This thesis explores the emergence and development of the single-artist retrospective exhibition in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. The retrospective is understood as the presentation of a considerable body of works by an artist spanning an extensive period of his or her production so as to represent a career. The first such exhibition, I argue, occurred in London in 1775 by the Royal Academician Nathaniel Hone. This exhibition is juxtaposed to one that happened in Paris in 1783 at the Salon de la Correspondance, organised by Pahin de La Blancherie in honour of the works of the painter Claude Joseph Vernet. Following these first two retrospectives I examine what prompted the emergence of the retrospective format in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. I argue that the inspiration for the retrospective was a result of the eighteenth century practice of monographic rooms (devoted to a single artist) in public galleries such as the DUsseldorf Gallery and the Vienna Gallery. The thesis further considers the approbation and development of the practice in England and France by looking at how living artists used the retrospective format to advance their reputation and promote their careers together with contemporary attempts by institutions or the state who wished to pay tribute to the productions of an eminent artist. Hence William Blake's 1809 exhibition is considered with the British Institution's commemorative display of Joshua Reynolds's work in 1813; while Gustave Courbet's 1855 show is considered together with the organisation of single-artists' displays on the occasion of the 1855 Exposition Universelle (Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Horace Vernet, Eugene Delacroix and Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps). Exploring a period of roughly a hundred years it becomes apparent that the retrospective, while it helped to portray and celebrate artistic authorship, functioned both as a marketing and sales tool by living artists and as an honorary device by institutions.

This thesis examines the extensive and diverse body of work of American artist Dorothea Tanning (1910 - 2012). Her oeuvre - spanning seven decades of experimentation with a wide range of media across the visual and literary arts - was influenced by Surrealism, the highly charged psychodramas of gothic/fantasy fiction and by the physical and imaginative intensities of her own childhood experiences. Tanning's work engages with a number of recurring interests and themes: an exploration of childhood and feminine subjectivity; the portrayal of domestic, interior spaces in which reality and fantasy converge and strange occurrences are folded into otherwise ordinary spaces; an obsession with sensation, movement, music, states of flux; and, the repetition of motifs such as doors, wallpaper and unfurling fabric that symbolise transformative thresholds. Drawing on original interview material recorded with the artist from 2000 to 2009 and a wide variety of theoretical frameworks (including music, literary and psychoanalytic theory), I argue here, that we can identify a common thread running through all of Tanning's work: an obsession with thresholds, liminal and transitional spaces that I refer to as the in-between. Further, I suggest that the work is not merely to be understood as a detached representation of experience but seeks to evoke the in- between itself as a physical or emotional state, particularly as felt through a feminine subjectivity

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Walter De Maria (b.1935) is best known for The Lightning Field, a large-scale, remote outdoor work constructed in New Mexico, USA, and completed in 1977. Both De Maria and The Lightning Field have largely been critiqued solely within the art-historical framework of 'Land Art'. This thesis argues that such a framework has been too homogeneous and too narrow in its scope to do justice to the true complexities either of the artist's practice or of the visitor's experience of The Lightning Field, which involves considerably more than the dramatic spectacle of lightning. It proposes that De Maria's wide-ranging artistic career during the 1960s- in Minimalism and in 'Happenings', in proto-Fluxus and as a musician- provides a crucial context for an understanding of The Lightning Field. In particular, it argues that De Maria's engagement in music is of far greater significance than has so far been recognised, and that an exploration of the work of experimental composers John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich facilitates a richer understanding of many aspects of the visitor's experience of The Lightning Field. The thesis reviews the literature on 'Land Art' (Chapter Two), before going on to provide a much more detailed account of De Maria's career- in music as well as in art - prior to the making of The Lightning Field, in order to give some flavour of the true breadth of his interests and friendships (Chapter Three). It also provides a thorough reassessment of what has mistakenly been construed as De Maria's critical 'silence' (Chapter Four). After giving brief details of The Lightning Field's construction and visiting arrangements (Chapter Five), the next four chapters (Chapters Six to Nine) explore a number of hitherto neglected aspects of the visitor's experience of the work - driving, walking, watching, slowing down, listening, imagining - especially in relation to spatiotemporal concerns in experimental music. De Maria's aesthetic has been remarkably consistent throughout his career, despite the variety of means used to explore it, and the concluding chapter of this thesis (Chapter Ten) examines some of De Maria's more recent works in order to demonstrate his continuing concern for the complex dynamic between art, audience, and environment.

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