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This dissertation reconsiders the role of foreign commodities—especially Asian porcelain—in the genre paintings of Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). The global turn in art historical scholarship has revised our conception of seventeenth-century Dutch art, highlighting the cross-cultural contact of both people and objects, and deploying new methodologies from diverse disciplines. While these studies have enriched our understanding of the historical context in which these works were produced, too often the foreign objects depicted within paintings are construed only as ciphers of trade or transcriptions of material prototypes. Vermeer’s art too has been subjected to this dependence on the priority of the material object. Recent scholarship has tended to cast Vermeer as merely replicating global objects, while overlooking the artist’s nuanced engagement with them in relation to his larger project of pictorial mimesis. My dissertation integrates a consideration of artifice and the distinctive status of painting into a close examination of Asian porcelain in Vermeer’s genre scenes. First, I recast Vermeer’s hometown of Delft as a cosmopolitan entrepôt with a unique affinity with Asia, owing to its roles as a Dutch East India Company (VOC) chamber city and as the epicenter of Dutch Delftware imitating Asian porcelain. Then, I provide a deeper study of the recurring global objects (with a focus on Asian porcelain) in Vermeer’s works than has been undertaken to date. Though the starting point for my project is a material culture study, I contend that identifying real-world referents for Vermeer’s painted objects is valuable to the extent that it illuminates the artist’s departures from actual models and allows us to assess whether such aesthetic maneuvers are unusual relative to his peers. Borrowing the terminology of the paragone (comparison) from Renaissance art and artistic theory, I propose a “modern paragone” as a rivalry between Dutch painting and Asian porcelain. Finally, through a close analysis of Vermeer’s “porcelain paintings” featuring distinctively re-presented porcelain objects, I argue that these motifs must be understood as vehicles for self-conscious meditations on the status of art in a newly globalizing commodity culture. / 2024-09-30T00:00:00Z

This thesis analyzes the work of Hamed Owais, Tahia Halim, and Inji Efflatoun, three artists who were active in Egypt during its era of decolonization following the 1952 Revolution. Using the large-scale public works project of the Aswan High Dam as a lens, this study focuses on the ways in which the construction of the dam and the social, political, and technological changes that it caused were linked to the ways in which Egyptian artists envisioned and employed concepts of time in new ways in their work. Additionally, artists in Egypt, existing outside of the binary of American abstract expressionism and Soviet socialist realism, employed and synthesized new aesthetic ideas in order to achieve their social and political goals. Fundamentally, this thesis argues that the blurred lines of these aesthetics, like the Aswan High Dam itself, reflect the geopolitical tensions that pressurized Egypt in the global Cold War era as it sought independence from imperial influence, and that they capture the ways in which artists in Egypt incorporated particular understandings of temporality into their work during a time of modernization. A close consideration of the work of these artists provides a window into a nuanced understanding of the intersections between aesthetics, politics, and technology in postcolonial Egypt. / Art History