This study examines the influence of Modern Art on the piano compositions of Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) to demonstrate how he was inspired by visual art and integrated its ideas into his music. From his youth, Takemitsu was aware of the relationship between music and visual art, exploring different genres, especially Surrealist poetry and modern painting, as well as Japanese gardens, then harmonizing and incorporating these ideas within his music. In doing so, he established his own philosophy and musical structure, combining colorful sonorities with spatial effects of timelessness, which became cornerstones of his music. This document explores and identifies ideas from Modern Art - primarily visual works of Paul Klee, Odilon Redon, Kagaku Murakami, and other Surrealists - that Takemitsu adapted and wove into his compositions to create visual imagery, rich in color, within his music. The use of these ideas is discussed in an analysis of two of Takemitsu's most profound and mature solo piano works, Les Yeux Clos - In Memory of Shuzo Takiguchi (1979) and Les Yeux Clos II (1989), both inspired by Odilon Redon's series of paintings, entitled Les Yeux Clos (1890).Following Chapter I, the introduction, Chapter II discusses Takemitsu's early influences, film music, legacy, and contribution to society. Chapter III examines Takemitsu's encounter with Surrealism and the four artists– Shuzo Takiguchi, Paul Klee, Odilon Redon, and Kagaku Murakami - that influenced him the most by demonstrating the importance of breaking with convention and freely exploring one's inner world. Chapter IV identifies the principles and ideas of Modern Art and Surrealism that appealed to Takemitsu, and how he adapted them into his compositions. The ideas fall into four categories: philosophy, structure, color, and space. Chapter V presents original analyses of two solo piano works, Les Yeux Clos and Les Yeux Clos II, demonstrating how the principles and ideas of different art forms are integrated into Takemitsu's works. Concluding remarks in Chapter VI include a brief discussion of how an understanding of Takemitsu's complex artistic journey can deepen a performer's understanding and interpretation of Les Yeux Clos and Les Yeux Clos II.

Museums are culturally constructed as places dedicated to tastemaking, preservation, historical record, and curation. Yet the contemporary isn’t yet absorbed by history, so as museums incorporate contemporary art these commonly accepted functions are disrupted. Through case studies, this thesis examines the successes and failures of three New York museums (MoMA, Dia:Beacon and New Museum) as they grapple with the challenging, perhaps irresolvable, tension between the contemporary and the very idea of the museum.

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.

In the 1960s, art and business engaged in a sweeping but now largely forgotten romance. Corporations rushed to install art in their foyers and on their urban plazas. Many bought or commissioned works of art to display inside their factories and offices. They reproduced art in their advertisements and annual reports, and profiled it in press stunts and photo ops. They developed promotional art exhibitions that toured across the country and around the world. This dissertation considers how such artworks supported – but also sometimes disrupted – the marketing, public relations, lobbying and personnel strategies of large-scale corporate enterprise. By reconstructing this diverse field, this dissertation contends that art was a key tool for the burgeoning ‘persuasion industry’ of the sixties. Both in the United States and further afield, artists and businesses worked together to make artworks function as ‘forms of persuasion’, instruments by which the consensus of the corporation’s constituents – workers, consumers and regulators – could be secured. The case studies focus on range of companies active in this field, exploring the phenomenon in three thematic chapters, covering the use of pop art by the packaged goods business, the role of abstract painting in the workplace and the value of metal sculpture for the steel industry. It is argued that the practices described through these examples represent a defining cultural phenomena of sixties art, one that challenges the conventional art historical alignment of its avant-garde with the decade’s famed radical politics, protest and counterculture.

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, the illustrations’ amalgamation of styles demonstrates a double entendre of religious and political frameworks represented through Indian religious iconography with localized motifs and styles from Nepal. In this study, I argue that the illustrated Nepalese Devi Mahatmya indicates a shift in power from the Shah aristocracy to Rana oligarchy. This Devi Mahatmya contextualizes the social, religious, and historical events of nineteenth century Nepal, as a unique extension to the current scholarship about the Devi Mahatmya since it is dated and has a known patron. The intentional amalgamation of previous Newar styles, localized elements, and European décor reveals the mythical being contemporized, that is, drawing from English modernism to empower the Rana family, adding a unique flair to this manuscript as opposed to previous Devi Mahatmyas of Indian Guler or Newar style. Within the nineteenth century Nepali Devi Mahatmya, the background of this Devi Mahatmya is Guler-inspired, utilizing lightly hued backgrounds and landscapes, suggesting that the artist(s) had observed Guler compositions prior to this commission. The Nepali and Newar motifs contextualizes the Devi Mahatmyas commissioning in Pokhara, as these elements comment on the clan patriarch Jung Bahadur Rana and uncle of the patron usurping power from the Shah king, asserting a new Rana oligarchy that would last until 1951. As a result, this Devi Mahatmya is used as an offering to the goddess to legitimize Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana and the nephews that would follow his legacy.

In 1998, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of artworks by Jackson Pollock. Curators Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel worked in an art historical context that had been significantly shaped by the early critical writings by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The curators’ stated intention for the exhibition installation was to provide “a fresh chance for new generations of artists to come to terms with a legendary figure” and to enable “the broader public to reassess a quintessentially American artist in light of three decades of new scholarship,” without “ hewing to any particular critical dogma.” Despite this curatorial intention, this thesis examines the ways in which the retrospective inscribed Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s theories, while disregarding subsequent scholarship that did not explicitly inscribe or align with the mid-century criticism in its account of Jackson Pollock.

This thesis offers a new way to conceptualize Hermann Max Pechstein’s “primitivism” as a kind of ethnographic “primitivism.” By creating a constellation that connects Pechstein’s Nidden and Palau-based projects, Paul Gauguin’s “primitivist” aesthetic, and the research produced by German ethnographers, I argue that the “documentary” nature of Pechstein’s work paradoxically merges the “scientific” aspects of ethnography with his, and more generally, other Expressionists’ interest in the “primitive.” In addition, the following work demonstrates that the purportedly “scientific” representations and visual accounts of South Seas natives that ethnographers like Otto Finsch produced in the late 1800s and early 1900s heavily and problematically relied on an aestheticization of these foreign people that renders them as decorative, “exotic” objects, which are in many ways subjugated to the gaze of and “on display” for the Westerners examining them. This thesis ultimately focuses on how Pechstein’s representations of people from Palau effectively combine the style typical of most Expressionists and an impulse towards ethnographic depiction not seen in the work of his Brücke colleagues.

This dissertation focuses on the modern art of Pakistan from 1947-57, more specifically, the role of six important artists who founded the Lahore Art Circle (LAC) in 1952. The group played a pivotal role in the formulation of modernism in Pakistan after its establishment as an Islamic Republic. Framed within postcolonial theories and criticism, this study will address the role of modern art in developing new artistic sensibilities in the nation of Pakistan. In order to understand the context of LAC’s framing of “modernism” and “nationalism” in terms of specific historic and hybrid nexus,my research will provide an investigation of works of only the founding members of the Lahore Art Circle including: Shakir Ali (1924-1975), Sheikh Safdar Ali (1924-1983),Moyene Najmi (1926-1997), Ali Imam (1924-2000), Ahmed Parvez (1926-1979) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928-1985). In analyzing the works of individual artists and the role of LAC during the first decade of the establishment of Pakistan as a nation-state, this study provides a framework to understand the specific condition of modernism in Pakistan that was dictated by these artists’ careers and works. Thus, this research investigates how the framing of modernism for these artists took on highly personal, international, incipiently national and distinctly local forms in the early years of the Pakistan after the Partition of 1947. Lastly, it will also examine how the individual LAC artists situated themselves in the discourse between constructing a newly established Pakistani identity within the larger paradigms of international modernism.

Pierre II Mignard naquit en Avignon, terre partagée entre papauté et royauté, dans une famille d’artistes. Il fit d’abord son apprentissage de dessinateur, de copiste et de peintre auprès de son père Nicolas, avant de suivre à Paris son oncle Pierre Mignard (dit le Romain). Ce fut dans la capitale que Pierre II fit évoluer son art pictural et architectural. Il partit dans le sud de la France puis en Italie pour lever les beaux monuments antiques avant de revenir en France. Enrichi de ce qu’il avait vu et fait, il devint, en 1671, membre fondateur et Professeur de l’Académie Royale d’Architecture, l’élevant à un art sans fioriture, avec ses propres codes, des lignes pures, simples et modernes. Après plusieurs années dans la capitale, il repartit dans sa ville natale. En Avignon, il fut un architecte et un peintre très prisé, un ingénieur, cartographe, expert,médiateur passionné par son travail. Dernier artiste de génie, il laissa dans cette ville son empreinte moulée d’un art nouveau. Il fit de son style une référence et de son expérience un art. Il bâtit de riches et magnifiques demeures bourgeoises, encore visibles aujourd’hui. Cette architecture épurée plaisait à ses contemporains notables et religieux qui le considéraient comme un créateur de génie. Couronné de gloire par des titres prestigieux tel qu’Architecte du Roi ou Chevalier de l’Ordre du Christ, il fut copié par les artistes de son temps et notamment par son filleul Pierre Thibault, l’architecte Jean Baptiste Franque ou encore le peintre Joseph Péru. Trois siècles plus tard, grâce au talent de Pierre II Mignard, le coeur de la ville d’Avignon, cerné par ses remparts ressemble à un joyau dans son écrin. / Pierre II Mignard born in Avignon, a land divided between papacy and kingdom, in an artist’s family. He was formed to the drawing and the painting in his father’s studio, before he followed his uncle, Pierre Mignard (as the Roman) in Paris. It was in the capital that Pierre II upgraded his pictorial and architectural art. He went to the south of France and in Italia to draw the most beautiful antic monument after to come back in France. Enriched by all he saw and he did, he became, in 1671, a founder member and Professor of the Royal Academy of Architecture, raising it to an art without embellishment, with its owncodes, pure simple and modern lines. After several years in the capital, he came back to his natal city. In Avignon, he was a very appreciated architect and painter, a civil engineer, cartographer, expert, mediator fascinated by its work. Last genius artist, he gave to the city his stamp mould on a new art. He did to his style a reference, and to his experience an art. He built big and gorgeous residence, still visible nowadays. This refined architecture was liked by his notable and religious contemporaries who considered him like a genius creative. Wreathed with glory by prestigious title like Architect of the King or Christ’s Knight, he was reproduced and imitated by artists and notably by his godson Pierre Thibault, the architectJean-Baptiste Franque or the painter Joseph Péru. Three century later, thanks to Pierre II Mignard’s talent, Avignon’s city’s heart, surrounded by its walls look like jewel in his case.

Este é um estudo sobre a importância da imaterialidade encontrada na obra de Kazímir Sievierínovitch Maliévitch (1878-1935), artista, pintor, filósofo, professor e arquiteto russo, considerado um dos principais precursores da arte abstrata. Os ideais de um mundo melhor e sem objetos, defendidos pelo artista, tiveram como consequência uma proposta visual representada por uma simplicidade nas formas e cores, com imensa sofisticação filosófica e intelectual. Num período de guerras e revoluções, os artistas dessa geração buscavam novas propostas. Não havia mais espaço para uma arte puramente contemplativa. Para a compreensão de suas obras, dependemos de uma extensa pesquisa pictórico-filosófica, com temas relacionados ao visível e ao sensível, para assim criarmos um possível juízo de valor. Faremos também um breve estudo sobre a imaterialidade contida na obra de Mark Rothko (1903, Rússia 1970, Nova Iorque), baseado em um olhar pós-suprematista. Para o estudo e abordagem dessas características da visualidade, nos apropriaremos de alguns aspectos do pensamento de Merleau-Ponty, para então justificarmos um possível olhar pós-suprematista em Rothko. / This is a study on the importance of immateriality found in the work of Kazimir Sievierinovich Maliévitch (1878 - 1935), artist, painter, philosopher, teacher and Russian architect, considered one of the main precursors of abstract art. The ideals of a better world and without objects, defended by the artist, had as consequence a visual proposal represented by a simplicity in the forms and colors, with immense philosophical and intellectual sophistication. In a period of wars and revolutions, the artists of this generation were seeking new proposals, there was no more space for a purely contemplative art. For the understanding of his works we depend on an extensive pictorial-philosophical research, with themes related to the visible and the sensitive, in order to create a possible value judgment. We will also make a brief study of the immateriality contained in the work of Mark Rothko (1903 - Russia, 1970 - New York), through a post-suprematist look. For the study and approach of these characteristics of visuality we will appropriate some aspects of Merleau-Ponty\'s thought, to justify a possible post-suprematist look in Rothko.