DEATH AND AMERICAN PAINTING: CHARLES WILLSON PEALE TO ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER.
Item
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Title
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DEATH AND AMERICAN PAINTING: CHARLES WILLSON PEALE TO ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER.
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Identifier
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AAI8103946
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identifier
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8103946
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Creator
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LLOYD, PHOEBE.
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Contributor
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Milton Brown
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Fine Arts
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Abstract
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The investigation of the iconography of American death imagery is an excursion into unexplored territory in the study of American art. The iconography of death is an especially sensitive index of cultural change because, as historians of European art have long understood and demonstrated, the life of a culture is revealed in its death imagery. Moreover, the portrayal of the death of the common man is the most susceptible to change: unlike the death imagery of heroes, it is not bound to any received iconographic tradition. Artists and the society in which they worked perceived the death of the common man in a variety of ways; and it is often by isolating the shift from one aspect of death to another that we can best chart the changing attitudes to death which in their turn reflect cultural change.;The body of works discussed is divided chronologically into four periods: 1773 to 1828--the Revolutionary era to Andrew Jackson's election to the Presidency (Chapter I); 1828 to 1861, the Jacksonian era to the beginning of the Civil War (Chapter II); the Civil War Years, 1861-1865 (Chapter III); 1865-1917, Appomattox to the death of Albert Pinkham Ryder (Chapter IV).;Exhibition canvases by Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Benjamin West and Rembrandt Peale focus the public's attention on the death of everyman in the early years of the New Republic and open the analysis of American death imagery. Yet even as these exhibition pictures were being seen by large numbers of people, their message was being augmented by novel representations of death. The watershed for iconographic change appears approximately with the election of Andrew Jackson to the Presidency in 1828. His election brought further democratization and ushered in a period of optimism, complemented by a naive romanticism which made death unwelcome. Hence, during this era, the death imagery that proliferated treated the subject euphemistically.;So entrenched did strategies of euphemistic evasion become that they prevailed during the Civil War. The American public only slowly comprehended the magnitude of the slaughter because their artists did little to confront them with the truth. Artists tended to concentrate on depictions of the bereaved, especially women. When the dead in battle were portrayed, the endeavor was not well received. Nor was any monumental art portraying death in battle commissioned by 1865.;Before and after the Civil War, the death of the Indian was made to conform to the exigencies of Manifest Destiny. The Indians, an aboriginal people doomed to near extinction in America's industrial economy, were portrayed in compositions that depicted the necessity of their demise, rather than their actual deaths. As in the case of the Civil War dead, the decimation of the Indian was not a subject that the public wished to confront outright in art.;In the last phase of American death imagery, some artists turned completely away from the realities of the American scene. They favored instead subjects of familial tragedy in exotic settings or took up literary themes. It fell to Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder to make an indigeous contribution to the iconography of death at the end of the century. Homer explored the theme of peril in dangerous waters; Ryder sought and achieved universal symbols for the experience of death.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
