The study of Nazi art as an historical document provided an effective measure of Nazi political platform and social policy. Because the ideology of the Third Reich is represented within Nazi art itself, it is useful to have a good understanding of the politics and ideology, surrounding the German art world at the time. Women were used in this study as an exemplification of Nazi art. This study uses the subject of women in Nazi painting, to show how the ideology is represented within the art work itself. It was first necessary to understand the fervorent "cleansing" of the German art world initiated by the Nazis. The Nazis too effectively stamped out all forms of professional art criticism, and virtually changed the function of the art critic to art editor. The nazification of the German artist was "necessary" in order for the Nazis to enjoy total control over the creation of German art. With these three steps taken in the "cleansing" of the German art world, the Nazis made sure that the creation of a "true" Germanic art would go forth completely unhindered. In order to comprehend the subject of Nazi art regarding women, the inherent ideology must be studied. The "new" German woman under National Socialism, was to be the mother, the model of Aryan characteristics, healthy and lean. Nazi political doctrine stated that women were inherently connected with the blood and soil of the nation, as well as nature itself. Women were to be innocent and pure, the bearers of the future Volk and the sustenance of that Volk. Once this political ideology is understood, the depiction of the German woman as mother, as nature, as sexual object, can be placed within Nazi historical context. Political art provided the Nazi state, the historical legitimization the government needed. It provided the means by which the state could be visually validated, politically, and historically.

This study traces the adaptation of the traditional gathering practices of Anglo/Celtic women to the landscape of Colonial Australia, thus developing a context for contemporary land-based art practices. Traditional gathering practices became one of the important forces that influenced and shaped the work of many women artists in post colonial Australia. Interacting with the landscape on a personal level helped contextualize women's gathering role into a contemporary theme, which linked past knowledge to present day voices. The author's art work is an interpretation of this traditional gathering practice. By relating herbal knowledge to present day concerns, she is able to extend the knowledge of past generations of women gatherers into present day images. The art work is also a diary of experiments, that are concerned with preserving the dye making recipes that have been handed down for generations. These botanical experiments have enabled the author to re-present herbal knowledge that took hundreds of years to glean, and to extend the use of the dyes obtained to create the art works. / Master of Arts (Hons) (Creative Arts)

Univ., Akad. avh.--Göteborg, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-346).

Thesis (M.A.(History of Art))--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : K. Dian Kriz. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-356).

My thesis is centered on poetics of the body in contemporary feminist art. Poetics, understood as the languages, materials and forms of composition, underscores the symbolically and socially mediated body so rendered, rather than its biological, anatomical, or otherwise 'natural' definition. A feminist poetics is at once a politics, and a creation, of language. I proceed through a close reading of a number of artworks by Canadian artists. These works 'resist' representation, foregoing a biologically grounded figuration to propose in more allusive terms the psychic and conceptual impulses through which the body is apprehended or might be imagined. / Influenced by the writings of Luce Irigaray on the structural isomorphism between logos, the phallus, and a privileged masculine model of subjectivity, the thesis investigates the construction within feminist art of alternative and contestatory poetics of the body potentially productive of other knowledge-effects. / Situating my investigation within the context of numerous 'figurations' of the subject that have emerged in recent feminist theory, I propose that feminist art practices provide a corollary contribution, in material form, to the theoretical project of thinking 'difference' beyond dualism. / I identify three modalities of practice that 're-make' the body/embodiment vis a vis a 'phallomorphic' model of identity, unity, self-sameness: (a) the body in/of language, as the imbrication of the two identified by Julia Kristeva through the category of the semiotic; (b) morphologies of the body as the imaginary body produced through an interweaving of the body's form, psychic dispensations and social/symbolic inscriptions; (c) constructed spatialities in which the material spaces of exhibition sites become enacted metaphoric spaces, and foreground the potential and import of spatial representations in the production of personal and social experience. / I argue that the forms, materialities and spatialities specific to visual art can serve to constitute analogues for the materiality of the body. The thesis considers the artworks as embodiments: at once material, textural and spatial 'bodies' of art. / Interdisciplinary in scope, this thesis brings together visual and textual sources drawn from contemporary art and the literatures of feminist (and) poststructuralist theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory and the field of art history and criticism.

Renaissance art historians concur that women were characteristically depicted as ideal types in Renaissance portraiture. Nonetheless, the historiography of portraits of women in Renaissance Italy reveals generational shifts between scholars. Male scholars writing in the nineteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century applied formalist and cultural historical methodologies. Recent scholars raise issues that were previously neglected, such as social historical and feminist concerns. Following this rationale, I argue that the changing interests of scholars have altered the interpretations of portraits of Renaissance women. Moreover, this historical difference is split along gender lines in the historiography of Titian's La Bella. A critical review of the literature on this painting shows that male scholars, such as John Pope-Hennessey, Harold E. Wethey, and Charles Hope define the work in formal terms, such as "charming" and "pretty," whereas female scholars such as Elizabeth Cropper, Patricia Simons and Rona Goffen concur the work to be a synecdoche for the beauty of painting itself. A historiography of Titian as a portrait painter confirms that recent scholars have shifted focus from formal studies to an assessment of the social context, conditions of patronage and the feminist issues surrounding the artist's portraits.

Thesis (MA (Hons.)) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1997. / Includes bibliography (leaves 45-46) and bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A. (Hons.) - Visual Arts) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1997. / Bibliography : p. 42-45.