The XXXII Venice Biennale, held in 1964, presented an important moment in the history of American art, for it was the first time that an American painter was awarded the major prize at the prestigious international show. The fact that Robert Rauschenberg captured the most coveted award of the Biennale, the Grand Prize for painting, had major repercussions for the art scene in the United States and the international art community. For the Americans, the prize was "proof" that American art had finally come into its own, that through its struggle for recognition over the European avant-garde, it had finally reached its well-deserved place as leader of the pack. For the Europeans, especially the French, the award represented the "last frontier" of American expansionism--for it seemed that the economic and military dominance of the United States finally had been supplemented by cultural dominance. It seems pertinent to this study to examine the French response in particular, since they had traditionally dominated Biennale prizes. By analyzing the French reviews and responses to the prize, and situating these in a broader political context, I will discuss how the U.S. was perceived as the new cultural leader, despite the vehement objections to the culture of the New Frontier, which seemed to be only Coke bottles, stuffed eagles and carelessly dripped paint. Given the vehement objections engendered by the Rauschenberg victory, it seems somewhat curious that the United States would choose Rauschenberg as a representative of American culture. In order to discover how the pop imagery in the work was linked to the image : of U.S. culture promoted by the U.S. Information Agency (the government agency responsible for the show), it is necessary to analyze the cultural and intellectual debates of the early 1960s. Rejecting earlier notions that high art should remain separate from mass culture, a prominent group of intellectuals argued for a "new sensibility" in art which would embrace popular culture, thereby elevating it. This positive notion of a single, all-embracing culture corresponds to a more general optimism among many intellectuals; their rallying cry was the "end of ideology," which disdained radical critique in favor of the promise of Kennedy's "progressivism" and the welfare state. These intellectuals argued that while the system was not perfect, any major problems could be averted by simply "fine-tuning" the existing state; in the meantime, the promise of Kennedy's New Frontier required a more affirmative than critical stance. The elements shared between these discourses on culture and society at this time were of seminal importance to the critical understanding of Rauschenberg's work, particularly as it was presented at the Biennale. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references. / Jack Tworkov began painting in the 1920s and made his reputation later as an Abstract Expressionist working in a gestural style. At the age of sixty-five Tworkov put that reputation on the line by undergoing a radical transformation in style and, within a few years, emerged as one of the innovative geometric painters of the later 1960s and the 1970s. This dissertation focuses on works from 1955, when Tworkov began to paint wholly idiosyncratic canvases, to 1979, at which time he significantly changed his brushstroke, a stylistic element that functions as a thread throughout this period. Other binding concepts include a continuing attempt to reconcile painterliness and spontaneity with premeditated structure and the combination of choice and chance in generating new ideas and compositions . This dissertation attempts to provide a complete analysis of this specific portion of Tworkov's work, which has never been done, and to avail the reader of a significant collection of artist's statements drawn from a variety of sources including Tworkov's own diary notes, the art historical literature , and personal interviews with the author. The analysis of the works is contextual, within the frame work of Tworkov's career itself, and proceeds stylistically rather than chronologically, identifying, explaining, and pursuing trends in Tworkov's works over an extended period of time. Iconographic analyses are provided where most appropriate and where most illustrative Tworkov's relationship to other artists has been discussed. The work from 1955 to 1979 has been divided into three major segments: Transitional Works, including the Painterly Abstractions and the Fields; the Structural/Geometric Works, subdivided into early geometric canvases, further experiments with geometry, and the Bisections; and the System Works, including both the Knight Moves and the Three-Five-Eight series. / by Lois Fichner-Rathus. / Ph.D.

Drawing upon theories concerning visuality, spectatorship, consumption, and the institutionalization of culture, this dissertation considers the ways that the art exhibition at the Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) attempted to make modern art accessible and acceptable to a mass audience in America. The story of the exhibition in the Palace of Fine Arts demonstrates how the American artistic establishment incorporated modernism into the conservative idiom of a major international exposition by promoting a definition and understanding of "modern" art that was distinctly national, celebrated individual style over subject matter, and was even open to personal interpretation. Making use of lessons learned at the Armory Show, the PPIE Art Department provided visitors with clear instruction on how to experience the exhibition, how to contextualize it within the broader history of art, and how to subjectively engage with individual works. Through analysis of the exhibition's design, the didactic practices of the Art Department, and the commentary that ensued in the popular press, this project documents the PPIE as a significant institutional venue for the advancement of American art history, as well as the process and contradictions of creating a public for modern art. Chapter One provides an overview of the details of the exhibition's organization, its role within the larger structure of a vastly popular, commercial, and nationalistic enterprise, as well as a framework for defining modernism as it pertained to the PPIE. Chapter Two compares paintings in the art exhibition with other attractions that featured fine art as paid entertainment at the Fair, as a means of examining provincial and national anxieties about nudity, the Futurists, and the definition of high art. Chapter Three analyzes the fine art guidebooks and how they organized, controlled and encouraged certain kinds of viewing experiences of the art exhibition. Focusing on Sargent and Bellows as case studies in how Art Department officials attempted to create a genealogy for modern art, Chapter Four considers the relationship established between the more radical artists in the competition galleries and those canonized as major figures with galleries of their own. The conclusion discusses the lasting impact of the fair through sales and the establishment of a permanent museum for San Francisco.

The primary objective of this creative project was to produce a professional grade body of work, which clearly expresses the author's perspective and concerns. The works were executed in the traditional mediums of woodcut, etching, drypoint, and drawing. The second objective was to further explore these mediums and their potential in contemporary art. / Department of Art

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Art History." Includes bibliographical references (p. 499-510).

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of History, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Despite having produced an impressive body of work and having been well-received in his lifetime, the career of nineteenth-century American expatriate artist Walter MacEwen has received virtually no scholarly attention. Assimilating primary-source materials, this thesis provides the first serious examination of MacEwen's life and career, thereby providing insight into a forgotten episode in American art.

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.

This dissertation explores the important but long forgotten career of the American artist Francis Davis Millet (1848-1912) and in the process calls into question several common understandings of turn-of-the-century American civic art. Through an examination of Millet’s civic art, including mural painting, illustration, and parades, I argue that Millet attempted to use the works he created for large audiences to help viewers navigate a common modern experience: the cultural diversity they encountered all around them. While many American artists making civic art during this period focused on allegorical scenes and emphasized whiteness, Millet’s images taught audiences about cultural diversity and even reflected a certain cultural sensitivity in their careful rendering of nonwhite subjects. In doing so, Millet employed the rhetoric of empiricism and engaged with his subject matter in a manner understood by his audience to be under the purview of science. This, I argue, aligned his project to the hierarchical understanding of “culture” and “evolution” presented by the anthropological community at the time, which argued for the superiority of white over nonwhite groups. In this way, though Millet attempted to move away from all-white subject matter and used global themes relevant to a modern moment, the underlying message he promoted served to reinforce notions of Anglo American hegemony.