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Lloyd Raymond "Bill" Ney's mural New London Facets was commissioned for the New London, Ohio post office through the Treasury Department-run New Deal program, the Section of Fine Arts (the Section), and is the only mural that program officials considered abstract. An examination of the mural today reveals that the label of "abstract" may be a bit extreme; objects in the piece have been abstracted but the mural as a whole is not at all strictly non-representational. This discrepancy and the ensuing controversy over Ney's mural reveal much about the sensitivity of Section officials to abstraction and to subjects outside genre or allegorical scenes typical of Section commissions. Correspondence between Ney and Section officials indicate a fear in the Section that the public would reject and fail to understand or relate to anything outside of the representational norm, a belief against which Ney adamantly and successfully argued. As a result, the Section made its lone exception in the case of Ney and New London Facets. While Ney did not achieve national renown as an artist within his lifetime, his work is still exhibited and auctioned relatively regularly in his hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania. With the exception of Karal Ann Marling's description of the New London Facets incident in her book Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression, there is nothing significant published on Ney or his mural. With this thesis I hope to raise awareness of Ney as an artist, provide readers with a complete understanding of the New London Facets commission and approval, and explore the relationship between abstraction and the New Deal art programs. / Art History

Interpretations of the Politics of Fictive Landscapes in Context: A Comparison of Allan Sekula's Sketch on a Geography Lesson and Martha Rosler's In the Place of the Public Airport Series Throughout this thesis project I examine the geopolitical context(s) of the photographs featured in Martha Rosler's 'In the Place of the Public Airport Series' (1983) and Allan Sekula's series, 'Sketch on a Geography Lesson' (1982). I investigate the manner in which they question the legitimacy of the genre of documentary photography within the post-modern age by emphasizing the documentation of an actual physical place, presenting an alternative to the post-modern notion of photograph merely as another component of simulacra, or the intentional creation of an image without meaning or origin. By looking at photographs that Rosler and Sekula made during the burgeoning stages of post-modern theory, presents a broader interpretation of the development of Marxist documentary photography from the early 1980's to today. One way in which I dialogue with the discourse surrounding documentary photography in the 1980's is to focus on Rosler's and Sekula's intentional choice of material that emphasizes the political dialogue rather than concepts that are abstract and maintain no reference to real life. Furthermore, the period of the 1980's is considered a point in contemporary art history when the political fervor of the 1960's and early 1970's diminished greatly. Departing from this trend, Rosler's and Sekula's work continues to address political ideas throughout the 1980's, creating a bridge to today's photographers, such as Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky who consider aesthetics from a socio-political perspective. / Art History

The rise of landscape painting as a dominant genre in nineteenth century France was closely tied to the ongoing debate between Art and Nature. This conflict permeates the writings of poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. While Baudelaire scholarship has maintained the idea of the poet as a strict anti-naturalist and proponent of the artificial, this paper offers a revision of Baudelaire's relation to nature through a close reading across his critical and poetic texts. The Paris Salon reviews of 1845, 1846 and 1859, as well as Baudelaire's Journaux Intimes , Paradis Artificiels and two poems that deal directly with the subject of landscape, are examined. The aim of this essay is to provoke new insights into the poet's complex attitudes toward nature and the art of landscape painting in France during the middle years of the nineteenth century. / Art History

The master thesis Art Criticism of Ramses Younan focuses on text analysis of theoretical work by Egyptian painter and critic Ramses Younan which deals with the topics of art criticism and theory. It examines and analyzes main topics of his work and offers their interpretation in the art-history and art-theory contexts. It also discusses its meaning in the wider perspective of Egyptian modernity and modern art and its possible value for reevaluation of the art theory field in the Middle East. The paper consists of three main chapters and appendix. The appendix contains a collection of selected essays of the author, translated from Arabic to Slovak. The first chapter deals with the art- historical background of author's theoretical production. The second one concentrates around the text analysis. The third chapter presents critical reactions on author's work by theorists of different geographical and cultural background. It suggests different ways of reading and understanding of the cultural and art-history impact on the local and global modern art history.

The dissertation explores how quality-judgments on works of art are created within the contemporary art world. The research starts with the examination of modernist art theories supported by the museum, and continues with the exploration of the impact of the art market on quality-judgments. Although the art market had already distorted the idea of quality, further contradictions and difficulties have risen within judgment-making after the 1960s due to the dematerialisation of the work of art. Art criticism should have been able to deal with this complexity, but it is demonstrated that art criticism is a subjective field and even if there is a universal theory on quality, it often fails when applied to the particular work of art. Throughout the dissertation it is demonstrated that although ‘good art’ is a subjective, power- and discourse-dependent concept, all art professionals seek something that is an inherent quality of the artwork. However, regardless of the existence of such inherent value, judgments on quality are constructed by and subjected to power-struggle. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Art History)