Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Art History, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Binghamton University, State University of New York, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-321).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 314-348).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1991. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 262-283).

This dissertation analyses the convergence of primitivism and nationalism in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century French and Russian art. The discourse of primitivism has yielded a number of critical studies focusing on the artistic appropriation of aesthetics derived from "tribal" arts, Asian arts, medieval icons, outsider art, and peasant arts and crafts. Within that scholarship, modern European art that appropriates the aesthetics of folk arts and themes of the peasantry is frequently considered to be representative of national identity and myth. The artistic elucidation of the peasantry as emblematic of national identity combined with their incorporation into primitivism produces a tension that complicates the conventional, binary structure of the discourse. It is therefore necessary to examine artistic expressions of national myth and the peasantry's absorption into the primitivist discourse, as this indicates a critical point at which issues of nationalism and primitivism converge. In the cultural realm, that juncture is located in the artistic idealisation of peasant cultures, which is indicative of a mythical state of being from which national identity could be rearticulated. / The myth of the peasantry as developed in nineteenth century European thought centres around the premise that rural populations were an unchanging element of society whose traditional customs, religious beliefs, and modes of production contrasted sharply with the accelerated changes in urban culture. A critical examination of selected paintings by the French artist Paul Gauguin (1848--1903), the Russian Neoprimitivist Natalia Goncharova (1881--1962), and the French Fauve painter Othon Friesz (1879--1949) within their specific, social contexts reveals the ways in which the modern, artistic maintenance of the rural myth elucidates current political and social issues of nationalism. This underscores the peasantry's symbolism within the nation as representative of a national, collective consciousness and ancestry. The peasantry's incorporation into the primitivist discourse and the cultural articulation of the rural myth are revealed in the paintings The Vision After the Sermon (1888), Yellow Christ (1889), Fruit Harvest (1909), and Autumn Work (1908). The paintings and their respective social contexts situate the peasantry both as constructions within the primitivist discourse and symbols of national identity, thereby disrupting the structure of alterity upon which primitivism is predicated.

No description available.

Examining a group of pictures painted in the early-to-mid 1630s, this dissertation sets out to demonstrate that Nicolas Poussin’s turn to the subject of dance helped him transform his style from the sensuous Venetian manner of his early years to the cool, crisp, relief-like approach that would characterize his mature work and form the basis for French Classicism in subsequent decades. Painting dancers allowed Poussin to work through the problem of arresting motion, to explore the affective potential of the body represented, and to discover a measured, geometric compositional method capable of containing and harnessing that potential. The resulting pictures, painted in Rome, were warmly received in Paris by a group of early collectors that included dancers, patrons, amateurs, and theorists of another modern French art: the ballet de cour. Ballet’s cultivation of a fiercely controlled physicality, its wild Dionysian characters and learned Apollonian conceits, above all, its insistence on a hidden geometric order underlying the chaos of embodied experience primed early French observers of Poussin’s dancing pictures to recognize something of themselves in his new approach. Though Poussin did not set out to define French Classicism, and though his brief service as premier peintre to Louis XIII demonstrates how ill-suited he was to the role of official artist, the fact that his dancing pictures shared so much—on the level of patronage, iconography, even, perhaps, theoretical underpinnings—with the ballet de cour may help explain why these works (and, indeed, Poussin himself) were so eagerly appropriated by France in the Classical Age.

As we all know, there are multiple stories of art. But even in the West, each country has its own story, especially when it comes to the visual arts in the second part of the twentieth century. The stories told by the French, the German, the Italian, and the American textbooks and museums differ greatly. Yet, the American story is usually regarded as the standard account: the common Western story against which we mentally contrast the Non-Western stories. Without aiming at writing the true story of contemporary Western art, this dissertation tries to uncover alternative stories, interpret the differences, and explain how one particular view came to prevail as the story. Concretely, it examines four contentious issues on which the standard account is particularly challenged by other stories, namely the fracture of the Second World War, the shift of the artworld’s center from Paris to New York, the domination of American art in the 1970s, and finally the European comeback of the 1980s. Analyzing the different national interpretations of these events and confronting them with empirical data (place, date, participant, etc.), the dissertation uncloaks enduring myths and reductive explanations. It highlights above all the role of dealers, collectors, curators, critics, and government officials in the way art is produced, received, and remembered. It also demonstrates how the shifting historical, economic, and institutional contexts continuously reshaped the story, the canon, and the viewers, so that what art historians have traditionally seen as stylistic shifts and artistic leadership appears rather as the result of forces that extend beyond the artistic creation. Stories with less international recognition should not be dismissed in favor of an official story that would erode all differences and present us with a single -- and thus deficient -- perspective. Only through the consideration and analysis of multiple cultural and national perspectives can we understand the complexity of the artworld’s dynamics. Ultimately, I propose a comprehensive yet critical art historical approach rooted in cultural history that would offer a solution to writing art history in an age of globalization that purports to eschew previous assumptions of nationalism and creative genius. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Art History, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 1979. / Photocopy of typescript. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1980. -- 22 cm. Bibliography: leaves [364]-415.