Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This study is limited to the murals of Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856). In the brief working period of less than fifteen years (1841-1855), Chassériau painted four important murals in Paris for: the church of Saint-Merri (1841-1843); the Cour des Comptes (1844-1848); the church of Saint-Roch (1851-1853); and the church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule (1853-1855). Much of the reputation of Chassériau during his career rested on his murals, yet in less than fifty years after his death in 1856 he became virtually forgotten as a muralist. His portraits in the style of his master Ingres and his easel paintings more in the manner of Delacroix are well known but his murals have never been stuied separately. Moreover, the preparations for the murals recently willed to the Cabinet des Dessins du Louvre have not been published. The research was done almost entirely in Paris from the remaining murals, the drawings and studies, documents in archives, church records, old graphic works, architectural plans and records, articles in periodicals contemporary with the murals, and the artist's studio notes. Although Chassériau retained the decorative style of Ingres and borrowed the color of Delacroix, the artist's notes reveal a decided interest in realism. The evolution of his mural style was in this direction. The trip to Italy in 1840 and the one to Algeria in 1846 were the turning points in Chassériau's mural style. This is supported by his notes. His first two murals depended upon the classical souvenirs of Italy and is last two reflect the sun of Africa. Most of all, starting with a cool classicism close to Ingres's in his first mural, Chassériau achieved a decorative realism in his last mural. This realism has been overlooked until now but did not go unnoticed by the artist's contemporary critics in rare and forgotten articles. The same age as Courbet, the champion of realism, Chassériau was indeed an artist of his time. Yet it was the eclectic style and the exotic nature of Chassériau that influenced Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and the early Degas. His mural style formed a watershed of currents that found their channels only after him. The first volume contains the text. Each mural is studied separately from the first sketch to the finished work in position. Each mural is considered in its: a. architectural position; b. iconography; c. drawings and studies; d. formal elements; e. nineteenth-century criticism; f. summary. The second volume contains 210 black and white photographs. These cover the murals with several details but the greater number are of the drawings and studies along with architectural plans, diagrams, and reproductions of lost works taken from old prints. In addition, there are eight compositional studies by the author, two for each major mural . There are also two drawings by the author reconstructing for the first time the position and the iconography of the fifteen panels for the grand staircase of the Cour des Comptes burned in 1871. / 2031-01-01

This dissertation examines nine representative unfinished works of art. It begins with the Van Eycks's Ghent Altar (1432), an example of the practice, common in the medieval era of having a work of art left unfinished by one artist completed by another. Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi (1481-82) and Michelangelo's Boboli Captives (c. 1519) raise the issue of determining the reasons why works have been left unfinished. Mozart's Requiem (1791) and Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) represent works left unfinished because of the artists' deaths. / Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony (1822), Rodin's Gates of Hell (1880-1900), and Duchamp's Large Glass (1912-23) were all intended to be completed but left unfinished during the artists' lifetimes for artistic reasons. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1797) represents works not actually unfinished but deliberately presented as fragments by the artist. / Critical issues raised by unfinished works are considered. Unfinishedness means different things in the context of different works, and it is not possible to have one definition that can be applied to all unfinished works. Unfinished works can provide insight that might otherwise be unavailable about the artist and the artist's ideas about art and aesthetics. The reason why a work of art was left unfinished has considerable significance. Nevertheless, the aesthetic character of the work itself still determines the nature of the interaction of the audience with the work and the role of the critic. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-02, Section: A, page: 0324. / Major Professor: Douglass Seaton. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

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<p> There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called <i> emergent narrative:</i> instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (<i>The Sims, Dwarf Fortress</i>), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, <i>Tale-Spin</i>). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction&mdash;emergent stories actually happen&mdash;and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure. </p><p> So, how can the pain of emergent narrative be alleviated while simultaneously maintaining the pleasure? This dissertation introduces a refined approach to the form, called <i>curationist emergent narrative</i> (or just <i> curationism</i>), that aims to provide an answer to this question. Instead of treating the raw material of simulation as a story, in curationism that material is <i>curated</i> to construct an actual narrative artifact that is then mounted in a full-fledged media experience (to enable human encounter with the artifact). This recasts story generation as an act of recounting, rather than invention. I believe that curationism can also explain how both wild successes and phenomenal failures have entered the oeuvre of emergent narrative: in successful works, humans have taken on the burden of curating an ongoing simulation to construct a storied understanding of what has happened, while in the failures humans have not been willing to do the necessary curation. Without curation, actual stories cannot obtain in emergent narrative. </p><p> But what if a storyworld could curate itself? That is, can we build systems that <i>automatically</i> recount what has happened in simulated worlds? In the second half of this dissertation, I provide an autoethnography and a collection of case studies that recount my own personal (and collaborative) exploration of automatic curation over the course of the last six years. Here, I report the technical, intellectual, and media-centric contributions made by three simulation engines (<i>World, Talk of the Town, Hennepin</i>) and three second-order media experiences that are respectively driven by those engines (<i>Diol/Diel/Dial, Bad News, Sheldon County</i>). In total, this dissertation provides a loose history of emergent narrative, an apologetics of the form, a polemic against it, a holistic refinement (maintaining the pleasure while killing the pain), and reports on a series of artifacts that represent a gradual instantiation of that refinement. To my knowledge, this is the most extensive treatment of emergent narrative to yet appear. </p><p>

<p> David Lamelas&rsquo;s life-long research projects have included examinations of social phenomena. The artist takes interest in the dynamics of mass communication and media, urban mundane activities, and documentary films. He employs the element of time often in the structure of his art as an innovative approach by which to study his subjects. </p><p> I argue that in pairing the element of time with social phenomena, Lamelas exposes how people&rsquo;s perceptions, both the visual experience and the thought processes impacted by these experiences, tend to work, therefore leading viewers to consider systems of knowledge and their own accumulation of knowledge. His artwork provokes viewers to open their minds to new ways of seeing and thinking, stimulates self-awareness, and challenges their concepts of knowledge.</p><p>

<p> Early European travel literature was a prominent source from which information about the New World was presented to a general audience. Geographic regions situated within what is now referred to as Latin America were particularly visible in these accounts. Information regarding the religious customs and styles of dress associated with the indigenous peoples who inhabited these lands were especially curious points of interest to the European readers who were attempting to understand the lifestyles of these so-called &ldquo;savages.&rdquo; These reports, no matter their sources, always claimed to be true and accurate descriptions of what they were documenting. Despite these claims, it is clear that the dominant Western/Christian perspective from which these sources were derived established an extremely visible veil of bias. As a result, the texts and images documenting these accounts display highly flawed and misinformed representations of indigenous Latin American culture. Although it is now understood that these sources were often greatly exaggerated, the texts and images within them are still widely circulated in present-day museum exhibitions. When positioned in this framework, they are meant to be educational references for the audiences that view them. However, museums often condense the amount of information they provide, causing significant details of historical context to be excluded. </p><p> With such considerable omission being common in museum exhibitions, it causes one to question if this practice might be perpetuating the distribution of misleading information. Drawing on this question, I seek, with this research, to investigate how early European representations of Latin American culture in travel literature may be linked to current issues of misrepresentation. Particularly, my research is concerned with finding connections that may be present with these texts and images and the negative aspects of cultural appropriation. Looking specifically at representations of Aztec culture, I consult three texts and their accompanying illustrations from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries to analyze their misrepresentational qualities, and how they differed between time periods and regions. Finally, I use this information to analyze museum exhibition practices and how they could be improved when displaying complex historical frameworks like those of indigenous Latin American cultures.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation employs four case studies&mdash;illustrator Alice Barber Stephens in Philadelphia; Louisville-born sculptor Enid Yandell; photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in Washington, D.C.; and the Newcomb College Pottery in New Orleans&mdash;to show how individual women artists from a variety of media utilized collaborative strategies to advance their professional careers. These strategies included mentoring, teaching, and sharing commissions with one another; establishing art organizations; sharing studio and living spaces; organizing and participating in all-female art exhibitions; and starting businesses to market their work. At a historical moment when expectations and ideas towards gender roles and feminine performance were shifting, these women artists negotiated these changes as well as those of a fine art world that was redefining itself in an increasingly consumer-based culture that challenged traditional definitions of the &ldquo;professional&rdquo; artist.</p><p> &ldquo;Sisterhood as Strategy&rdquo; intersects with important work in the fields of American History, Women&rsquo;s and Gender Studies, and Art History. It bridges a gap between broad, cultural histories of women&rsquo;s artistic production and more focused scholarly studies on women&rsquo;s labor and organized womanhood. Indeed, this dissertation brings more specificity to these areas by focusing on particular artists who were highly acclaimed during their lifetime but who have since fallen through the cracks of the art historical canon and by attending to the wide array of genres and media that all artists, men and women, worked with during the era: illustration, photography, public sculpture, and the decorative arts. By analyzing the art produced as a result of collaboration; the artists&rsquo; letters, photographs, and personal papers; and contemporary mass media, particularly art journals and popular ladies&rsquo; magazines, this dissertation recovers the voices of artists who served as professional role models and creates a far more diverse picture of the people and art forms that constituted early modern American visual culture.</p><p>

This dissertation engages America's illustrated sheet music through topical analyses of political and social ruptures from the Civil War to World War I. In so doing, it demonstrates that music illustrations fit into larger networks of American picture making, participating in the recording and redirecting of contemporary American anxieties. Chapter 1: Bloody Banner, Silent Drum: The Material Wounded on Civil War Sheet Music argues that violated flags and drums in music illustrations transcended their martial functionality to signify loss of innocence and life; in so doing, they took on their own subjectivity. Chapter 2: Banjos, Rifles, and Razors: Picturing American Blackness investigates the transition from black-face minstrel songs to the "coon song craze" of the 1880s and 1890s, arguing that the stock character's razor, a weapon frequently figured in the songs, was not only a symbol of violence but of white fears of black social mobility. Chapter 3: Hoopskirts and Handlebars: Gender Construction and Transgression in Victorian America offers two case studies, one of cross-dressing pictures after the Civil War, the other of gendered bicycle images, arguing that the American public between the war and the turn of the century enjoyed contemplating the flexibility of gender roles and boundaries. Chapter 4: "There Were Giants in the Earth": Monsters of the First World War argues that popular pictures of American giants and monstrous war machines engaged in symbolic battle with monstrous Huns, who symbolized German atrocity for a Euro-American public uncomfortable with the idea of war with European peoples. At the same time, giants represented the common belief of America's special role in international peace, as neutrality gave way to declared war. Sheet music illustration was a vibrant part of American visual culture. By assessing the layered meanings of these often ignored pictures, my dissertation seeks to recover and restore lost memories of America's usual but fraught visual romance with popular song.

The study of Florentine artistic patronage has attracted several approaches over the last three decades, including the exploration of patron-­‐client structures and how the use of art in private and public spheres contributed to shape families’s identity. Building on past research, this work focuses on the art patronage of a prominent, yet overlooked, family, the Vespucci, to whom Amerigo, the navigator who reached the coasts of America in the late fifteenth century, belonged. Although the family’s importance was achieved through a synergy of political, religious and intellectual forces, attention is given to the Vespucci’s engagement with the arts and their key contribution to Florence’s humanistic culture between the years 1470-­1500. The family’s houses and private chapels are analysed, and three artists, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Piero di Cosimo, considered. Combining history, art history, and archival resources, new evidence and interpretations are advanced to ascribe selected artworks -­ controversially believed to be Vespucci commissions - to the private patronage of this Florentine family. Examining the Vespucci’s artistic taste in private and public settings, whilst attempting a reconstruction of partially lost painted commissions, deepens comprehension on the role that domestic and social life played in the creation of art and culture; the family’s force in shaping spaces; and the practice of buying, commissioning, and displaying as a means of signifying wealth, increasing status, and establishing identity. Power seekers, the Vespucci entered the Medici intellectual circles through which they created chains of friendship with prominent families inside and outside of Florence. As questions about shared artistic tastes and the paradigmatic role of the Medici artistic patronage have been the focus of scholarly enquiry, this study of the Vespucci provides an insight into the family’s spreading of new ideas and its interaction with the development of the visual arts. Investigation into the Vespucci’s breadth of interests helps to reframe the current knowledge of Florentine cultural exchanges and to contextualise the family’s influence beyond the geographical discoveries it has been exclusively associated with.

Among the extant examples of ancient Mexican screenfold manuscripts, those painted by the Mixtec people of southern Mexico include the only native manuscripts on historical themes made before contact with Europeans that have survived to the present day from any area of Mexico. These are the focus of this study. The Mixtec screenfold manuscripts are also distinguished from other native Mexican screenfold manuscripts by the addition of painted red guidelines dividing their pages into registers that read back and forth in alternate directions In alphabetic writing, format does not normally contribute to the meaning of a text, but in the Mixtec pictorial narratives meaning derives from the arrangement of the painted motifs in the manuscript, and therefore from the form of the manuscript, as well as from the motifs themselves. This is the proposition investigated in this study. It is a study of the elaborate Mixtec manuscript format, but also of the nature of the ideas expressed in the painted manuscripts The study has two parts. Part I is general, while Part II focuses in detail on the Mixtec screenfolds. Part I considers the origins, shapes and sizes, two physical types (having even or odd numbers of leaves), functions of the covers, and the location and arrangement of the painted texts on one or both sides of the manuscripts, for all known screenfold manuscripts from all areas of prehispanic and early colonial Mexico Most of the Mixtec screenfold manuscripts employ one or the other of two general variants of the Mixtec multiple-registers system. In one, the horizontal manuscripts are divided into registers that are vertical and parallel to the folds of the manuscripts, while in the other variety the registers are horizontal and parallel the length of the screenfolds. Part II of this study examines the role of the format in the individual historical texts of the Mixtec manuscripts and compares differences of structure, style and meaning that stem from these alternative designs. Rather than mere technical options, the evidence suggests, the two basic varieties of the Mixtec screenfold format were features of different approaches to the painting of Mixtec history / acase@tulane.edu