This dissertation focuses on the secular painting of Photis Kontoglou (1895-1965). Although Kontoglou is best known for leading a revival of Byzantine religious painting, he also produced a number of secular paintings which were rendered in the style of religious icons. In the course of my study, I suggest that these "secular icons" can only be understood by exploring his conception of the sacred. I show that the sacred for Kontoglou was not limited to the life of the Greek Orthodox Church but included a Romantic conception of Greek nationalism grounded in folk culture. I argue that Kontoglou's view of the sacred was broad enough to encompass numerous instances of pre-modern life and society, many of which were not confined to the Greek nation. The dissertation is organized in the following way. In Chapter 1, I explore the meaning of the term 'icon' within the theoretical framework of discussions about the categories of 'sacred' and 'secular,' especially those of Mircea Eliade. In the next section, I examine the wider context out of which Kontoglou's artistic views took shape. Chapter 3 explores Kontoglou's theory of Greek national continuity. Chapter 4 focuses on Kontoglou's conception of icon painting. Finally, Chapter 5 includes an analysis of five of Kontoglou's so-called 'secular icons' and seeks to account for the resemblance of these works to conventional religious icons.

Persistence of vision| Hamaya Hiroshi's Yukiguni and Kuwabara Kineo's Tokyo Showa 11-nen in the transwar era

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Art History." Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-327).

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Scott P. Gordon.

<p> This study is an overview of how museums utilize informal learning as a primary source of engagement to improve overall visitor experience while building community interest. For this study, it was important to look at the history and purpose of museums origin and the evolution of their function from an art institution to an educational institution. The top 3 Los Angeles based museums; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art were all put under the various scopes to deduce if they are utilizing their education department to be the best of their ability to create meaningful experiences for their visitors. They were evaluated based on their use of technology, use of dialogue and the overall experience within the museum. Lastly, this study stresses the importance of public art to incorporate all three areas of informal learning.</p>

One of the most obtrusive features of Yoruba studies has been its clear pattern of regional preferences and biases in its scholarship. This pattern is reflected in the present concentration of studies on the southwest, the northwest, the central subgroups of Ife, Owo, Ijesha, Egba, Ijebu, Oyo, and Ilorin on one hand, and the paucity of works on the northeast and southeast subgroups of the O-okun Yoruba, the Igbomina, the Ikale and the Ilaje on the other. There is no other subgroup where this particularistic trend in Yoruba studies and especially, art historiography can better be observed than with the scholarly neglect of the O-okun peoples, the most northeasterly of the Yoruba subgroups. An important goal of this thesis is to foreground the multi-culturalistic tendencies among the Yoruba and underscore the necessity to provide comparable scholarly attention to neglected subgroups, the O-okun peoples in particular.

This dissertation is a study of the late Moche murals found within the adobe temples of Pañamarca, Peru (ca. 600-850 CE). This project was designed to redress the problem of iconographic decontextualization of the Pañamarca paintings that, through limited documentation and repetitive scholarly publication, had become effectively untethered from their material moorings and spatial settings. New fieldwork succeeded in contextualizing and conserving remains of all known mural paintings. This field research also resulted in the discovery of a new corpus of paintings at the site. Together these paintings form a case study on image making and visual experience in a Pre-Columbian era without contemporaneous writing. This art historical study of archaeological monuments makes several contextual moves. Most concretely it mounts evidence for the situated experiences of images by ancient beholders. This includes analysis of spatial patterns that governed both visual and kinaesthetic approaches to images, as well as forensic indices of human-image engagement and response through time. The approach is not, however, exhausted by the nested contexts of architecture, archaeology, and geography. Meaning is further established through the discernment of philosophical propositions set forth in the broader corpus of ancient Moche art, material culture, and ritual practice. This work proposes to yield emic perspectives on mimesis, corporeality, and spatiality. An embodied approach to image and space is not merely imported from theory developed elsewhere, but is grounded in the Andean cultural setting at hand. The orthodox Moche imagery of the Pañamarca murals was arrayed in specific, strategic ways in both plazas and private spaces. In some areas life-size paintings may have modeled mimetic performance that perpetually enlivened ritual architecture. Elsewhere densely composed imagery would have enveloped the bodies of ritual practitioners and devotees, as they were absorbed into a private architectural repository of specialized knowledge. This is unusual in the Moche world where the innermost spaces of lavishly decorated temple complexes are themselves usually devoid of painted images. The paintings of Pañamarca are interpreted as efficacious in the articulation, embodiment, and recollection of late Moche ideology and identity as it crystallized on the southern periphery in the Nepeña Valley. / History of Art and Architecture

<p> For centuries Western sensibilities have been governed by an assumption that imagination is an exclusively human faculty, independent of the phenomenal world. This dissertation explores a view, long elaborated in mythologies and artistic traditions of pre-modern cultures, that phenomenal reality is the template of imagination, that terrestrial and celestial elemental forces are continuous with the mind, and that meaning in artistic practice is derived from a reciprocal exchange with the world in which we live.</p><p> This dissertation revives a traditional view of the heart as the seat of a continuous circulation of mind, imagination, and the world. In endeavoring to recover the eclipsed intelligence of the heart, this study argues that both the thought and perception of the heart are primarily metaphorical, which necessarily makes them essential in humanity&rsquo;s unceasing exchange with the greater community of beings.</p><p> This dissertation demonstrates that imagination and artistic practice are inseparable from the environment, and that a study of pre-modern artistic traditions broadens an ecological understanding of the web of relationships between living beings and the environment that sustains them. Three traditions of painting disclose varying human orientations within the world: Navajo sandpainting, Chinese landscape painting, and Western European painting since the fourteenth century. Navajo sandpaintings are made at times when disorder and sickness prevail in order to restore balance in the relationship between the human community and primordial forces embodied in the landscape. Chinese landscape painting is a visual contemplation of the interwoven place of humanity within the perpetual change and transformation of heaven, earth, and sentient beings. Western painters in the fourteenth century departed from pre-modern approaches to painting when linear perspective was introduced as a way to fix a perception of the phenomenal world that was primarily optical, rather than visionary. The perception promoted by this method, based on an orientation that is both dualistic and literal, eventually ran its course, giving way to the introduction of more interactive approaches to artistic practice and perception by twenty-first century artists.</p>

Since beginning my graduate studies in landscape architecture, I have encountered many situations in class in which references to art were used. I discovered a connection in the usage of the jargon of art in landscape architecture study. People, for the most part, do not know what landscape architects do or who we are. In this thesis I will make the case for aligning the profession of landscape architecture with the fine arts and humanities. An art history component in the curriculum and education and training of landscape architects would augment their design and presentation skills in the workplace. I have included the results of a survey questionnaire that I sent to 65 landscape architecture teaching faculty representing 38 landscape architecture programs in the United States. These individuals held either a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, a Master of Fine Arts degree, or they had a scholarly research interest in art.

In this dissertation I explore the relationship between the city and the pastoral ideal in America. While not meant to be a comprehensive discussion of Urban Pastoralism, I want to focus my attention on the pastoral impulse one experiences within the city. Some versions of American Pastoralism emphasize the city as a complex wilderness, which creates within its inhabitants a pastoral impulse for a simpler mode (Golden Age) outside the boundaries of the city. However, the inability of the subject in art, literature, and film, to escape from the city forces the subject to seek a symbolic pastoral moment within the city. I will discuss three "texts" to demonstrate how this pastoral desire is manifested in the city. First I will discuss a selection of paintings by Edward Hopper. Hopper paints an ironic form of hortus conclusus in his paintings of this city, for his inhabitants appear trapped within the frame of the painting and longing for "something beyond the frame." I will demonstrate how Hopper's paintings present the possibility of a narrative through this irony. As viewers, our desire to impose order upon this chaos compels us to construct narratives for his paintings. This narrative desire is tied to the pastoral impulse which satisfies our need for order. Second, I will discuss John Updike's Rabbit, Run in which Harry pursues a point suspended in time. His pursuit of the Golden Age of his youth is compromised by the physical and geographical surroundings. Finally, Woody Allen's Manhattan shows a man in pursuit of the pastoral in terms of the meaning and purpose of art. Through his search for artistic integrity, Allen discovers the value of beauty as a symbol of the pastoral ideal.