As the endurance of Wright’s soubriquet ‘of Derby’ shows, the association between Wright and Derby is distinctive in its ongoing cultural resonance. The legacy of this today is the Joseph Wright Collection at Derby Museum and Art Gallery – the largest collection of his work in the world. This thesis is, therefore, concerned not with arguing for the relationship between Wright and Derby but with attending to how it has been represented and claimed during the 19th-century. This will encompass both how the relationship influenced Wright’s posthumous reputation and how it was enlisted in Derby as the painter was incorporated into the town’s social and cultural fabric. The different claims made upon the artist’s life and locality will become apparent through this, demonstrating the changing relation between painter and place as it was adapted and appropriated according to different times, places, and discourses. This refurbishment of the painter throughout the 19th-century is significant as it provided cultural continuity at a time when the town was rapidly transforming. Exhibitions were an important medium through which the relationship was shaped and represented: within Derby there was a display of Wright’s work nearly every decade. These represent important moments in which Wright was enlisted as a source of cultural capital and in which his reputation was shaped and sustained. Following the natural chronology of the period, the thesis will first consider Wright’s immediate commemoration through the networks of people and circulation of objects involved in sales of his work and his literary representation. In 1839 the Derby Mechanics’ Institute exhibition was heralded as ‘Derby’s first exhibition’; Wright’s prominent display in this implicated him within the civic culture of the 1830s. As momentum around exhibitions and Wright built in the latter half of the century, the exhibitions in 1866, 1870, and 1877 will be considered in relation to one another, consolidating Wright’s presence within the town. Lastly, the thesis will close with the 1880s, when Wright’s association with Derby was celebrated and claimed through a large retrospective exhibition of his work, the beginning of a municipal art collection, the publication of his monograph, and a display at the Royal Academy in 1886.

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The aim of this thesis is to examine and study Japanese traditional colours: gold and red for the Kanō school, blue and purple for the ukiyoe, including their symbolic meanings, pigments, how they were applied in art works and how they were related to Japanese aesthetics. This thesis is comprised of four chapters: the Introduction, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Conclusion. The introduction indicates the research purpose, theory, and research method. It also demonstrates the reason why the four colours and the two schools were selected. A combination of western colour theory, represented by Goethe, and Asian colour theory, represented by Five-elements theory and Confucius, is used in the following studies. In Chapter 2, studies on the colour gold and red for the Kano school are presented. These show that Japanese aesthetics is not a simple concept, but an aggregation of conflicting senses of values. The thesis then examines the colour blue and purple for the ukiyoe in Chapter 3. The two colours illustrate the concept of Japanese aesthetics, especially wabi-sabi, 侘び寂び, shibui, 渋い, and iki, 粋”. In the two detailed central chapters, the thesis provides readers with resourceful charts and pictures of paintings that are helpful to understand the statement. Finally, the thesis concludes the studies on Japanese traditional colours and their relations to Japanese aesthetics. This thesis hopes to not only help scholars in the field of Japanese traditional art and art history, but also offer some inspiration to readers who are doing research on Japanese contemporary design and modern art. / Graduate / 0377 / 0357 / siyingwang2013@163.com

It moves on the frontiers of the sides it looks from and the media it uses following the vision to assemble miscellaneous knowledge so that a certain truth (or a semblance of a truth) could come to the jigsaw that just has been created. Starting in a context originally coming from another argumentation field (social) and in the subsequent topic (the moment of effect of power), which may not necessarily be explicitly readable, it wants to examine what does it take to activate "the image" to be a (partial) autonomous comment about real spaces, even if translated to fictional or virtual. On the background of this heterotopic matter they want (the images and processes of their creation) also to test themselves, to ask on their own sense, to negate the conceptual difference between static and moving images.

Title: Fundamental Painting Author: Claudia Rajlich Department: Institute of Art History Supervisor: Prof. PhDr. Vojtěch Lahoda, CSc. Abstract: This dissertation wishes to define fundamental painting - a term which was coined and a current which was defined by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the form of a show of 18 artists of different nationalities in 1975. Like the show, it wishes to give a clear view of a specific new kind of painting of the 1970s, which is "a reflection on the foundations of painting."1 The core of Fundamental Painting is formed by the four painters of American Minimal Art and the show based on a text concerning their work (upon which innumerable texts have been written since). This dissertation focuses on the European part of this "common mentality" as the curators call it, which remains unresearched until today. Its scope is to define: What was it, where did it come from and was it at all? The research is limited to artists in the show (although we conclude that a few should be replaced by others), historical evidence concerning new painting in the 1970s, the critical analysis of texts, artists statements and, above all, the undeniable documentation in the form of the body of works themselves. The existence of Fundamental Painting is proven, its characteristics determined in...

In the early modern Dutch Republic, plaster casts offered artists a way to overcome limitations of space and time, to reach places distant and ancient, and to present themselves anew. This dissertation constitutes the first comprehensive account of the impact plaster casts had on the artistic practice, intellectual endeavors, and social status of seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Though plaster casts appear in archival documents, in theoretical texts, and most of all in paintings across genres, they have been marginalized in the history of Dutch art, too often explained away as mere studio props or didactic tools. I inquire, instead, into the consequences of Dutch painters’ conscious choice to depict plaster casts after ancient and modern sculpture, at the same time they staked their claims as practitioners of a noble art. Plaster casts linked Dutch painters to antiquity, to the Renaissance, to discerning contemporary collectors, and to one another. These modest objects, full of semantic potential, were incorporated into myriad compositions in which they became signifiers of an artist’s ambitions, humanistic aspirations, and technical virtuosity. Through novel interpretations of paintings in which plaster casts have been taken for granted, I argue that plaster casts lie at the heart of the self-awareness and artistic self-promotion manifested in the seemingly quotidian paintings of the new seventeenth-century genres. This dissertation also sets out to recognize the variety of laborers involved in the production and circulation of the actual plaster casts, though their specific identities remain largely obscured or lost in the historical record. Their absence from the corpus of images of trades and professions emerges in stark contrast to the privileged self-fashioning of Dutch painters, for whom plaster casts functioned as a means to distinguish themselves from other artisans. I take the pictorialized encounter between plaster casts and artists as an opportunity to discern the particularities of that interaction and to explore the liveliness that plaster casts introduced into both the experience of studying casts and the compositions artists populated with them. With an invigorated focus on plaster itself as a material with a protean character and multi-purpose applications, this dissertation contributes to the discourse on Dutch painters’ naer het leven practice through an overdue analysis of the sculptural copies and other bodies in plaster that kept them company.

Cubism has often been referred to as “a dead art.” It is the objective of this thesis to present evidence gained through working with high school art students that the study of Cubism, at the secondary level, can result in greater creativity and a genuine appreciation of the abstract. In addition to the study of Cubist artists and their techniques, a correlation was made between art of the early 1900’s and other areas such as Social Science, Music and Literature of this time. By this method, the students were given a broader insight into the motives of the Cubist artists. The personal involvement of each student in the progressive changes from objective representation of subject matter to quasi-nonrepresentational painting provided them with more open attitudes in understanding art of the past and of the present. Photographs of student work from an advanced art class at Reynolds High School are offered as evidence to support this thesis.

This thesis is for a Master of Fine Arts in Painting.

This thesis is for a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and features the work of Elizabeth Harris.

Thie thesis discusses forty paintings completed during the period of study from October of 1974 and presented at the Art and Architecture Gallery, May 26, 1976-June 11, 1976.