Inventing the modern artist : art and culture in Gilded Age America / Sarah Burns.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burns, Sarah.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art, American.

Artists--Psychology.

Artists.

Art and society--United States--History--19th century.

Art and society.

Art and society--United States--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

viii, 380 p. : ill. ; 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c1996.

Summary:

Sarah Burns tells the story of artists in American society during a period of critical transition from Victorian to modern values, examining how culture shaped the artists and how artists shaped their culture. Focusing on such important painters as James McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, she investigates how artists reacted to the growing power of the media, to an expanding consumer society, to the need for a specifically American artist type, and to the problem of gender.

Contents:

Introduction : Templates for modernity

Part 1. The traffic in images. Finding the "real" American artist ; The artist in the age of surfaces : the culture of display and the taint of trade

Part 2. Sickness and health. Fighting infection : aestheticism, degeneration, and the regulation of artistic masculinity ; Painting as rest cure

Part 3. Gender on the market. Outselling the feminine ; Being big : Winslow Homer and the American business spirit

Part 4. The artist in the realm of spectacle. Performing the self ; Performing Bohemia

Part 5. Oculus populi. Dabble, daub, and dauber : cartoons and artistic identity ; Populist versus plutocratic aesthetics.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-371) and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Miller Fund bookplate.

ISBN:

0300064454 (alk. paper)

OCLC:

34474299