Visual Culture: Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts from the Civil War to World War II (original) (raw)
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Revolt and Artistic Innovation in 20th-Century America
The reconstruction of the twenty-first-century imagination (ideologies that shape our " imagined world ") and aesthetic view through the " authentic " modes of abstraction, conceptualism, and the lens of media and digital technology has led to a new way of understanding and experiencing creativity. While these are certainly new or original critical experiences, there are other types of creativity, ideologies and imaginary worlds that are quite separate, and sometimes polemically opposed to this genre of making and looking. An example of this type of creative visualization and boycotting of the supposedly authentic gesture is the work of the late American artist Edward E. Boccia, who devoted much of his life to a series of panel paintings that take as their subject problems of politics and society, as well as religious experience in the twentieth century. Made between 1956-2006, the large scale altarpieces represent the phenomenon of figural creativity produced in traditional studio mediums in mid-to late twentieth-century America. While the artist was active within a university community, where there would be a heightened awareness if not support of the contemporary rhetoric of formalist criticism and anti-illusionism, Boccia's way of working was transgressive, going against the nationwide current of Abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptual art, art informe and later digitization. This study attempts to reposition his significance and move past a conscribed history of mid-to late twentieth-century American art that has often been guided by a somewhat reductive hierarchy in which abstraction and its progeny feature as the key accomplishments of American ingenuity.
ARTH 231: Twentieth-Century Art in the United States
This course presents an array of flashpoints in the history of the art and thought of artists working in the United States as they shaped notions of artistic purpose, power, and identity from 1889 to 1989. Along the way we will consider a wide range of artistic and visual media, including painting, sculpture, dance, photography, film, video, and the graphic arts. Always we will explore the ever adaptive and catalytic work of art and artists as they engaged with, responded to, and worked to revise the wider political and social conditions of their contemporary moment. Learning Objectives • Entry into the history, art, media, and culture of the United States in the twentieth-century, including attending considerations of identity, nation, race, class, gender, and sexuality. • Cultivation of visual literacy; interdisciplinary engagement with recent and past approaches to modern and contemporary art history and visual culture. • Development of skills in critical and constructive reading and thinking; respectful interpersonal dialogue; and oral and written communication.
Tradition is art history's eternal Other: it is that which must be overcome, resisted, thrown off or, if a compromise must be made, creatively appropriated. The history of the art of the nineteenth century, that "great" age of innovation, progress and revolution, is more than any other rooted in anti-traditionalist sentiment, steeped in a rhetoric that privileges innovation and bound to narrative structures geared against artistic tradition. Modernist and other teleological histories of nineteenth-century art have always emphasised change and novelty. But even revisionist accounts of the art of the nineteenth century leave scarcely any room to consider tradition in its own right. These have generally either sung the aesthetic praises of traditional art without much further reflection, or have discussed academic art as innovative in another way, either within a traditional framework or in the sense that the art under consideration points forward to developments other than those associated with formal modernism. This rejection of artistic tradition may be due to its use in fascist and totalitarian ideologies, but is also the result of a structuralist approach within the discipline of art history that continuously opposes new