Matching Items (46)
Description
Scholars have written much about home and meaning, yet they have said little about the professionally furnished model home viewed as a cultural artifact. Nor is there literature addressing how the home building industry uses these spaces to promote images of family life to increase sales. This research notes that not only do the structure, design, and layout of the model home formulate cultural identity but also the furnishings and materials within. Together, the model home and carefully selected artifacts placed therein help to express specific chosen lifestyles as that the home builder determines. This thesis considers the model home as constructed as well as builder's publications, descriptions, and advertisements. The research recognizes the many facets of merchandising, consumerism, and commercialism influencing the design and architecture of the suburban home. Historians of visual and cultural studies often investigate these issues as separate components. By contrast, this thesis offers an integrated framework of inquiry, drawing upon such disciplines as cultural history, anthropology, and material culture. The research methodology employs two forms of content analysis - image and text. The study analyzes 36 model homes built in Phoenix, Arizona, during the period 1955-1956. The thesis explores how the builder sends a message, i.e. images, ideals, and aspirations, to the potential home buyer through the design and decoration of the model home. It then speculates how the home buyer responds to those messages. The symbiotic relationship between the sender and receiver, together, tells a story about the Phoenix lifestyle and the domestic ideals of the 1950s. Builders sent messages surrounding convenience, spaciousness, added luxury, and indoor-outdoor living to a growing and discriminating home buying market.
ContributorsGolab, Coreen R (Author) / Brandt, Beverly K. (Thesis advisor) / Bernardi, Jose (Committee member) / Schleif, Corine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Western landscape photography helped to create an imaginative perception of a new nation for Americans. Early nineteenth-century photographers captured a vision of uncharted terrain that metaphorically fulfilled a two-fold illusion: an untouched Eden and a land ready and waiting for white settlement. The sublime and picturesque experiences of the West provided artists a concept that could be capitalized upon by employing various forms of manipulation. In the twentieth-century, the role of landscape photography evolved as did the advancement of the West. Images of wilderness became art and photographers chose to view the western landscape differently. Some focused more sharply and critically on the relationship between the land and the people who lived on it. The influential exhibition in 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape presented work that showed a landscape altered, marked by power lines, houses, and fences. The West as Eden no longer existed. Today, photographers continue to examine, image, and experience western land anew. In this thesis I examine the relationship of contemporary landscape photography and the role of the West, guided by an analysis that traces the history of American ideologies and attitudes toward natural land. The artists I have chosen recognize landscape not as scenery but as the spaces and systems people inhabit, and use manipulative strategies that emphasize an artificial character of the West. Their work elicits antecedent mythologies, pictorial models, and American ideologies that continue to perpetuate internationally.
ContributorsHerden, Nicole (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Klett, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis discusses the significance of the casta naming process depicted in pinturas de casta or casta paintings created in eighteenth-century colonial New Spain. These paintings depicted family units, each member named by a racial label designated by the sistema de castas, the Imperial Spanish code of law associated with these paintings. In the genre, the labeled subjects were hierarchically ordered by racial lineage with pure Spanish genealogies ranked highest and all other racial categories following on a sliding scale of racial subjectivity. This study focuses on casta paintings' label coyote, which referred to colonial subjects of mestizo and indigenous heritage. Policies of the casta system, when matched with casta paintings' animal label created a framing of indigenous colonial subjectivity; those labeled coyote were visually positioned as one of the lowest members of the casta and of questionable quality as humans, given their comparison to wild canines. Beyond the general discussion of racial hegemony at work in these paintings this thesis exploration individually questions the meaning of the casta label coyote by analyzing how the colonial namer and the named colonial subject related to this word and title. Deep-seated beliefs about the undomesticated canine were at work in the imaginations of both the Imperial Spanish namer and the named colonial subject, evidenced in European/Spanish renderings of wolves and indigenous art depicting coyotes in Mesoamerica. To uncover the imaginations that informed the creation and reception of the coyote label this study examines the visual development of wolf as a symbol of wildness, evil, and racial impurity used to hail the human Other in both peninsular and New Spanish colonial arts. Additionally, images of coyotes will be considered from the position of the colonial named, vis à vis indigenous arts and beliefs that coyote acted as a sacred symbol of power through centuries of human development in the Mesoamerican world. Varied understandings of coyote were at work in the New Spanish colony, evidenced in eighteenth-century paintings of mestizo artist Miguel Cabrera. Analysis of his paintings of the La Divina Pastora and of his casta painting De mestizo y india nace coyote reveal the instability of coyote as symbol and human label amid the mestizaje mechanisms of New Spain.
ContributorsDashnaw, Mary (Author) / Malagamba, Amelia (Thesis advisor) / Schleif, Corine (Committee member) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The history of jade in many ways reflects the evolution of Chinese civilization, encompassing its entire history and geographical extent and the many cultural traditions associated with the various regions that have finally been brought together in the unity of present-day China. The archaic jade collections investigated in this thesis, from an archaeological point of view, primarily consist of pieces from the late Neolithic through early historic era, named the "Jade Age" by academics. Although well-researched museum catalogues of archaic Chinese jades have been widely published by major museums in the United States, they are mostly single collection oriented. It is, then, necessary to conduct research examining the overall picture of collecting practices in the U.S. Given the proliferation of fake early jades, this study will provide an essential academic reference for researchers, students, and the present art market. This thesis seeks to explore how shifting tastes, political climates, and personal ambitions, as well as various opportunities and personalities, were instrumental factors in shaping these important collections of archaic Chinese jades in the U.S. today.
ContributorsWang, Yijing (Author) / Brown, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Baker, Janet (Committee member) / Schleif, Corine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The medieval bestiary is often simply described as a moralized "encyclopedia of animals," however, these so-called "books of beasts" were made for humans, by humans, about humans. It is therefore surprising that one common pictorial subject of the bestiary has been left unexamined: humans. By viewing bestiary images through this lens, one may easily see man's underlying and unresolved struggle to maintain dominance over the beasts, and the Others projected onto them, thereby ensuring that "the (hu)man" remains a discrete definition. This study begins as the bestiary does, with the Naming of the Animals. Illustrations of Adam as a king, bestowing names of his choosing upon tame beasts express a kind of nostalgia for a now-lost time when humanity was secure in their identity as non-animal. This security no longer exists in the postlapsarian world, nor in the bestiary images following these scenes. In an attempt to maintain the illusion of dominion, many bestiary illuminations forego simple descriptive images in favor of gory hunting scenes. However, these conspicuous declarations of dominion only serve to highlight the fragility of the physical form, and even demonstrate the frailty of the human (male, Christian) identity. One such example is MS Bodley 764's boar illumination, in which the animal is killed at the hands of male hunters. This thesis unpacks this image of dominion in order to reveal the associated insecurities regarding race, gender, and species that lie beneath the surface. Subsequently, the study turns to the many bestiary images depicting human bodies brutally fragmented within the jaws of an animal. Anthropophagous bestiary animals often carry fears of the gender and ethnic Other; despite the bestiary's posturing of order and hierarchy, both the human body and identity are easily consumed and subsumed into the ever-present animal/Other. Just as in life, the human figures in the bestiary struggle to establish unquestioned dominion, only to be constantly undercut by the abject. By using a psychoanalytic approach to the human bodies of the bestiary, this study will explore how this imagery reflects the ambiguous position and definition of the human.
ContributorsAnderson, Susan (Author) / Schleif, Corine (Thesis advisor) / Brown, Claudia (Committee member) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
In this thesis, I investigate the anatomical excesses represented in the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In recent years, art historical scholarship on Ingres has multiplied after being quiescent for much of the twentieth century, as contemporary scholars perceive the unusual contradictions in his works. I introduce the concepts of pathological versus imaginary distortions. Pathological distortions are distortions that represent diseased bodies, such as the goiters in many of Ingres's female figures, whereas imaginary distortions are not anatomically possible, such as the five extra vertebrae in the Grande Odalisque. Ingres employed both of these types of these distortions in his bodies, and I discuss how these two types of distortions can be read differently.
My thesis is that Ingres employed extended anatomical variations-in his paintings, most notably in his female figures, for several reasons: to reconcile his anxiety about originality while remaining within the tradition of Classicism and "disegno," to pay homage to his predecessors who were also the masters of line, and to highlight his command of line and drawing. Though Ingres has never been a strictly Neoclassical artist in the Davidian tradition, the Romantic elements of his work are underlined further by these anatomical variations.
My thesis is that Ingres employed extended anatomical variations-in his paintings, most notably in his female figures, for several reasons: to reconcile his anxiety about originality while remaining within the tradition of Classicism and "disegno," to pay homage to his predecessors who were also the masters of line, and to highlight his command of line and drawing. Though Ingres has never been a strictly Neoclassical artist in the Davidian tradition, the Romantic elements of his work are underlined further by these anatomical variations.
ContributorsEpstein, Danya (Author) / Codell, Julie F. (Thesis advisor) / Gully, Anthony (Committee member) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The turmoil that China endured during the twentieth century triggered a series of social and political revolutions. As China struggled to resolve domestic questions of dynasticism or democracy and nationalism or communism, Western industrialization and imperialism dragged China rapidly into the globalizing world. Likewise, Chinese painting had to confront the West, as Chinese artists dealt with the twentieth-century version of the recurring question of modernizing Chinese painting for its times: how does one reconcile an ancient painting tradition with all the possibilities Western interactions introduced? This dissertation focuses on one artist's lifelong struggle, often overlooked, to answer this question. By examining C. C. Wang (1907-2003) and his life in art, this case study reveals broader truths about how twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters, such as Wang, modernized the tradition of Chinese ink painting.
Wang's reputation as a connoisseur of ancient Chinese painting has overshadowed his own artwork, creating a dearth of research on his artistic development. Using public and private sources, this dissertation applied stylistic analysis to track this development. The analysis reveals an artist's lifelong endeavor to establish a style that would lift the Chinese painting tradition into a modern era, an endeavor inspired by modern Western art ideas and a desire to play a role in the larger movement of elevating Chinese painting. The argument is made that these efforts establish Wang as an influential twentieth century Chinese ink painter.
To clarify Wang's role within the broader movement of Chinese diaspora painters, this dissertation employs a comparison study of Wang with such established twentieth century ink painting artists as Zhang Daqian, Liu Guosong, and Yu Chengyao. It is
asserted that the 1949 diaspora forced this cohort of artists to adjust their style and to transcend traditional Chinese painting by integrating newly-salient ideas from Western art, particularly the abstract movement. Meanwhile, the essential Chinese identity in their art collectively became more significant. The solidarity of purpose and identity is a distinctive part of the answer this group of twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters proposed to their generation's inherited challenge of enriching the tradition.
Wang's reputation as a connoisseur of ancient Chinese painting has overshadowed his own artwork, creating a dearth of research on his artistic development. Using public and private sources, this dissertation applied stylistic analysis to track this development. The analysis reveals an artist's lifelong endeavor to establish a style that would lift the Chinese painting tradition into a modern era, an endeavor inspired by modern Western art ideas and a desire to play a role in the larger movement of elevating Chinese painting. The argument is made that these efforts establish Wang as an influential twentieth century Chinese ink painter.
To clarify Wang's role within the broader movement of Chinese diaspora painters, this dissertation employs a comparison study of Wang with such established twentieth century ink painting artists as Zhang Daqian, Liu Guosong, and Yu Chengyao. It is
asserted that the 1949 diaspora forced this cohort of artists to adjust their style and to transcend traditional Chinese painting by integrating newly-salient ideas from Western art, particularly the abstract movement. Meanwhile, the essential Chinese identity in their art collectively became more significant. The solidarity of purpose and identity is a distinctive part of the answer this group of twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters proposed to their generation's inherited challenge of enriching the tradition.
ContributorsHua, Ming (Author) / Brown, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Baker, Janet (Committee member) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Morgan Library MS M.905 (the Geese Book) is the last known illuminated gradual produced for the Church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, Germany. The Geese Book, which was created during the early sixteenth century, has been in the collection of the Morgan Library since 1961. This thesis describes the iconography of the eight historiated initials that illustrate the earthly life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Ascension. A detailed description of the content of each initial is followed by a brief history of the iconographic development of the identified event in order to determine whether or not the Geese Book uses a standard or nonstandard iconography. The results of this analysis reveal how this manuscript fits into the broader contexts of Christian art as well as the specific time and place of its creation. It shows that the iconography of the Geese Book reflected current theological beliefs and societal norms and allowed contemporary viewers of the Geese Book to feel a strong connection to the depicted events.
ContributorsDankert, Rebecca Lynn (Author) / Schleif, Corine (Thesis advisor) / Schier, Volker (Committee member) / Brown, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The Neue Galerie in New York City includes some of the most impressive and culturally-specific artwork from Ronald S. Lauder's private art collection. The Neue's permanent exhibitions showcase pieces from the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession) and Wiener Werkstätte (Applied Arts of Vienna) in an environment that also employs replicas and period specific motifs to evoke the interiors of the private homes in which affluent fin-de-siècle Viennese art patrons lived, displayed influential modernist work, and held culturally important salons. Gustav Klimt's celebrated Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) is arguably the museum's most prized artwork. It serves as an icon that immortalizes Ronald Lauder as private collector. The figure of Adele Bloch-Bauer has also become an important emblem, whose story epitomizes the complexities of Jewish identity and its influence upon Viennese modern art. This thesis explores how the Neue Galerie's physical layout represents a specific model of modernism. By focusing on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, I urge a rethinking of the museum's relationship to modern art as an interpretation of the past. The themes that surround Adele Bloch-Bauer I have shaped Lauder's agenda as the leading private collector of the art of fin-de-siècle Vienna.
ContributorsFindling, Heather (Author) / Mesch, Ulrike (Thesis advisor) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Toon, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In the middle of the 20th century, juried annuals of Native American painting in art museums were unique opportunities because of their select focus on two-dimensional art as opposed to "craft" objects and their inclusion of artists from across the United States. Their first fifteen years were critical for patronage and widespread acceptance of modern easel painting. Held at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa (1946-1979), the Denver Art Museum (1951-1954), and the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery in Santa Fe (1956-1965), they were significant not only for the accolades and prestige they garnered for award winners, but also for setting standards of quality and style at the time. During the early years of the annuals, the art was changing, some moving away from conventional forms derived from the early art training of the 1920s and 30s in the Southwest and Oklahoma, and incorporating modern themes and styles acquired through expanded opportunities for travel and education. The competitions reinforced and reflected a variety of attitudes about contemporary art which ranged from preserving the authenticity of the traditional style to encouraging experimentation. Ultimately becoming sites of conflict, the museums that hosted annuals contested the directions in which artists were working. Exhibition catalogs, archived documents, and newspaper and magazine articles about the annuals provide details on the exhibits and the changes that occurred over time. The museums' guidelines and motivations, and the statistics on the award winners reveal attitudes toward the art. The institutions' reactions in the face of controversy and their adjustments to the annuals' guidelines impart the compromises each made as they adapted to new trends that occurred in Native American painting over a fifteen year period. This thesis compares the approaches of three museums to their juried annuals and establishes the existence of a variety of attitudes on contemporary Native American painting from 1946-1960. Through this collection of institutional views, the competitions maintained a patronage base for traditional style painting while providing opportunities for experimentation, paving the way for the great variety and artistic progress of Native American painting today.
ContributorsPeters, Stephanie (Author) / Duncan, Kate (Thesis advisor) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Mesch, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012