عنوان

Roots/Routes:

TLpq2267898961

انگلیسی

Roots/Routes:

[Thesis]

Richmond-Moll, Jeffrey

Religion and Modern Mobility in American Art, 1900-1935

Bellion, Wendy

University of Delaware

2019

487

Ph.D.

University of Delaware

2019

In the early twentieth century, American artists and audiences embraced religious subject matter as a means to navigate new experiences of mobility and displacement. Such artworks located a spiritualized sense of place in an increasingly dislocated world-roots in the midst of routes-and challenge theories that modernization's forces have been unilaterally secularizing. This dissertation examines these artists, viewers, and objects in motion during decades of unprecedented movements of people and capital. Chapter 1 analyzes Underwood & Underwood's stereographs of Palestine, which sought to produce virtual pilgrims out of its viewers. Chapters 2 and 3 consider how Henry Ossawa Tanner and John Singer Sargent constructed spiritual equivalents in their paintings for their transnational travels in the physical world. Chapter 4 examines Marsden Hartley's still lifes of New Mexican santos, created when various authorities sought to obstruct santos' full mobility in local rituals. Chapter 5 investigates John Steuart Curry's paintings of Midwestern migrations, which show religious faith as a re-stabilizing force for the displaced. Together these examples demonstrate how differently positioned individuals from diverse backgrounds experienced American modernity's unmooring effects in distinct ways, and sought, in response, a means of spiritual anchorage through artistic representation. By focusing on Christian subjects across denominational traditions and regional boundaries, this project reveals striking affinities between artists rarely considered side-by-side, and thereby advances a more global, more richly intercultural history of American art in the modern era.

Art history

Bellion, Wendy

Richmond-Moll, Jeffrey

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y