This essay puts forth an analysis of the recent portrayal of an unwed mother in the Bollywood film, Kya Kehna! (Kundan Shah, 2000, henceforth KK). The title, which is readily translated to the rhetorical, "What can you say?" has additional significance here as a laudatory exclamation directed at the film's young heroine. Targeting a younger audience, the film was hailed as a challenging exploration of female sexuality and women's empowerment. The film in fact reaffirms traditional stereotypes of women in which their behavior is carefully controlled within a patriarchal framework. In spite of the awkward fact that the main character's state of motherhood is the result of pre-marital sex, nationalist mechanisms are put into play to glorify the ideal of Woman-as-Mother. Unwed motherhood is not unheard of as a half-hidden side-plot of Hindi film, but it is very unusual to find it as the main narrative focus. A close textual reading of KK will enable a detailed comparison with an earlier film that apparently served as a template for the later production. Julie (K. S. Sethumadhavan, 1975), is a film that handled the same subject with a sensitivity unmatched in the more recent film. Further, placing KK alongside other contemporaneous releases, will show how-even in a film that does not foreground political, patriotic, or religious storylines-nationalist subtexts can be discerned in its handling of pre-marital sex, religion, and in the staging of its conclusion. The influences of economic liberalization, rising Hindutva sentiment in India (and commensurate communal tensions) as well as the impact of the NRI (Non-Resident Indian) community are all factors that play a part in the shaping of current Bollywood ideology, and their effects are visible in this film. Finally, viewer response and the concept of women's "uplift" will be addressed.

The photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration Historical Section from 1935-1942 produced a large body of photographic work that now resides in the Library of Congress. These photographs serve as valuable visual resources for depicting an economically deprived section of America's population during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Some of these photographers, like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, are widely recognized for their work, while others remain obscure. Russell Lee falls into the latter category, although he contributed the largest number of captioned photographs to the FSA photographic files. This paper explores Lee's photographic techniques in relation to other FSA photographers who addressed similar subject matter. In order to limit the scope of my study, I chose to investigate the photographs Lee took in southeastern Louisiana in April 1939 as part of an assignment on strawberry farming. This batch of approximately 150 black and white photographs offers insight into Lee's working methods. Lees imagery reveals the similarities and differences between his photographic style and that of his FSA colleagues, such as Evans, Lange, and Ben Shahn. I will argue that Lee's anonymity is the result of his approach to photography, privileging a large quantity of pictures of a given subject or location over searching for a single remarkable image that captured the essence of the situation. His photographs, while technically precise, often lack the visual impact found in the work of Evans and Lange. Though Lee's artistic vision may not have been as keen as some of his colleagues', Lee's straightforward pictorial style bestows a hitherto undervalued importance to his contribution to the FSA photographic files. He captured ordinary moments in the lives of human beings suffering during one of America's bleakest periods. In southeastern Louisiana, Lee took photographs of migrant workers at home and in the fields. He also visited a strawberry auction and documented the economic aspects of the agribusiness, while paying attention to such details as the shipping of strawberries on refrigerated rail cars. This collection of photographs underlines Lees fondness for filling his compositions with more visual information rather than less.

A renewal of interest in the French impressionists began in 1974 with the 100th anniversary of the first exhibition of the artists who broke with the official Salon in Paris and held their own exhibitions from 1874 through 1886. Since 1974, there has been a swell of interest in reinvestigating lesser-known European and American impressionist artists, especially women artists whose work often was relegated to second-class professional status. Among them was Helen Maria Turner (1858-1958), an artist whose work merits further examination. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Turner's art was held in great esteem by critics, private and public collectors, and her peers. Despite her contributions to the movement of impressionism in America, her works are often overlooked today. Following her death in 1958, the first examination of her work did not occur until 1983, when art historian Louis Hoyer Rabbage curated a retrospective exhibition for the Cragsmoor Free Library in Ulster County, New York. In the exhibition catalogue, Rabbage declared that the purpose of the exhibition was to make a statement on behalf of Turner's "rightful place in American art history" and that a definitive biography and catalogue raisonné were still needed. William Gerdts's 1995 landmark volume, Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Paintings, included her work, but no one has undertaken major new research. The objective of this project is to give further consideration to Turner's work by exploring her seventy-year career, especially her early years of art training in New Orleans, heretofore overlooked. The project investigates the influences on her style and subject matter, how her work reflects the time in which it was produced, and how her professional career served as a role model for other artists. An attachment documenting her paintings in museum collections includes the provenance and exhibition history for each work. A detailed history of her participation in museum and gallery exhibitions is also attached. The main sources used to compile this information were Turner's papers at the New-York Historical Society and materials from the museums and institutions that hold her work.

<p> The works here showcase my artistic process in painting, drawing and performance art. The idea of using a visual as tool, I provide experiences in installation art through performance and play. My subjects deal with cultural habits and reinventing stories and myths.</p>

The Boston Public Library was founded on the principle that it would serve the needs of Boston's entire populace, without respect to class, race, or gender. However, despite this democratic ideology, the nineteenth-century library, in its practices and artistic expressions, articulated an elite conception of the perfect American. Edwin Austin Abbey's Quest for the Holy Grail (1890--1902), painted for the library building of McKim, Mead, and White (begun 1883), embodies the cosmopolitan, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, and masculine values of Boston's elite through its American Renaissance style, its subject, and its iconography. In particular, the figure of Galahad, the hero of Abbey's mural, conforms to models of spirituality, race, and manhood that legitimated the power and social position of the financial, political, and cultural elite that administered and constructed the library.

This dissertation examines the work of nineteenth-century American painters Frederic Edwin Church, William Michael Harnett and Albert Pinkham Ryder, and focuses on the relationship between their work in painting and their work in the decorative arts. Through their decorative work, all three artists explored "systems of world ornament" that introduced them to an international range of ornamental form by compiling, cataloguing, and comparing ornament from nearly all cultures and eras. Combining all of world culture single folios, these "systems of world ornament" promised to help American artists and designers study and sort a wide range of cultural influences into temporal and geographic order and thus make sense of the increasingly internationalized nature of American material culture. As this dissertation argues, the study of these "systems of world ornament" became for American artists and designers a powerful--if problematic--tool for distilling the increasingly international nature of American art and culture into a material form--and a formal painterly language--that opened it up to comment and critique. Ornament has to a large extent been understood as a mode of retreat rather than engagement with the clean lines and streamlined aesthetic of the twentieth-century, a crust that had to be cleared from painting's surface so that it might embrace the revolutionary potential of the technological and artistic innovations of the twentieth-century, but this dissertation argues the opposite--that ornament crucially informed American painters' attempts to update painting in response to the artistic challenges of increasingly internationalized twentieth-century life. / History of Art and Architecture

This thesis analyzed the designs of a select group of labyrinths set into the pavements of Gothic churches in northern France. The designs of these labyrinths and their possible meanings and functions were examined. Existing information on the labyrinths, including oral traditions associated with them were considered. A study of earlier medieval church labyrinths and illustrations of labyrinths in medieval manuscripts was made. In addition, medieval philosophy and history were considered. The various meanings and functions scholars have proposed for the labyrinths were critically reviewed. It was possible to draw some conclusions as to the labyrinths' original meanings and their functions and to trace the evolution of these meanings and functions during the Middle Ages.

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Rene Magritte, Surrealist painter, represented women in segmented forms. He enclosed portions of female anatomy in frames and painted representations of broken, sculpted torsos. In this he was inspired by the example of de Chirico's poetic painting, Rodin's use of partial forms to represent whole beings, and by collage concepts involving the dissolution and reconstruction of images. Although Magritte's nudes were undeniably erotic, his ultimate conclusion seems to be that the mystery of woman is beyond the power of art's representation. Framing and fragmentation, as represented in two paintings from the Menil Collection and numerous related works, reinforce the idea that in Magritte's work art and reality were never intended to coincide.

Traditionally, commentators of Corot's late historical landscapes dismissed the subject matter of these works as irrelevant accessories added merely to increase their popularity and marketability. It is entirely possible, however, that Corot consciously chose the subject matter of these late historical landscapes, particularly the six paintings incorporating Orpheus and Eurydice, to reflect his feelings about life in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, the role of the artist in society, and the effect of change on the artist. A critical examination of Corot's artistic background, of the commentaries on his work, and of the multifaceted Orpheus myth provides insight into the role subject matter played in these reflections.