Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You AreThe above quotation sums up my feelings about this thesis. By reviewing my life I feel a sense of renewal. I think that my memories are true and accurate. My story certainly is a living memory of my time. I have found that in telling my story I have purged myself of much of my past and refreshed myself in mind and spirit.I start my story by reviewing the three artists who have influenced my work over the past two years, Squeak Carnwath, Jean Hammond and Nancy Spero.I then give a chronological resume of my life to date: my time as a mother, teacher and artist. I describe some of my earlier works together with the moods and emotions which accompanied them. The latter part of the chapter deals with my life in the United States and how my work is developing and the many influences which are helping in this process.In Chapter 3, I talk about my imagery and my latest thoughts as an artist, and go on to describe the paintings which make up the exhibition which accompanies this thesis.Finally, I have attempted to evaluate the fragments of my life, fragments which make up the whole. This is my catharsis. I have released much of myself and my inhibitions. I have absorbed a variety of stimuli and felt a multitude of sensations. My emotions have ebbed to and fro, and in retelling my story I have renewed myself. / Department of Art

<p> This dissertation examines representations of the family in art and literature of the Spanish court during Philip IV's reign. I contend that depictions of royal and noble families in court settings&mdash;and by artists who resided at court&mdash;spoke to the monarchy's social and political concerns at a time of imperial crisis. Family is understood here not as a fixed entity, but as a mobile cultural construct that bent, in Golden Age Spain, to address a variety of needs. The emotional and theological intricacies of a prince's marriage indicated the preparedness or ineptitude of a king to be; a noblewoman's marriage abroad to a foreign prince embodied Spain's struggles to contain the Thirty Years' War; the depiction of an artist's family in a royal palace demonstrated the ambitions of the courtier-artist. </p><p> Chapter 1 examines V&eacute;lez de Guevara's play <i>Reinar despu&eacute;s de morir</i> (1635). I propose that the play's thematic interest lies in an attempt to reconcile the strictures of dynastic marriage&mdash;marriage for reasons of state&mdash;with the necessities of emotional fulfilment and mutual trust of marriage partners suggested in contemporary conduct manuals. Chapter 2 reads two short stories from Mar&iacute;a de Zayas's <i>Desenga&ntilde;os amorosos</i> (1648), "Mal presagio casar de lejos," and "Estragos que causa el vicio," as nationalist allegories. I suggest that the families Zayas depicts are metaphors for a Spanish national family, belagured in European theaters of war and beset by domestic conflicts such as the Portuguese and Catalonian uprisings of the 1640s. In Chapter 3 I explore a painting, <i> La familia del pintor</i> (1665), by Juan Bautista del Mazo, son-in-law of Diego Vel&aacute;zquez and heir to his post as painter of the king. I compare Mazo's <i>La familia del pintor</i> to Vel&aacute;zquez <i> Las meninas</i>. Mazo's proud portrayal of his own biological family and of a dyanasty of court artists indicates that the painting is not merely dervivative of his father-in-law's masterpiece, <i>Las meninas</i>; rather, Mazo has a pictorial agenda all his own, one that includes the social advancement of the court artist and of a multitude of heirs seeking the king's patronage in other careers.</p>

<p> "Dissociated Verses" is a collection of poems inviting its readers to step into a space of cleansed perception&mdash;a poetic field that enables the apparition of objects and phenomena as they are in themselves, as though they were uncontaminated by human subjectivity. Avoiding the traditional predicative use of the English language and favoring the use of paratactical linguistic constructions, the verses in this collection literally carve out the white space of the page to display luminous aesthetic moments. </p><p> "Intonation" is a complementary opus&mdash;an antidote to the solemnity and escape-from-emotion-ness of "Dissociated Verses." Although steeped in a similar apocalyptic vision of phenomenology, the poems in this collection clearly differ in form: they are pulled by a lyrical and symbolic drive. Winking at Blake and Baudelaire, they bring the dissociated reader back to human-ness&mdash;the symphony of joy and sadness.</p>

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1978. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1937. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Issued also as thesis, Amsterdam.

Inaug.-Diss.--Würzburg. / Lebenslauf. "Literatur-verzeichnis": p. 75-76.

Inaug.-diss.--Uppsala. / Extra t.p., with thesis statement, inserted. Bibliography: p. [297]-322.

<p> In December 1911, the public exhibition of Kandinsky's Komposition V shattered the world of Western illusionism as audiences knew and understood it - or so the traditional tale goes. Yet the relative abruptness with which abstraction supposedly shocks the art world not only presents a misleading impression; it in effect creates a great riddle. If the Western art world spent centuries organized under a unifying goal of perfecting imitation, why would it now so suddenly turn its back on its institutional underpinnings by challenging, negating, or exploding the principles it had worked so hard to develop? This project responds by rejecting the presuppositions of the riddle and arguing against the traditional narrative, claiming instead that the invention of abstract art in the 1910s was neither abrupt nor unprecedented, but was already being described, theorized, or created in the 19^th century, only in literature rather than painting. Through close reading and literary analysis, I present three moments in the German literary canon in which abstract art is imagined or becomes theoretically possible: Heinrich von Kleist's Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft (1810), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem "Howards Ehrenged&auml;chtnis" (1821), and Gottfried Keller's Der gr&uuml;ne Heinrich (1855, 1879). Composing these moments are three different authors who write at three different decades, speak through three different genres, and conceive three different modes of abstraction, none of which contemporaneously achieved painted form. Connecting these moments is the following argument: each constitutes an example of the invention of abstract art in a 19^th-century literary text prior to the visual actualization of abstract art in the early 20^th century. With such images in circulation well before 1911, this study features the crucial role of literature in foregrounding the cultural developments essential for abstract artworks to "speak for themselves" in the medium of painting by establishing certain preconditions involving need, spectatorship, and the self-awareness of the artist. Thus by conceptualizing abstract images in their writing, these three 19^th-century German authors also produce necessary components of the theoretical grounding required for the 20^th-century birth of abstract art.</p>

Thesis--John Hopkins University. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [3]-5).