<p> This dissertation examines the architectural patronage of a small cadre of industrialists, textile millowners, who controlled the city of Ahmedabad, India economically and politically between Indian independence in 1947 and 1968, the year communal riots shattered that city's self-image. It examines the role modern architecture played for these elites in projecting Ahmedabad as a modern, cosmopolitan city, though one steeped in a unique history and culture. On the one hand, modern architecture was used to promote the city as a node in the global network of capital and industry that developed after the Second World War. As such, most of the architects selected by these industrialists came from the ranks and institutions of the global modern movement, mirroring the industrialists' attempt to place the city's industry into global networks of capital and development. On the other hand, the millowners employed modern architecture as a way to naturalize Ahmedabad's sweeping social changes, so that they appeared as an inevitable outgrowth of Ahmedabad's and India's own history. In this, the modern architecture of Ahmedabad was suffused with references both to Ahmedabad's textile industry and India's imagined and historical past. </p><p> The first chapter examines projects that represent the industrialists' earliest overtures towards the global network of modern architects and institutions. The goal of the projects, which included an unbuilt store by Frank Lloyd Wright, a store inspired by Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, and Achyut Kanvinde's Gropius influenced ATIRA headquarters, was to instantiate a capitalist model of modernity in Ahmedabad through the fostering of consumer markets and the rationalization of industry. The second chapter delves further into the millowners' use of modern architecture for the instantiation of capitalist values and self-representation by comparing the city's two most famous modern projects: Louis Kahn's Indian Institute of Management and Le Corbusier's Millowners' Association Building.</p><p> The third and fourth chapters turn to the cultural and domestic sphere, exploring projects that negotiated modern, Indian identity in the public and private context. Cultural institutions by architects like Le Corbusier, Charles Correa, and Balkrishna Doshi interrogated the relationship between the elite's new vision for Ahmedabad and the city's history. Meanwhile houses by many of the same architects for industrialists showed a modern domesticity that negotiated between community, the joint family and the individual by fusing modern forms to older domestic spatial organizations.</p><p> This dissertation contributes to the growing body of research focused on the role modern architecture played in shaping postcolonial Indian identity and subjectivity. While previous research has often focused on the patronage of the socialist state, the examination of the patronage of an elite group of capitalists shows how modern architecture became the locus for debates about the direction of modern Indian society. Further, the dissertation's focus on capitalist patronage places this dissertation in a larger body of research that traces the connections between capital and modern projects, though such issues have rarely been explored in the Indian context.</p>

<p> In an effort to unveil the underlying potency of architecture I take banal structures and give them a dynamic intervention. Basic architectural forms are manipulated in a way that alters our relationship to them. Once ordinary, the forms are now anomalistic. It is through this surreal reinterpretation of form and space I hope people are encouraged to examine the world around them. By unconventionally combining materials associated with contemporary building practice, or reinterpreting their functionality, I aim to displace the familiar and emphasize the tension inherent in places we think we know. </p>

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At the end of the 19th century, Americans heralded the end of the westward march across the continent. The West had been won. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner put it best when in 1893 he proclaimed: And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. Long understood as a geographically remote wilderness where the epic struggle between civilized and savage would determine the fate of Americas future, suddenly the frontier defined the nations past. Previous scholars, in examining the work of artists, writers, entertainers, and others, have explored how certain individuals fashioned a nostalgic legacy of western expansion at this moment in the nations history. My dissertation charts new territory in this field by exploring how Americans nationwide fashioned a legacy of western expansion in an assemblage of works of art neglected until now, sculptural monuments erected in public space. In so doing, it provides a fresh understanding of the nations defining legend, the myth of the frontier, and how this myth corresponds to the history upon which it is based. By employing the Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum Inventory of American Sculpture to examine the entire range of public monuments commemorating western expansion from 1890-1930, my study provides an unprecedented synthesis on this topic. Inventory research revealed one striking pattern--monuments focused overwhelmingly on two figures, the Indian and the pioneer. It also led to one surprising finding--while represented as combatants in the battle for the continent in the 19th century, both figures would be remembered heroically in the wake of western expansion, each the foundation upon which citizens would construct American identities in the early-20th century. Thus, in a series of case studies complementing my Smithsonian Inventory research, my dissertation examines the life of two mythic American figures, the Indian and the pioneer, and how these figures were used to fashion a legacy of western expansion in a rich array of artifacts including public sculptures, minted coins, and memorial highways.

This dissertation deals with two periods in the history of a room in the Sforza Castle known as the Sala delle Asse: the fifteenth-century, when Ludovico Sforza (1452-1508) commissioned Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) to paint it and the late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth century when the Sala was re-discovered and subjected to a major restoration by the Italian architectural historian Luca Beltrami (1854-1933). Beltrami's participation in the Sala's re-discovery in 1893, the architectural and pictorial alterations he ordered in preparing the room for public view, and his monographic presentation of the Sala's fifteenth-century history will be discussed here using new archival evidence. The author will argue that Beltrami's interventions ultimately shifted attention away from the Sala's fifteenth-century circumstances and transformed it into a key component of the ambitious restoration scheme that Beltrami had formulated for the Sforza Castle as whole. This was a scheme that supported certain political and cultural ideologies about Milan at the turn of the twentieth-century. In an effort to provide an alternative voice for the Sala to that of Beltrami, the author will use new archival documentation to discuss the participation of Paul M&#xFC;ller-Walde, a German art historian who is credited with the actual re-discovery of the Sala but whose contributions remained curiously absent from all modern art-historical literature dealing with the Sala. Acting on the premise that a more plausible and much needed interpretation for the Sala's fifteenth-century history is needed, the author will offer a reconsideration of some of the Sala's most basic problems such as dating, location and possible uses. The author will also deal with Leonardo's contributions and the perils of characterizing the Sala as yet another work that sprang fully from Leonardo's imagination, with little interference or direction from outside sources. Finally, the author will deal with Ludovico Sforza's reasons for commissioning the Sala and lay the groundwork for an expanded and alternative interpretative discourse intended to broaden the avenue of investigation of this important and unique commission in Renaissance art. This dissertation concludes with an extensive Register of Documents containing reproductions or transcriptions of important fifteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century documents for the Sala delle Asse.

This dissertation is the first monographic study in any language of Japans official war painting produced during the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 through the Pacific War in 1945. This genre is known as sensô sakusen kirokuga (war campaign documentary painting). Japans army and navy commissioned noted Japanese painters to record war campaigns on a monumental scale. Military officials favored yôga (Western-style painting) for its strength in depicting scenes in realistic detail over nihonga (Japanese-style painting). The military gave unprecedented commissions to yôga painters despite the fact that Japan was fighting the materialist West. Large military exhibitions exposed these paintings to civilians. Officials attached national importance to war documentary paintings by publicizing that the Emperor had inspected them in the Imperial Palace. This study attempts to analyze postwar Japanese reluctance to tackle war documentary painting by examining its controversial and unsettling nature. The art community has been hesitant to reflect on its alignment with the regime by relegating responsibility for wartime collaboration to individual artists. That hesitance has resulted in a critical gap in the history of modern Japanese art. This study attempts to fill the void by examining artistic and political circumstances surrounding war documentary painting from three perspectives as follows. (1) Art historical significance: Yôga war documentary paintings offer a record of yôgas development since the Meiji period. Critics say that yôgas expression during the war was exceptional, but I show it was consistent with yôgas history. (2) Nationalistic pragmatism toward art: Modern Japanese leaders were often motivated by nationalism. This study illustrates that the alliance forged between the wartime regime and the art community was a continuation of Meiji governing tradition. (3) Ideological and propaganda aspects: By analyzing documentary paintings of what officials called the Holy War (Seisen) of 1937-1945, this study demonstrates central propaganda mechanisms in the images. Without a single portrayal of the Emperor, Japanese war documentary painting expressed the absolute importance of the imperial order over the individual.

I Won't Play Primitive to Your Modern: The Art of David Neel (Kwagiutl), 1985-2000 examines the production and reception of one artist's work as it crosses discursive arenas. This dissertation theorizes that, at times, Neel draws upon his schooling in photojournalism and his training as a carver to challenge Eurocentric assumptions tied to two ideals: that looking is disinterested, and that justice is blind. At other times, Neel uses the same skills to provoke an experience of viewing that yields political or spiritual transcendence. I Won't Play Primitive to Your Modern, then, investigates overlaps and gaps between different conventions and experiences of looking in a study connected to questions of epistemology, metaphysics, and phenomenology. My research examines Neel's art in conjunction with his own mobility through Mexican, African-American, Asian and Euro-American communities, as well as indigenous North America. My interpretation is predicated on evidence derived from oral histories, fieldwork, and archival research. I also apply strategies of visual analysis informed by an interdisciplinary array of theories about looking forwarded by scholars such as Barbara Stafford, Susan Sontag, Christopher Pinney, James Clifford, Roland Barthes, W.J.T. Mitchell, Robert Davidson (Haida), Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache), and Charlotte Townsend-Gault. My analysis of Neel's artistic production and reception also draws upon theories of embodiment that include Transformation, the Kinship I, and The Four Sacred Directions as well as ideals of objectivity embedded in the disciplines of art history and law. This study concludes that Neel's use of photography's reproductive capabilities, his references to the importance of copying in the aesthetic of carving, his knowledge of media outlets, and his life of migration have enabled him to slip himself and his images into multiple discursive communities that espouse distinct aesthetic sensibilities and political agendas. The import of Neel's project lies in his capacity to engage his viewers with, and thus reveal, political and aesthetic differences that provoke debate about group identity, about his own identity and about the meaning of his art.

Readers of Vasaris Vite will be aware of the lively Renaissance tradition of the artists embedded portrait within commissioned works. We are told of numerous embedded self-portraits, a notion that earlier authors including Alberti, Filippo Villani, and Ghiberti, corroborate. This dissertation argues that the Vite, our most extensive source on the subject, set up ideas and expectations that continue to pervade our understanding of their purposes and functions. A primary aim here is to move beyond Vasaris assumptions and examine self-images from the standpoint of their audience rather than their creators. Chapter One examines aspects of our current knowledge concerning Vasaris historical context and his motivations as an artist, courtier, and writer in order to understand how his views informed his interpretation of the genre. Chapter Two examines a manuscript self-portrait by Pietro da Pavia and a sculpted self-portrait of Andrea Orcagna. It investigates issues of artistic identity and authority and how these notions were displayed and commemorated to discern how self-portraits may have served the aims of the commissioner(s). The third and fourth chapters delve into the history of Quattrocento Florentine embedded self-portraits. First with Masaccios self-portrait in the Brancacci Chapel, and then with self-images of Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Domenico Ghirlandaio, these chapters examine aspects of the Renaissance culture of art commissioning to establish the patrons role with regard to embedded self-portraiture. Discussion here suggests ways in which a patron might have understood the artists embedded self-portrait during the early Quattrocento. It further explores the notion that while professional, intellectual, and social-status driven concerns may have dominated the creation of embedded self-images, not all of these were the concerns of the artists. The final chapter investigates transitional images between the embedded and autonomous self-portrait traditions by examining two fictively autonomous self-images one by Perugino in Perugias Collegio del Cambio and the other by Pintoricchio in Santa Maria Maggiore, Spello. The case-studies presented here illuminate neglected aspects regarding Renaissance embedded self-images, and cast light on both sides of the transaction between artist and patron that resulted in the inclusion of the artists embedded self-portrait in narrative paintings.

This dissertation focuses on the (East) German artist Bernhard Heisig (b. 1925), one of the most important German artists of the twentieth century. In English-language scholarship, however, he is virtually unknown, the result of lingering Cold War-era stereotypes that presume East Germany had no art, merely political propaganda or kitsch. This study focuses, in particular, on a crucial but little understood moment in Heisigs life and work, the decade between 1961 and 1971, a time when the style and subject matter for which he is best known today first emerged in his oeuvre. The introduction provides an overview of Heisigs reception in East, West, and unified Germany that will show how Cold War-era thinking affected--and continues to affect--his reception. The second chapter focuses on his past as a teenage soldier in the Second World War and the emergence of explicit references to this past in his art in the early 1960s. A comparison of his work to that by other artists suggests that there was more to its emergence at this point in time than simply personal reflection. It also reveals how his own experiences affected his portrayal of the subject. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters focus on a number of controversies that centered on Heisig and his work in the mid and late 1960s. It was during these years that the very definition of art in East Germany was under discussion: What is Socialist Realism? Heisig was a key figure in these debates, especially as they played out in Leipzig. A close investigation of the four main controversies in which he was involved reveals an artist deeply engaged with the society in which he lived and worked. Rather than a uniformly repressive system, the East German cultural scene was one of negotiation, sometimes heated, between artists and cultural functionaries. By engaging in these debates, Heisig helped to change what art was in East Germany and developed the commitment to figuration, tradition, and allegory for which he is praised today. In the end, this dissertation will offer a deeper understanding of both the artist and art under Socialism.

My dissertation analyzes the art, architecture, and rites related to mortuary ceremonies for Emperor Antoku and the Taira at the Buddhist temple Amidaji in Shimonoseki City in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Amidaji served as a mortuary temple for the eight-year-old emperor Antoku and the Taira clansmen, who, defeated in the final battle of the Genpei War, jumped to their deaths in the cold seas off the coast of Akama in 1185. Because the child emperor and the Taira drowned themselves, their spirits, unable to access the next world, were believed to become malicious ghosts who threatened the living and the nation. Amidaji, constructed in front of the battle site and where Antokus body was believed to be interred, assumed major responsibility for the rituals to appease these ghosts and to assist them in attaining rebirth in the Western Paradise of Amida Buddha. Despite its importance, Amidaji was abolished and was then replaced by a Shintô shrine during the persecution of Buddhism in the late nineteenth century. The buildings of the temple were demolished and the majority of Buddhist icons and implements were destroyed. Several key artworks, including the portraits of Antoku and the Taira as well as the sliding-door paintings depicting the life of the emperor, survived; however, the removal of artworks from the architectural settings where rituals took place stripped their primary functions. In order to recover the lost meanings of the art and architecture of Amidaji, this dissertation positions the art and architecture as integral ritual components and attempts to reconnect them with the various contexts in which they actually functioned. My study is based on a visual analysis of surviving works of art and architecture at Amidaji, a close study of textual and pictorial evidence, and a survey of the actual site. I explore the roles of the art and architecture where a variety of elementsartifacts, rites, patrons, and specific circumstances of politics, society, history, culture, economy, and religion intersected. This study enhances our understanding of the art and architecture of Amidaji and illuminates the broader context where their specific meanings and actual functions were created.