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Florine Stettheimer was an independent painter and eminent "art hostess" among the avant-garde in New York City during the years between the World Wars. In 1916, Stettheimer rather suddenly affected a naive or unschooled style that did not fit within any academic or vanguard movement. This new style, what I have termed conscious naiveté, can be considered the genesis of Stettheimer's mature works. Contemporaneous critical appraisals after the shift in style undervalued the inventive modernity of her work and unfairly “feminized” her style.

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.

In the Hindu tradition of the Indian subcontinent, worship of the goddess has long been practiced as supreme embodiment of the divine. Around the second century, a Sanskrit Purana (ancient Hindu text that extols deities) titled the Markandeya Purana details the battles of the supreme Goddess Durga against the illusions and negative energy in the universe. This textual version of the Devi Mahatmya “Praise of the Goddess” serves as the foundation for the nineteenth century Nepalese illustrated Devi Mahatmya, commissioned by Tej Bahadur Rana from Pokhara district in Nepal. Because the folios closely follow the textual Devi Mahatmya, the illustrations’ amalgamation of styles demonstrates a double entendre of religious and political frameworks represented through Indian religious iconography with localized motifs and styles from Nepal. In this study, I argue that the illustrated Nepalese Devi Mahatmya indicates a shift in power from the Shah aristocracy to Rana oligarchy. This Devi Mahatmya contextualizes the social, religious, and historical events of nineteenth century Nepal, as a unique extension to the current scholarship about the Devi Mahatmya since it is dated and has a known patron. The intentional amalgamation of previous Newar styles, localized elements, and European décor reveals the mythical being contemporized, that is, drawing from English modernism to empower the Rana family, adding a unique flair to this manuscript as opposed to previous Devi Mahatmyas of Indian Guler or Newar style. Within the nineteenth century Nepali Devi Mahatmya, the background of this Devi Mahatmya is Guler-inspired, utilizing lightly hued backgrounds and landscapes, suggesting that the artist(s) had observed Guler compositions prior to this commission. The Nepali and Newar motifs contextualizes the Devi Mahatmyas commissioning in Pokhara, as these elements comment on the clan patriarch Jung Bahadur Rana and uncle of the patron usurping power from the Shah king, asserting a new Rana oligarchy that would last until 1951. As a result, this Devi Mahatmya is used as an offering to the goddess to legitimize Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana and the nephews that would follow his legacy.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin was faced with the challenge to reunify in both political and cultural realms. Berlin is noted throughout history as a metropolis that is characterized by flux; the Post-Wende [Post-Wall] era is another remarkable transitional phase in Berlin’s history. During this era, the city was extremely porous and susceptible to cultural forces that could easily define the city’s malleable future. This essay discusses such forces and events that were planned by the city government, as well as an organic grassroots force that was especially significant in the cultural reunification. This force is the squatting culture that was spurred by the excess of unused and unclaimed buildings in the center of Berlin. Many of the squatters are coalitions of artists who embody the renitente Kultur [unruly culture] that characterizes Berlin. Analyzed in this essay is a group of squatting artists, known as “Gruppe Tacheles das Kunsthaus” who inhabited the ruins of a historical building in the Mitte neighborhood located in the center of Berlin. The creators of Tacheles breathed life back into the ruins by establishing ateliers, a restaurant, a club, a movie theatre, a sculpture garden, and a bar in the building that became an artists’ haven with international fame. Artists, both residential and visiting, have treated the crumbling building like a makeshift giant canvas and it is now covered in layers of graffiti and stands as the Gesamtkunstwerk [total and universal ideal work of art] of the reunifying Berlin that has become an international hub for artists. Due to escalation in property value, an effective owner of the property on which Tacheles stands has stepped forward and taken actions to evict the artists and demolish the building in order to build luxury offices. Most of the artists have left the site, leaving it as a ghostly shell of the bustling community it once was. Near twenty artists remain and protest the actions to destroy their work of art that had come to live symbiotically with the city. At this point, there is one appropriate event to occur next in the lifeline of the site: the building must be demolished in a ceremonious explosion to mark the passing of its vitality, so that its legacy can live on untainted in the future phases of Berlin’s culture.

This thesis, which studies the effect Loïe Fuller had on artists at the turn of the 20th century, redefines her role in art and society. An American dancer born in 1862, Fuller is often hailed as one of the forefathers of modern dance and a technological engineer, but she is too rarely shown in control of how the audience perceived her. This work gives an overview of Art Nouveau and the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris in which she performed. It closely examines her impact on painters, illustrators, and lithographers: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Will Bradley, and Jules Cheret. It also studies her influence on sculptors: Raoul Larche, Agathon Léonard, and Pierre Roche; architect Henri Sauvage, and writer Stéphane Mallarmé. In this work, Fuller is not solely presented as the physical embodiment of Art Nouveau but as an active shaper of artistic movements of her time. It portrays her as active rather than passive.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany, 1945—the year of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, and subsequently, the end of World War II. His own beginnings were shrouded by a national “repression” of history. This repression was at odds with Kiefer’s needs to establish his own origin. For this reason, the spirituality in his earlier work is often overshadowed by its subject—Nazi Germany. This thesis will look back on Kiefer’s work through the lens of mythology in an effort to re-evaluate his earlier art within the context of his works since 1990. From the 1970s to the present, Kiefer has drawn from mythology to find links between personal and universal human experience. We begin by examining Kiefer’s controversial Attic Paintings of 1973. In the Attic Paintings, German and Christian mythology helped Kiefer understand his origin as a post-war German artist. Kiefer then turned his attention to myths from outside cultures throughout the 1980s. We will look closely at three paintings from the 1980s that incorporate Greek, Judaic, and Egyptian mythology in an effort to understand Kiefer’s larger goals in broadening his mythological base. Following this discussion, we will examine two paintings from the 1990s and his 2007 permanent installation at the Louvre Museum. These selected works serve to illustrate how Kiefer presented his own cultivated, personal mythology under the stars in his still ongoing cosmic series. The 1990s mark Kiefer’s broadest expansion yet; in a sense, he went from “the attic to the universe” over the course of three decades.

This paper examines Djuna Barnes's Modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, by exploring the author's particular styles of writing. As an ironist, a master of spectacle, and a visual artist, Barnes's distinct stylistic roles allow the writer to construct a strange fictional world that transcends simple categorization and demands close reading. Through textual analysis, consideration of how Barnes's characterization, and engagement with key critical interpretations lead to the conclusion that Nightwood's primary aim is to present the reader with an image of his or her own individual estrangement.

This paper explores the art of Olga Costa and María Izquierdo. The history of the Mexican revolution is outlined and then presented again with a focus on women’s issues and involvement. Next is a discussion of national identity construction after the revolution, with attention paid to the role of the “Big Three,” muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros. While scholars often credit male artists for their involvement in this process, the contributions of female artists tend to be overlooked. Although the work of female artists is often portrayed as limited to their personal experiences, this thesis argues that women’s work subverted hegemonic narratives and images that homogenized Mexican national identity building, and thus reveal valuable perspectives on post-revolutionary Mexican society. Specific topics explored include subversions of representations of female beauty, challenging of the role of women in Mexican society and patriarchies in general, and the creative use of symbols in order to avoid objectifying women while representing themes pertaining to Mexico. This thesis engages with scholarly works that perpetuate traditional readings of Costa and Izquierdo’s work as primarily autobiographical and limited in scope as well as more progressive critiques that recognize the social significance of these artists. A variety of paintings are analyzed in detail, including Costa and Izquierdo’s portraits of nude and clothed women, Izquierdo’s series of allegorical pieces and still lifes, and Costa’s masterpiece “La Vendedora.” This thesis is written in Spanish.

Si el siglo XX creó una extendida conciencia sobre las variantes de la intertextualidad en la ficción literaria, hoy enfrentamos transformaciones en la naturaleza de la ficción y sus relaciones con otras formas discursivas y/o creativas como el arte, y con la misma realidad, que es posible designar con el concepto de ficción extrema. Desde “Don Quijote” o “Las meninas” hay incursiones en la metaficción y/o autorrefecividad. Pero a partir de las vanguardias modernistas y de modo creciente en los estertores de la postmodernidad nos abocamos a un singular tipo de hipertextualidad que desbordando lo literario se apropia de prácticas artísticas (o lo contrario) como recurso para la transposición de sus ficciones, no sólo de uno a otro campo, sino para su inserción en la realidad: la ficción extrema. Max Aub (España 1903-México 1973), Leonora Carrington (Inglaterra 1917-México 2011) y Enrique Vila-Matas (España 1958), radicalizaron este tránsito o filtración de los imaginarios artísticos y literarios subvirtiendo las delimitaciones entre —pintor catalán Jusep Torres Campalans, junto con sus obras pictóricas, creadas como sombra o doble de Picasso. Así insertó su existencia en ciertos dominios del cubismo como un modo de meta-crítica artística. Carrington asumió un doble animal que transitó entre cuentos y cuadros y se inscribió en la memoria del surrealismo. Vila-Matas narró su “Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil” como un doble del espectro Marcel Duchamp —a su vez asaltado por otros— que reescribe la memoria del dadaísmo de tal modo que ha llegado a ser confundida con un ensayo. La revisión de las estrategias de la ficción extrema en estos autores junto con las de otros contemplados en el epilogo —Mario Bellatín, y los artistas Liliana Porter, Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, Ana Tisconia, Rubén Torres Llorca y Carlos Amorales— arroja nueva luz sobre sus obras, enriquece los estudios transatlánticos y revela la movilidad y multiplicación de la identidad y los deslizamientos de la ficción en la realidad como signos de tránsito a la altermodernidad.