period. This thesis describes her early art influences and explores her photography career in regards to the historical and cultural developments from World War I through the 1950s. Dahl-Wolfe is compared with her contemporaries such as Consuelo Kanaga, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Richard Avedon, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The study reveals how Dahl-Wolfe's work reflects photography's evolution over a specific period and how traditional constructions affect the reception of commercial photographers. Conclusively, Dahl-Wolfe's oeuvre straddles such an array of constructed arenas that she virtually fell through the cracks and has been narrowly defined as a result of art historical definitions.

In 1910 Alfred Stieglitz published two pamphlets titled Photo-Secessionism and Its Opponents, reproducing letters written by Stieglitz and fellow Secessionist Annie W. Brigman, to Frank Roy Fraprie, Walter Zimmerman, and Francis J. Mortimer, members of the international photographic community in public opposition to the activities of the Photo-Secession. The extent of Stieglitz's frustration with the frequent pictorialist quarrels occurring from 1900 to 1910, and the degree to which "secessionist" principles and actions were misunderstood is apparent from the correspondence. This thesis examines the letters published in Photo-Secessionism and Its Opponents, the statements of the opposition figures which these letters answer, and the situations which produced them. From this examination a clearer understanding of pictorial photographic politics and the principles and purposes of the Photo-Secession is gained.

In July of 1888 Vincent van Gogh produced a series of drawings of the plain the Crau. Two drawings from this series are particularly shaped by the circumstances surrounding van Gogh at that time, and what he wanted to communicate about the French countryside. Wanting to produce drawings that would sell, van Gogh turned to methods of composition and style based on Dutch seventeenth-century panoramic landscapes, which were themselves shaped by the practices of map making. Van Gogh produced representations of the French countryside that reveal his nostalgic attitude and the biases of his class. What van Gogh saw in France was the old Holland of the seventeenth-century landscape artists, not France of the late nineteenth century. The drawings re-connect the artist to his Dutch visual heritage. They also reveal van Gogh's nostalgic view of the rural landscape, and his particularly Dutch attitude toward changes in this landscape caused by nineteenth-century modernization. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Previous art historical scholarship has approached the portraits of court jesters painted for the Buen Retiro Palace by Diego Velazquez between the late 1620s and 1630s as fascinating character studies that provided the artist with the opportunity to display psychological nuances and to experiment with painterly techniques that were precluded in his formal portraits of the royal family and members of the court. In addition, they have been discussed as an interesting intermingling of Northern and Southern Italian traditions of jester and dwarf imagery. This thesis will show that Velazquez was also deliberately including sophisticated references to prevailing philosophical ideas concerning inverted realities, and that these paintings, as well as their placement, provide information about the function of the jester as an instrument of opposition and comparison for the monarch at the court of Philip IV.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the bronze sculpture known as the Piraeus Apollo and to establish its date of manufacture. It may be the first known monumental bronze sculpture in Greece, dating to the late sixth or early fifth century, or it could be a second century Archaistic bronze. For this investigation several different methods are employed. First, the archaeological context is discussed by reexamining the excavation history. Then Apollo's place in the canon of Greek sculpture is established using an art historical approach with a focus on connoisseurship to find Apollo's place in the canon of Greek sculpture through comparisons with other Greek sculpture. Previous scholarship is key to this section of the thesis. It is then placed chronologically using the current understanding of ancient bronze casting technologies and scientific analysis. Through this analysis, the Piraeus Apollo arises as an example of the Lingering Archaic style from the beginning of the fifth century.

This research project examines the photographs of mujercitos and hombrecitas in the exemplary Mexican nota roja periodical Alarma!, from 1963 to 1986. The photographs of mujercitos, "effeminate men" and hombrecitas, "masculine type women" (as defined by Alarma!) are not what one expects from a nota roja periodical. Nota roja is a particular news genre for the narration of violence characterized by its gruesome and cruel photographic content. Within these photographs, mujercitos and hombrecitas are shown posing and taking the center stage of the camera for 23 consecutive years. Through an analysis of how the photographs of mujercitos and hombrecitas featured in the nota roja periodical Alarma! inform and participate in the larger national imaginary in relation to peripheral sexualities in Mexico, my dissertation contends that these photographs work as a site of resistance to and a subversion of many different forms of violence in Mexico. Moreover, this analysis reveals a process of subjectivation and subject identification informed as much by class/skin tonalities as by gender/sex. As such, my dissertation maps some of the zones of tension between the main Anglo North American theories of performative gender/sex within the pigmentocratic sociocultural system of Mexico. / Ce projet de recherche s'intéresse aux photographies de mujercitos et de hombrecitas dans le fameux périodique nota roja mexicain, Alarma!, de 1963 à 1986. Les photographies de mujercitos, « hommes efféminées » et hombrecitas « femmes masculines » (définis comme tel dans Alarma!) sont quelque peu inattendu dans un magazine nota roja. La presse nota roja est spécialisé dans une narration sensationnaliste de la violence et se caractérise par un contenu photographique tape-à-l'œil, très cru et souvent morbide. Pourtant ces sexualités périphériques vont s'y mettre en scène et prendre la pose devant l'objectif et pendant 23 années consécutives. A partir d'une analyse sur la manière dont les photographies de mujercitos et hombrecitas publiées dans le périodique de nota roja, Alarma! rendent comptent et participent du large imaginaire des sexualité périphérique au Mexique, ma dissertation soutient que ces photographies fonctionnent comme lieu de résistance et de subversion face à différentes formes de violence au Mexique. En outre, cette analyse révèle un processus de subjectivation et d´identification du sujet, défini aussi bien à partir de la classe social /tonalité de peau que du genre /sexe. De la sorte, ma dissertation cartographie les zones de tensions entre les principales théories nord-américaines et anglophones de genre /sexe performatif avec le système socio-culture de pigmentocratie au Mexique.

Histories of North American feminist, queer, and queer feminist art can be traced in relation to a history of the institutions, organizations, and structures that have helped to secure and legitimize feminist and queer art practices. My dissertation provides a queer feminist historiographical analysis of key feminist and queer alternative art spaces in three North American cities, in an effort to both affirm their enduring historical significance and to delineate the ways by which the present day histories of past queer and feminist practices support or challenge the dominant narrative lens through which the histories have come to be read. With focus on the 1970s feminist art movement in Los Angeles, the underground queer art communities formed in New York City in the 1980s and continuing into the mid-2000s, and the burgeoning queer feminist cultural communities working in the present day in Montreal, I show how the socio-political conditions of each place have resulted in divergent paths among the institutions. Putting each history into dialogue with contemporary queer feminist initiatives and interventions, I demonstrate how queer feminism can work, in the present day, both to secure the historical significance of these spaces and to critically engage histories of exclusion as integral to their continued relevance. / On peut retracer l'histoire de l'art féministe, de l'art queer ainsi que de l'art queer et féministe en Amérique du Nord à travers une histoire des institutions, des organisations et des structures qui ont contribué à garantir et légitimer les pratiques d'art queer et féministe. Ma thèse offre une analyse historiographique queer et féministe des espaces d'art alternatifs, féministes et queer clés dans trois villes nord-américaines, de manière à affirmer leur portée historique tout en délimitant les façons par lesquelles l'histoire actuelle des pratiques queer et féministes du passé soutient ou remet en question l'optique du discours dominant à travers laquelle cette histoire en est venue à être lue. En me concentrant sur le mouvement artistique féministe des années 1970 à Los Angeles, sur les communautés underground d'art queer formées à New York dans les années 1980 jusqu'à la première moitié des années 2000 et sur les communautés culturelles queer et féministes émergeantes aujourd'hui à Montréal, je démontre comment les conditions socio-politiques présentes dans chaque ville ont mené les institutions dans des trajectoires divergentes. En engageant chaque histoire dans un dialogue avec des initiatives et interventions féministes et queer contemporaines, je démontre comment le féminisme queer peut présentement participer tant à assurer l'importance historique de ces espaces qu'à aborder, de façon critique, les histoires d'exclusion comme étant une partie intégrante de leur pertinence continue.