Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts, 1980. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-340).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Art History. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

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In 1793, the nascent French republic established its first intellectual property law called droit d’auteur. This statute affected the visual arts and literature in equal measure, such that from a legal perspective, a painting and a manuscript were now treated as equivalent entities. Whereas literary critics have traced the impacts of this legislation on the production of novels and poetry, and legal historians have detailed its ramifications in nineteenth-century case law, art historians have yet to examine how this consolidation of the sister arts under the rubric of the auteur affected the development of the visual arts and aesthetic practices in the same period. Thus, despite ongoing interest in authorship across the humanities, scholars have operated with an only partial understanding of the subject. My thesis documents how French institutions of authorship, which included courtrooms, print shops, publishing houses, post offices, and libraries, coordinated an increasingly transnational field of textual and pictorial activities. More importantly, it analyses how these same institutions led to the creation of historically significant visual forms. Through a series of case studies of five canonical painters and writers, I offer a revised account of the emergence of modern art in France on the basis of the intimacies and antagonisms felt to exist between these differing artistic spheres. Chapter 1 follows the transition from the ancien régime’s system of artistic privilege to the modern administration of artist’s rights in the work of the royal portraitist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. By analyzing her 1835 memoirs alongside some of her key post-Revolutionary paintings, I establish the artist as a leading theoretician-practitioner of a new, legitimist aesthetics. Chapter 2 focuses on the classical aesthetic conflict between picture making and writing as it was expressed in the posthumously published diaries of Eugène Delacroix. I interpret his diary’s Romantic notion of pictorial specificity as an early variant of pictorial modernism. Chapter 3 explores the intertwined politics of exile and authorship in Victor Hugo’s enigmatic ink drawings. Tracking their creation in Guernsey to their eventual bequest alongside the writer’s literary manuscripts to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this chapter also offers the first art history of the French national library, which, months prior to the opening of the Louvre, became the country’s first true public domain of images. Chapter 4 chronicles the emergence of the first global infrastructure for authors of art through an analysis of what I have called Vincent van Gogh’s “postal paradigm.” It demonstrates how the émigré artist substituted traditional academic protocols of education, critical evaluation, and reception with newly internationalized postal instruments and, additionally, how the formation of the Universal Postal Union facilitated the expansion of the international art market in the 1880s. Chapter 5 analyzes writer Émile Zola’s photographs taken in the 1890s in relation to a key aspect of his magnum opus, the Rougon-Macquart series: its conclusion. This chapter charts the consequential overlapping of two significant aesthetic debates in the 1880s and 1890s, both of which have until now been treated as unrelated— (1) the critiques and debates surrounding Zola’s experimental aesthetics; and (2) the contestations over the court’s role in determining photography’s status as authored. The project concludes with an epilogue that utilizes the project’s author concept to re-interpret early art historical theory.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-89). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Art History, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1982. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 593-630).

The erosion of traditional French academic methods of picture-construction, and the eclipse of hierarchical subject-matter, ensured the emergence of a diversity of new painting styles in France by 1900 and the possibility of even more drastic departures from tradition in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Picasso, from 1900 to 1914.

The Neo-Orientalism of Matisse's The Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, both of 1907, exists in the similarity of the extreme distortion of the female form and defines the different meanings attached to these "ugly" women relative to distinctive notions of erotic and exotic imagery. To understand Neo-Orientalism, that is, 19th century Orientalist concepts which were filtered through Primitivism in the 20th century, the racial, sexual and class antagonisms of the period, which not only influenced attitudes towards erotic and exotic imagery, but also defined and categorized humanity, must be considered in their historical context. My introduction is an investigation of current art historical scholarship which has linked the manipulation of form by Matisse and Picasso and shifting avant-garde practice in Paris in the years 1905 - 1908, when Cubism displaced Fauvism, to the concepts of Orientalism and Primitivism. The problem of the ideological content of images of women, which I undertake to address, arises from these studies which rely upon the assumed metaphysical fascination with the exotic or the intuitive, personal concern for erotic symbolism by the artists as a solution to meaning. The absence of a rich critical discourse surrounding the paintings encourages my approach to the problem of meaning whereby in Chapter One I examine images of women produced in Paris in the specific discourses of popular and official culture in 1906. These representations of the female are identified as ideological constructions which functioned in relation to the important and broader issues of the moment affecting the dominance of French culture: class struggle and neo-colonialism. In Chapter Two the "ugly" women of Matisse's The Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon are analysed as intended avant-garde transformations of images of female prostitutes and compared with the Images of women In popular and official culture and with each other, In recognition of their function within the historical context of their production. In conclusion I suggest that the difference in meaning between these paintings by Matisse and Picasso was Ideological, operating within the context of class struggle and neo-colonialism, and defined by their distinctive conscious and unconscious use of Primitivism. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate