Alexandre Hogue (b. 1898) has been active as an artist in Texas and Oklahoma throughout much of this century. He has also been a vocal supporter of the arts of this region. In the 1930s and 1940s he completed three murals under government auspices and entered competitions for four others. This paper will reconstruct the events surrounding the mural competitions and commissions with which Hogue was involved. A formal analysis of the murals will be made and their critical acclaim and public reception discussed. Mural painting offered a venue for Texas artists to express their regional view that truly successful art must reflect what the artist knows best, and that it should be accessible to and understood by a broad number of people. Hogue's murals can be seen as an extension of his commitment to develop an idiom that was an expression and interpretation of his region.

<p> Renoir's late work represents a paramount contribution to the history of modernism that has often been overlooked and obscured according to a paradigm of reactionary escapism. This dissertation instead positions Renoir's staunch commitment to the decorative arts, and his advocacy of decorative and classical styles of painting in the late work, as central to the political and cultural debates of its time--both as a link to the traditions of the eighteenth century that satisfied politically conservative cultural nationalists, and as a badge of avant-garde formalism among new collectors of modern art such as the Steins, Maurice Gangnat, Paul Guillaume, and Albert C. Barnes. Renoir's response to modernity was less one of denial than one of protest against a mode of production that diminished the hand crafted sensuality of the object in favor of machine made efficiency. This interpretation re-imagines the dominant teleology of Modernism by re-installing the decorative and the Symbolist movement as the important aesthetic revolutions they were for Renoir and his young admirers: the Nabis, Picasso, Maillol, and Matisse. During his late career Renoir adopted successive hybrid styles that combined decorative and classical forms and which encouraged synesthetic responses in the viewer. His pictures of music-making, dress-up, millenary, and the notorious late bather paintings and sculptures unabashedly revel in the depiction of decorative motifs and tactile flesh, ultimately locating the origins of aesthetic form in the slippages between the senses of sight and touch. </p><p> Ultimately Renoir's late work serves as an alternative paradigm of modernity, one that complicates the traditional narrative predicated on Greenbergian purity, media specificity, and flatness. Instead, Renoir presents a body of work which traffics in opposites: a decorative style that is willfully heterogeneous, synesthetic, and which explores the liminal space between the pictorial and the sculptural. As an antihero of modernism, a detailed understanding of Renoir's late work expands our understanding of this period by intertwining decorative, classical and avant-garde painting styles in a web connecting the diverse aesthetic movements and social upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</p>

No description available.

Between 1825 and 1848 Thomas Cole produced many imaginary views based on literary, allegorical and religious themes. Historical landscapes of traditional religious subjects represent a small but significant element in the artist's oeuvre. Cole's early Biblical landscapes (those painted before the artist traveled to Europe) are significant indicators of the transitional character of Cole's work as he attempted to Americanize traditional European precepts of art. In them, Cole reveals an alliance with European art theory, adapted to produce didactic landscape paintings intended as a testimony to the power and majesty of God with man's relationship to God as the central focus. Cole combined American scenery with historical subjects which would be familiar to all--those extracted from the Bible. Subject matter is an essential clue in understanding the artist's intent. His work was a response to the zeitgeist of nineteenth century America.

Anselm Kiefer's empathic approach to Germany's past, particularly its period of National Socialism, has provoked heated controversy among art critics and historians. The first section of this paper examines and critiques a sample of the discourse on the subject, drawing the primary conclusion that postwar Germany's peculiar cultural and political context, which has been neglected, is of fundamental importance to understanding Kiefer's mediations. The second section juxtaposes a sample of Kiefer's work against this context, drawing attention to the psychological resonances of National Socialism which continue to haunt Germany and which find their way into the artist's work.

<p> Abstract not available.</p>

<p> During the early stages of the seventeenth century in Seville, images of the Last Judgment participated in a long artistic tradition of inspiring fear about the impending apocalypse. This thesis focuses on two paintings of the Last Judgment, one by Francisco Pacheco for the church of St. Isabel in 1614 and the other by Francisco Herrera el Viejo for the church of St. Bernardo in 1628. Pacheco was an influential artist and theoretician in the development of Sevillian art, who substantiated the core values of the Counter-Reformation. In a similar way, Herrera's participation in such development was vital because he was one of the first artists to experiment with naturalism in Seville. The Last Judgment paintings by Pacheco and Herrera sought to activate viewers' consciousness and self-assessment on their actions and thus modify their behavior. By interpreting primary sources such as Pacheco's <i>Arte de la Pintura, </i> this thesis investigates the cultural impact of these paintings through phenomenological methods. These methods derive from theoretical materials formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Louis Lankford, and Paul Ricoeur. The goal of these methods is to describe the experience of fear and evil in response to the Last Judgment paintings by Pacheco and Herrera. The results of this study illustrate the cultural perspective of evil by placing these paintings in relation to other popular and institutional manifestations of religion, particularly the Spanish <i>auto de f&eacute;.</i></p>

<p>This paper focuses on Monet&rsquo;s <i>Rouen Cathedral</i> paintings, a set of canvases painted by the artist between February 1892 and May 1895. This series has traditionally been hailed as Monet&rsquo;s greatest and most significant, but historical scholarship has addressed the series within an Impressionist framework. However, this paper argues instead that the <i>Cathedral</i> paintings no longer represented Monet as an Impressionist, but instead as an artist with entirely original and different goals for whom the nature of time had taken on new meaning. Where Monet began his endeavors in seriality with a feverish focus on the temporary and elusive&mdash;the <i> enveloppe</i>&mdash;in Rouen he worked and reworked the canvases, bringing them to a hand-wrought and over-worked surface unprecedented within his own work. For Monet, these paintings did not capture specific moments; they rendered an enduring and overwhelming presence entirely outside of time and place. The <i>Rouen Cathedral</i> series marks a distinct shift in Monet&rsquo;s oeuvre. With these paintings, the artist left behind Impressionism and its focus on the fleeting qualities of atmosphere and light. The <i>Rouen Cathedral</i> works were a declaration of his new grand ambition: to construct paintings that would endure through both their physicality and their timeless subject matter. </p>

<p> The work of Caravaggio, which was recognized as revolutionary in his own time and exerted a profound influence on seventeenth century painting all over Europe, has prompted a wide range of interpretations among modern art historians. Some, emphasizing the controversy generated by his religious pictures, have seen him as a daringly irreverent artist, while others have found his unidealized "naturalistic" style fundamentally well-suited to the spirit of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Some detect a boldly overt homoeroticism in many of his pictures, while others claim not to see it at all. Some understand him to have worked in an unprecedentedly direct, almost visceral way, while others emphasize his sympathy with new directions in the sciences or the intellectual sophistication with which he played his naturalistic style against the precedents of classical and earlier Renaissance art. </p><p> Caravaggio's difficult personality has also lent itself to different readings. Some see him as a sociopath, if not a psychopath, while others see him calculatedly performing the role of social rebel in a manner that looks forward to the self-consciously dissident posturings of modern artists. Some art-historians have been led to conclude that he had highly-developed non-conformist values and tendencies that could be described as "libertine" in at least some of the varied senses in which that word was used during his time. </p><p> The aim of this dissertation is to discuss the relation of Caravaggio's work and personal example to his immediate art-historical and cultural context, but also to trace their influence on an ever-more-disparate group of artists active in the seventeenth century in order to see whether his style, sometimes characterized as "Baroque Naturalism," actually implied a set of values beyond its efficacy as an artistic strategy, whether a commitment to it implied or was understood to imply a non-conformist or libertine orientation that might be a matter of deep conviction on the part of the artist or a position felt to be appropriate to certain themes or in certain contexts. </p><p> The first chapter examines Caravaggio himself, while the second discusses three artists&mdash;Giovanni Baglione, Orazio Gentileschi, and Guido Reni&mdash;who knew him personally and responded to his work as it burst so dramatically on the scene in the very first years of the century. The third chapter discussed three artists who were active shortly afterward, whose engagement with Caravaggio testifies to a wider field of influence: Valentin de Boulogne, Domenico Fetti, and Guido Cagnacci. The final chapter sets two very different artists&mdash;Salvator Rosa and Nicolas Poussin&mdash;side by side in order to expose both the radically different responses to Caravaggio's legacy and the diverse senses in which the word "libertine" must be understood. </p><p> While the evidence does seem to suggest that at least some artists utilized Caravaggesque naturalism in order to invoke a well-defined "alternative tradition," one that was understood to imply a certain range of values, very few committed themselves to his approach strictly or for very long. Poussin rejected it emphatically. Yet Poussin, too, deliberately positioned himself on the margins of the Roman art world in order to cultivate a distinctive approach to art, one that seems to have been consciously based on deeply-held philosophical convictions. The lesson seems to be that Caravaggio's example made it possible for later artists to develop strategies with which to express their dissent from the prevailing values and practices of their time, and that even if their work did not look like his, they were indebted to him.</p>

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1944. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-121).