Images of women were ubiquitous in America at the turn of the last century. In painting and sculpture, they took on a bewildering variety of identities, from Venus, Ariadne, and Diana to Law, Justice, the Arts, and Commerce. Bailey Van Hook argues here that the artists' concepts of art coincided with the construction of gender in American culture. She finds that certain characteristics such as "ideal," "beautiful," "decorative," and "pure" both describe this art and define the perceived role of women in American society at the time.
Most late nineteenth-century American artists had...
Images of women were ubiquitous in America at the turn of the last century. In painting and sculpture, they took on a bewildering variety of identi...
The beaux-arts mural movement in America was fueled by energetic young artists and architects returning from training abroad. They were determined to transform American art and architecture to make them more thematically cosmopolitan and technically fluid and accomplished. The movement slowly coalesced around the decoration of mansions of the Gilded Age elite, mostly in New York, and of public buildings and institutions across the breadth of the country. "The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917" is the first book in almost a century to concentrate...
The beaux-arts mural movement in America was fueled by energetic young artists and architects returning from training abroad. They were determined to ...
