<p>This dissertation examines color photographs made in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee between 1968 and 2005 and their relation to evolving racial discourse. My discussion revolves around three photographers: William Eggleston, Birney Imes, and William K. Greiner, who make striking color photographs in the U.S. South. I discuss the critical reception of their work and place it within the context of political and cultural attitudes toward the region and issues of race expressed in the media in the 1970s-early 00's. The important role played by Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] curator John Szarkowski was central in shaping discussions about contemporary photography during this period, placing Eggleston as the herald of the color photography explosion. I explore changing attitudes toward artistic and documentary color photography among photographers, critics, and the general public leading into the 1970s, arguing that these attitudes influenced the reception of the often high-intensity color images of Eggleston, Imes, and Greiner, in the decades that followed. </p><p> I discuss the critical reception of William Eggleston's 1976 photography exhibition at MoMA. I examine how Imes's color photographs of juke joints and roadhouses in Mississippi utilize the expressive potentials of color film to depict these liminal, public/private spaces as sites of boundary crossing in a racially divided culture. I explore the ways in which William K. Greiner uses color to depict the pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans metropolitan area. </p><p> My contribution is to show how Eggleston, Imes, and Greiner employed the expressive, visceral potentials of color photography to interpret and navigate the uncertain moral terrain of the U.S South in the era following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.</p> / Dissertation

<p>In 1278, the Franciscan Order of Piacenza acquired a large piece of land in the center of the city. The land had been confiscated by the commune when the property's former owner had been exiled several years earlier. However, that land was occupied by at least eleven other private and commercial tenants, including the jurisdictions of five different parishes. The friars immediately set to work demolishing the houses, and sealing off the site with a high enclosure wall. They then began construction on a large church and convent. The impact on the economy of the parish churches in loss of charitable revenue was immediate. One month into their project, a representative of the Bishop and Chapter of the Cathedral arrived at the site and denounced the friars in the name of the harm it was inflicting on the surrounding parishes. The friars ignored the warning and the result was their excommunication. Four years later Pope Martin IV sent three delegates to investigate the Franciscans' actions. The inquest that followed was recorded in a detailed manuscript that is preserved in Parma's Archivio di Stato. The document records the testimony of eighteen witnesses, including parish priests, neighboring lay people and workers on the building. Their testimony and the accompanying documentary material allows us to reconstruct the alteration to the economic and urban fabric of the parish community caused by the Franciscans.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis centers on an analysis of Allan Kaprow's Activities (1970-1979)-works that gauged how people interact when following a script that often involved ostensibly banal, everyday routines; for example, brushing one's teeth, or walking through a doorway. These pieces, as suggested in the artist's writings, were influenced by a range of philosophical and sociological theories. While Kaprow associated his Activities with the sociological and philosophical inquiries of John Dewey, Erving Goffman, and Ray Birdwhistell, I will also suggest that concepts related to interpersonal psychology and social transaction theory were just as significant. In particular I will discuss the parallel development of Transactional Analysis, a concept defined by the psychologist Eric Berne. Kaprow's works aligned interpersonal events and an early form of "relational aesthetics," a term coined later by contemporary art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. The resulting works were art that bordered on sociological and psychological experimentation.

<p> This thesis examines how Hans Holbein the Younger negotiated the genre of donor family portraiture in the <i>Darmstadt Madonna</i> (1526/1528) by creating a contemporary representation of the patron Jakob Meyer&rsquo;s family. In early sixteenth-century Basel, reforms within the Catholic Church and the advent of Protestantism contested late medieval concepts of gender, kinship, and piety. I argue that the <i>Darmstadt Madonna </i> addressed this tumultuous context by partially reorienting the focus of traditional devotionally-themed paintings from the holy figures to the donor family. In this transitional work, Holbein offered an innovative and complex representation of the Meyer family members, their interconnections, and their relations with the depicted holy figures. The painting inventively satisfied Jakob Meyer&rsquo;s ostensible objectives in representing his family&rsquo;s exemplary devotional practices, his own paternal authority, and the Meyers&rsquo; procreative continuity through their daughter, Anna. </p>

Édouard Manet's "Masked Ball at the Opera" of 1873 shares formal and thematic relationships with Charles Baudelaire's poetry and art criticism. Although previous scholars have suggested visual sources for Manet's paintings, I argue that Baudelaire's poetry was the textual paradigm for Manet's Masked Ball. My argument considers the roles of women, masks and the danse macabre in these works as analogous in both form and content. The women in the Masked Ball parallel those in Baudelaire's poetry, such as "To a Passerby" and "The Mask," and his art criticism in The Painter of Modern Life. The women in both the image and text are constructed with oppositional concepts, words and phrases that indicate their role in nineteenth-century Paris and the many masks they wear in daily life. Next I examine the ways in which Haussmannization, the destructive reordering of Paris during the middle part of the century, presented new problems and opportunities for the artist-as-flâneur. Baudelaire's poem "The Crowds," corresponds to Manet's painting in that both use the mask as a means by which the poet/flâneur/masked ball participants assume a double-identity as they experience the spectacle of modernity as part of the crowd but distanced from it. Lastly, I argue that in the Masked Ball Manet modernized traditional danse macabre schema by conflating it with funereal attributes. Like the painting, Baudelaire's poem, "Danse Macabre," is a modernized version of the schema due to its contemporary poetic form comprising oppositional pairs, such as life/death, and thus establishing both as signifiers for the funeral of Parisian culture, specifically word and image, under Haussmannization. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the binary structures of the Manet's painting and Baudelaire's poetry develop from the same social milieu and are thus reciprocal objects that signify the prevailing cultural condition of nineteenth-century Paris. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: March 19, 2008. / Nineteenth-Century Paris, Masquerade, Masked Ball, Opera, Binary, Baudelaire, Manet, Dance Macabre, Women In Paris, Women In Nineteenth-Century Paris, Benjamin, Crowds, To A Passerby, To A Passer-By, Haussmannization, Haussmann, Binary Structure, Masked Ball At The Opera, Women And Masks, 1873, Manet And Women, Nineteenth-Century Opera Balls, Nineteenth-Century Masked Balls, Nineteenth-Century Masquerades, Masked Balls, Poetry, Danse Macabre / Includes bibliographical references. / Lauren S. Weingarden, Professor Directing Thesis; Richard K. Emmerson, Committee Member; Adam Jolles, Committee Member.

In this dissertation I investigate The National Museum of Anthropology (NMA) in Mexico, and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture (MPS) in Turkey to examine the important role they played in the construction and projection of a national identity that at once looked to past traditions while at the same time engaging with and aspiring to the internationalism of modernity in the mid-twentieth century. In the twentieth century, these nations shared some common features in that they were reevaluating their histories to address significant political and social changes such as the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the 1923 establishment of the Turkish Republic. These political and social transformations had an effect on the arts and arts institutions and leadership in each country made use of the arts to advance their political agenda of crafting a coherent nation that attempted to fuse competing social factions and achieving international status often times through modernization policies that were on many occasions synonymous with westernization, especially in Turkey. Despite these similarities each country faced specific, historically contingent issues and thus arrived some different responses to similar historical and political circumstances. In this dissertation I address these responses through two case studies focused a study of two major museums in each country the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Turkey. First, I present the historical backgrounds of each of these museums before their establishment. Second, I examine how each deployed marked national historical tradition to craft narratives of national identity at critical moments in each of country’s engagement with modernity. Finally, while these countries read their histories in their own ways, this study creates a connection between the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Turkey, to attempt to identify broader patterns of how the arts and arts institutions were used in “developing” nations during the twentieth century. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / March 5, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael Carrasco, Professor Directing Dissertation; Pat Villenueve, University Representative; Paul Niell, Committee Member; Kylie Killian, Committee Member.

abstract: During the Nazi era, which is historically regarded as lasting from 1933-1945, the National Socialists both looted and made “legal” confiscations of art and artifacts they deemed “degenerate” from museums throughout occupied Europe. The art they seized was sold abroad in exchange for foreign currency that not only funded their war efforts, but also allowed for purchases of art for Hitler’s un-realized Führermuseum in Linz, Austria. The rapid transfer of objects flooded the art market, making this period one of the most prosperous times for collectors and dealers. However, due to the overall hasty nature of the displacements, the ownership history, or provenance, of the works became extremely convoluted. Institutions in the United States, as well as individual collectors, began to buy pieces, unaware of their provenance. Without this knowledge as a good-faith purchaser, many institutions never delved deeper into the background of the objects and the works remained in their collections until the present day. In this thesis, I argue that provenance research can shape a museum’s history through changing the relationship it has with its permanent collection. Insight into the ownership history of the collection must be made a priority in order for museums to remain transparent with their visitors, thus allowing for perceived notions of exclusivity, or distrust, to be eliminated. I researched two institutions, the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Krannert Art Museum, which recently examined their own holdings for incomplete attributions, with one establishment conducting a study after it became enmeshed in public scrutiny generated by a controversial bequest. Lastly, I employ both art historical scholarship and legal resources to investigate how provenance can be more widely used as a valuable asset in an increasingly globalized society. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2019

This thesis examines the series of Apocalypse illustrations appearing in a thirteenth-century copy of the Liber Floridus, MS lat. 8865 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Liber Floridus is an illustrated encyclopedia completed in 1120 by Lambert, a canon of the church of Nôtre Dame in Saint-Omer in northern France. The autograph manuscript of the Liber Floridus has survived to the present day (Ghent, University Library MS 92), along with nine copies. Lambert's encyclopedia is a compilation of excerpts from a range of Classical and medieval writers, and a number of the texts in the Liber Floridus are or were accompanied by figural illustrations. The Ghent autograph once contained a series of full-page miniatures depicting scenes from the Apocalypse of Saint John. Though fragments are present in several of the copies, this Apocalypse cycle is now missing from the autograph manuscript. MS lat. 8865 is the only copy to have retained a complete series of Apocalypse illustrations. This thesis argues that its iconography is an accurate reflection of the lost cycle in the autograph manuscript. Because of the survival of the autograph manuscript, the Liber Floridus has generated a substantial amount of scholarly interest. As a result, the series of Apocalypse images, which is no longer present in the autograph, has gone largely unnoticed. By examining the relationship between the Apocalypse cycle and the other textual and figural elements of MS lat. 8865, I demonstrate that the cosmological and eschatological elements of the Liber Floridus are visually and thematically related, and were so in the autograph. In his choice of texts and illustrations, Lambert tries to structure the universe and situate himself in history and time – in relation to past events and to events of the apocalyptic future. In Lambert's original, the use of similar pictorial arrangements in the Apocalypse cycle and in the rest of the Liber Floridus encyclopedia, particularly the didactic cosmological diagrams, strengthens the thematic connection between these schema and the Apocalypse illustrations. The specific selection of texts and the arrangement of the components in MS lat. 8865 reveal a significant concern with the end times and with systematizing knowledge. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010. / Date of Defense: April 1, 2010. / Diagrams, Medieval, Antichrist, Liber Floridus, Lambert of Saint-Omer, Apocalypse, Encyclopedia, Manuscript, Cosmology, Eschatology, MS lat. 8865, Ghent MS 92 / Includes bibliographical references. / Paula Gerson, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Richard Emmerson, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Lynn Jones, Committee Member; Stephanie Leitch, Committee Member.

This dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of Les Costumes Grotesques, a group of one-hundred black and white single-figure etchings of elegantly-posed characters wearing or composed of items related to a specific occupation, profession, or trade. The Costumes Grotesques was initiated by Parisian printmaker Nicolas I de Larmessin in 1688 and expanded in the years after Nicolas I’s death by his wife, brother, and associate. From the first to the last, these prints are itemized illustrations of seemingly every imaginable consumer object that was crafted, sold, and utilized for the purposes of enhancing early-modern life. In dressing these characters in work-related goods, the creators of the Costumes prints connected their figures—quite literally—to the processes, tools, and products of manufacture. In some, characters are dressed in twelve signs of the zodiac, in masks, in explosives, and in plans of military fortifications, thus expanding the ensemble’s subject matter to include many other types of professions aside from artisanal expertise. In dressing these characters in occupation-related items, the creators of the Costumes prints connected their figures—quite literally—to the processes, tools, and products of manual and intellectual labor. The existing literature on the Costumes Grotesques has clarified issues of attribution, established the individual prints that comprise the ensemble, and has identified possible influences on its conceit. Yet a study of the place the Costumes ensemble occupies, in its broader historical context and the specific visual culture in which it was created, has yet to be explored. Similarly, issues concerning the extent of its publication, circulation, and reproduction by other printmakers require further scrutiny. In this dissertation I argue that the Costumes Grotesques delighted audiences with its detailed, encyclopedic, and imaginative renderings of occupational tools and products, while also entertaining viewers with subtle (and, often, not so subtle) critiques of the monarchy and the pretensions of aristocratic culture. Throughout the ensemble are references to the specific period of Louis XIV’s reign in which they were created: an era marked by the monarch’s war-mongering, which threatened the nation’s economic health, and by the gradual dimming of the splendor of Versailles, which was no longer the site of festivities on the scale they had been at the start of the monarch’s reign. At the same time, I suggest, the Costumes celebrated numerous important achievements, accomplishments, and contributions of the French monarchy. In the chapters of my dissertation, I provide the first substantial definition of the Costumes Grotesques as a monument. I also analyze the production and circulation history of the ensemble, and examine the compositions of all known surviving original and pirated editions of the Costumes that have been preserved in US and European print repositories. By comparing the composition of editions of variants to those comprising the distinct publication phases identified in previous scholarship, I reveal the complexity of the ensemble’s circulation, and determine the place that variants, which were produced soon after the ensemble’s initiation, occupied in its production history. Other chapters focus on the question of sources for the Costumes Grotesques. A number of themes emerge and overlap in these three chapters, such as the increasing permeability of the boundary that had previously separated the court from the public sphere, and the complex public perception of Louis XIV’s reign at the end of the century. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 19, 2017. / 17th century, France, Larmessin, Louis XIV, printmaking, trades / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Neuman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Reinier Leushuis, University Representative; Jack Freiberg, Committee Member; Stephanie Leitch, Committee Member.

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.