Dissertation Fellow 2000-01
Kristin Ann Schwain (Art and Art History)
Stanford University
Figuring Belief: American Art and
Modern Piety, 1890 – 1917
Works with religious subject matter saturated the American fine
arts scene at the turn-of-the-century. Artists from Abbott Thayer
to Albert Pinkham Ryder, and F. Holland Day to Henry Ossawa Tanner,
painted and photographed biblical scenes, religious customs, holy
figures, and contemporary church leaders. Even Thomas Eakins, heralded
by art historians as a paradigm of late nineteenth-century positivism,
created fourteen portraits of the Catholic clergy. My dissertation
examines the cultural conditions that motivated so many artists
to paint religious imagery at the turn-of-the-century. More specifically,
it explores how the artistic embodiment of religious figures participated
in larger social discourses shaping gender, ethnic, and religious
identities in modern America.
At the end of the nineteenth century, observation and personal
experience were considered determinants of scientific and religious
truth; signs were intended to mirror their referents; and human
bodies were supposed to evince inner character. Mainstream America’s
faith in the sincerity of the visual magnified the authority of
religious imagery, which, as Hans Belting has said of religious
art in another age, not only represented a person or event, but
“served in the symbolic exchange of power and . . . embodied
the public claims of a community.”1 By picturing religious
figures, artists authenticated, undermined, and constructed normative
models of belief and behavior. Through close analyses of three of
the most frequently illustrated iconic figures—Mary, Christ,
and the Clergy—I investigate the complicated and often conflicting
ideologies at work in America’s religious visual culture.
1 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image
Before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xxi.
|
