This research project attempts to answer the question of whether it is possible to design a system wherein the rights of current possessors and the rights of original owners or their descendants of art that may have been looted during the Nazi era in Germany can be fairly balanced to achieve results that would be both fair and economical to the parties involved. While it could be said that twenty years ago this issue was hardly noticed, and very few lawsuits or claims were made, in recent years a large number of lawsuits have been filed against museums and private individuals claiming that the defendants own art that was stolen from the original owners or were taken from them in forced sales designed to give a patina of legitimacy to what were thefts by other means. Museums and others have defended themselves, first claiming that not all sales of that era were fraudulent, and second, claiming that the claimants’ claims should be denied as they were dilatory in making the claims and that the statutes of limitations have expired. While it is true that in many cases decades passed before such claims were filed, the reasons for this are also explored. Two lawsuits have been chosen to serve as exemplars. One suit was brought against a private owner and the other against a museum. This was done to show the differences in the techniques and strategies used. The hypothesis was that there is no practical solution available to bring about the fair and just result most would seek. Complicating matters is that with the federal government and the fifty states, there are too many sources of law to easily bring together in a unified solution. While there are many plausible solutions, the most plausible is for the federal government to step in and set up a national system. At this time, the government lacks the will to act, leaving the parties with no solution.

Le XIXe siècle, en France, a donné le jour à la Modernité dans les Arts. Ce qui a débuté comme un courant esthétique, s'est doté d'une sensibilité au présent et au changement. Il fallait "être de son temps" et les deux Honoré ont repondu à l'appel. Le but de cette thèse est d'établir des rapprochements entre Balzac l'écrivain et Daumier l'artiste qui indépendamment l'un de l'autre, ont sû utiliser cette maxime dans la création d'une "comédie humaine". Tout en reconnaissant qu'à certains moments, la littérature où la peinture à influence l'autre ou parfois s'est faite la complice de sa rivale, nous nous sommes néanmoins soumise à des procédés d'équivalence nécessaires au rapprochement d'arts interdisciplinaires. Nous avons également assemblé certains critères qui, pour nous, définissent une "caricature", qu'elle soit picturale ou scripturale. Les deux Honoré ont été tous deux, de grands caricaturistes. Nous pourrions apporter plusieurs théories pour expliquer le rapprochement entre les descriptions que chacun des Honoré donne de ses personnages dont la physionomie ou la démarche révèle ce qui se cache dans leur for intérieur. Notre étude nous a révèle qu'à l'arrière plan des images de Balzac et de Daumier, se dessine l'ombre de ces sciences à la mode, la Phrénologie et la Physiognomonie. Les deux Honoré en ont observé les codes pour esquisser leurs personnages. Nous avons monté un catalogue contenant des reproductions de lithographies de gravures et de peintures de Daumier qui ont servi au rapprochement des deux artistes. Ce volume accompagne notre thèse. Les illustrations viennent démontrer que la plupart des ressemblances entre les deux oeuvres se trouvent dans les types ou stéréotypes de la contemporanéité que les deux artistes ont réussi a étoffer pour en faire des représentants vraisemblables des tendances, des modes, des thèmes et des vices de leur siècle.

Berthe Morisot was one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement in the nineteenth century. However, she is not researched with the same level of respect as her male Impressionist counterparts. Scholars often rely on her biography to analyze her artwork, compare her to other women artists, or briefly mention her accomplishments in a generalized history of the French Impressionist movement. I analyzed nine of Morisot's paintings and applied feminist theory, including third-wave feminism (post-1960's). My research was angled to approach and understand Morisot's artwork as a contemporary woman would at an exhibition.

This study explores the reasons why corporations which supported and collected contemporary art in the twentieth century chose abstract expressionism as the appropriate visual expression of their achievements during the 1950s and 60s. Corporate use of contemporary art began during the mid-1920s as the result of new interest in modernist subject matter. Affinities between technology and aesthetic modernism were promoted by some business advertisers. The depression of the 1930s prompted a conservative cultural retrenchment and new aesthetic statements. Regionalist art was used as an effective marketing tool by advertisers until political events abroad and at home led to its association with fascism. Nazi persecution of abstracted modernist work during the same period forged links between abstraction and democracy for many artists and collectors in the United States. Returning affluence and the shift of the center of modern art from Paris to New York at the end of World War II provided an impetus for corporate consumption of American modernist art. In the increasingly restrictive cultural climate of the post-war years, social realist art was perceived by Congressional investigators to be subversive and communist-influenced; consequently, many business patrons turned to abstract expressionism as a depoliticized, safe alternative. Other corporate collectors defended all varieties of modernist art under the banner of artistic freedom. These patrons called for government support of contemporary American art because they believed that diversity was essential to the preservation of democracy and freedom. The personal freedoms associated with democracy were not unlike the depoliticized personal expression through pure aesthetics emphasized by the abstract expressionists. During the 1950s and 60s increasing numbers of corporate executives saw the advantage of connecting the ahistorical nature of abstract expressionism and its emphasis on individual expression with corporate image. They believed that abstraction would attract attention and, perhaps more important, suggest that the corporation itself was up-to-date, diverse, and uniquely individual. By the 1960s issues of style had superseded earlier political, moral or aesthetic concerns of corporate collectors. Corporate involvement in the arts became chic. That modern art was good for business and that abstract expressionism was the perfect corporate style were fully accepted.

This dissertation deals with the politics of cultural production in documentary film and photography. The axis of contemporary documentary production has shifted significantly, as people of color, women of all races and ethnicities, post-colonial peoples, and gays and lesbians, all of whom were traditional objects of documentary representation, have become active producing subjects. Yet post-structuralist cultural theory, which has significantly influenced film and photography studies, fails to account for, or support, acts of cultural production, focusing instead on the critical potential inherent in the moment of reception. This dissertation argues that an adequate theory of documentary production requires a producing subject, as well as a realist theory of language. It finds in Mikhail Bakhtin's writings on the novel a basis for theorizing the inscription of experience in language, and the practice of identity as the orchestration of the heteroglossic discourses that converge upon the self. It then links these reformulations of language, identity, and experience to key 20th century debates about realism, aesthetics, and the politics of image-making practices. Finally, the dissertation offers an extended critical analysis of photographer Anne Noggle's Silver Lining, and of the film Two Laws, a collaboration between an indigenous Australian community and two white Australian filmmakers. Silver Lining and Two Laws offer significant challenges to the politics of documentary production, and each in its own discursive mode shifts the basis of documentary practice from a mode of representation (the organization of pre-existing experience) to the active performance of reality.

Historian Warren Susman has proposed that the response to an experience is perhaps more important than the experience itself, and the American public responded to the Great Depression of the 1930s by documenting it in different forms and genres, and with different purposes and goals in mind. Given the complex nature of the crisis, the structure and function of the family served as central points of focus toward which many Americans directed their fears, concerns, anxieties, and hopes during the decade; consequently, the family was a frequent focus of the era's documentary texts. This dissertation examines documentary texts from the Depression-era which represent the American family, in an attempt to understand how documentary made sense of the Great Depression and its effects on families, and to determine what family "realities" documentary constructed and sanctioned as valid or depicted as undesirable. Its goal is not to determine how accurately or inaccurately documentary represented some objective "truth" or "reality" of family life, but to explore the complex interrelations between cultural ideals or myths of the family and constructions--representations--of actual families. The study considers works of fiction, nonfiction, and photography which are characterized by similar documentary methods and goals. It is organized according to three interconnected topics as they were presented by writers and photographers during the decade in question: the reactions of male heads of household to widespread unemployment and financial insecurity; the changing roles of wives and mothers both in and out of the home during a time of economic hardship; and the experiences of children and young adults in a society which provided limited opportunity and promise for the future. Issues of work and poverty are important subtexts of this analysis, given the Depression's effects on society in the way of unemployment, bank failures, homelessness, and destitution. The dissertation concludes with an examination of documentary constructions of "otherness" which are based on class and race, and illustrates how images of family were used to qualify or otherwise influence these concepts of otherness and difference.

This dissertation addresses the problem of raising consciousness in Walter Benjamin's writings, which focuses on the problem in his major early works, and in his later writings on photography, film, and mimesis generally. It is a closely-read interpretation, following Benjamin in his attempt to present a historical-philosophical treatment of the literature he was examining. However, it moves away from Benjamin's methodology at critical moments, presenting its own reading of the raising of consciousness as a problem not only for political theorists, but for those interested in the philosophy of history as well. The chapters focus on Benjamin's key major early works, the untranslated "Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," his dissertation, and the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. It contains a lengthy chapter on Benjamin's famous Trauerspiel book, and two on mimesis and the essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The dissertation casts these works in a different light, one under which they have not been examined previously: this light bears the shadow of Kant. Although this is not a dissertation on Benjamin and Kant, the place of the subject and its historicity is considered when contemplating the raising of consciousness at stake in each individual chapter. The question of temporality is present in each case, and marks the presence of Kant as the figure who attempted so articulately to bridge reason and history. Benjamin realized this, and so his attention to consciousness and its temporality is so keen in all of his writings. Conclusions are always difficult to enumerate, especially when a work sees itself as necessarily unfinished. It is the opinion of this author that it is evident, in each chapter, both how Benjamin wrote about raising consciousness, what that meant in each case examined, and how this author interjected to highlight, stress, and invent new ways to read what is often so terribly obscure.

This dissertation argues that widespread belief in a British national character is the result of the wide circulation of images purporting to depict its traits, and further, that audiences for those images have been no less important than image makers in determining what kind of character has been imagined. To support these contentions depictions of the British or English are examined, chosen mainly for their own wide circulation or that of their authors' work in general, but also for their derivation from earlier images in order to demonstrate the continuity of the nation's self-imagining. Apart from one sixteenth century text by Sir Walter Raleigh, the images examined are taken from British works of the last two centuries: in the nineteenth century from texts by Thomas Macaulay, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson, and paintings by Ford Madox Brown and John Everett Millais; in this century from texts by Sapper, Maud Diver, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Margaret Drabble and Salman Rushdie, political speeches by Margaret Thatcher, T. E. Utley and Britain's current chancellor Gordon Brown, and the 1980s re-enactment of Raleigh's activities known as Operation Raleigh. Reference is also made throughout to other contemporaneous images in a variety of media. Discussion draws on post-colonial theory and on theories of nations and nationalism and of narrative and historiography, with a predominantly Marxist approach. Although authors' motives for designedly portraying the national character have quite personal, even, at times, irrational aspects, they are primarily ideological. Motivation is, however, largely irrelevant to the images' reception, which mainly depends on their appeal, availability and general circulation. In conclusion, the construction and proclamation of a supposed national character is seen to be a continuing process which provides the nation's members with an acceptable collective self-image adapted to concerns of the time. Largely stereotypical, inevitably idealized and fraught with ideology, such collective representations incorporate much that is true but differ considerably from prevailing national norms of attitude and behavior. One or another such representation has nevertheless been embraced by a very large number of Britons as embodying their national character.

This dissertation analyzes the extent to which the pictorial cycle and poetic text in the Códice Rico manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X el Sabio convey the same religious and ideological messages. The Códice Rico portrays an ordered, laboring Christian society with some presence of Jews and Muslims, at the mercy of nature and human nature and saved only by the grace and intercession of Holy Mary. In this iconographic society, King Alfonso appears both as the exemplary Christian ruler and the devotee of Mary, singing her praises and exhorting others to do the same. This dual representation suggests that the pictorial cycle of his Marian project is not merely pious, but also politically motivated and forming part of Alfonso X's greater ambition, the crown of Holy Roman Emperor.

Most studies of European exoticism tend to emphasize its complicity with the hegemonic or imperialistic gaze. This dissertation takes a different approach--exploring the tensions/connections between exoticism and resistance within European culture, especially with regard to representations of the exoticized female body. Its interdisciplinary range spans the 19th century British novel, the work of French and British orientalist artists (particularly Gerome), discourses on ethnology, medicine and criminology, conduct books for women, and the operas of Puccini and Bizet. I argue that several artistic constructions of the exoticized woman (in both male and female authored texts) enact ambivalences which rupture and destabilize the ideological structures of domesticity and imperialism. Moreover, I theorize the figure of the Eastern odalisque (which has so far been analyzed as the passive, eroticized object of the European male gaze) as an equivocal, racially hybrid female body, aligning it with the European courtesan. I redefine the odalisque broadly, as including (and blurring) the categories of harem woman, public dancer, nomad, vampire, and courtesan. I argue that often, the hybridized odalisque not only returns a compelling gaze of her own, but also articulates a powerful, transgressive female presence, continually negotiating cultural anxieties about female self-display and miscegenation. The Introduction and Chapter One survey Puccini's opera Turandot, paintings of seraglio interiors by orientalist artists, medical and ethnological texts by Acton, Ryan, Knox, Lombroso and Ferrero, and the positioning of the courtesan. I read Merimee's gypsy Carmen, LeFanu's vampire Carmilla, and Wilkie Collins's detective Marian Halcombe as exoticized women who unravel the plots of Victorian ethnology. Chapter Two explores the possibilities and limitations of female visibility, power and appetite through a discussion of the "haunted odalisques" in Charlotte Bronte's fiction. Chapter Three examines the dynamics of female adornment within orchestrations of imperial spectacle and regulated self-display in Collins's The Moonstone and No Name, and Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. The final chapter investigates the links between the racialization of disease (in Victorian imperial medicine) and female insurgence in the fiction of colonial novelist Flora Steel, focusing particularly on the ethnology of the Indian courtesan.