Augustus Saint -Gaudens, his critics, and the new school of American sculpture, 1875--1893.
Item
-
Title
-
Augustus Saint -Gaudens, his critics, and the new school of American sculpture, 1875--1893.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3103180
-
identifier
-
3103180
-
Creator
-
Tolles, Thayer.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Sally Webster
-
Date
-
2003
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Art History
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation explores the development of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's critical reputation through the lens of his participation in American art venues and the published reception to his sculptures. During the first half of his career, through the late 1870s and 1880s, Saint-Gaudens consistently exhibited his portrait busts and bas-reliefs, most notably at the Society of American Artists in New York. Since then, these works have been eclipsed in scholarly and critical attention by his successful public monuments in New York, Chicago, and Boston, and have sustained his rank as an American master sculptor. Yet along with these great monuments, Saint-Gaudens's small sculptures must be viewed as integral to the construction of his artistic persona and status. From his return to New York from Europe in 1875, he purposefully marketed his public image with the twin goals of attracting lucrative monumental commissions and promoting the legitimacy of American sculpture on American shores. His participation in exhibition venues, role in the management of the overseeing organizations, and affiliation with well-placed critics, artists, and patrons were seminal to his professional and social advancement.;A genteel circle of critics, including Richard Watson Gilder, Charles de Kay, and Mariana Van Rensselaer, trumpeted Saint-Gaudens as the harbinger of a new school of American sculpture. The published reaction to Saint-Gaudens's small work in New York newspapers and art journals between 1875 and 1893 put him in context with his fellow sculptors and contemporary aesthetic debates. The art writings also assert Saint-Gaudens's genius, often in propagandistic terms. His sculptures---large and small, public and private---were at once evidence of sophisticated foreign-trained talent working in an original idiom as well as a refutation of American artistic provincialism. Saint-Gaudens was central to the new movement of young cosmopolitan painters and sculptors who emphasized subjective aesthetics over transcriptional subjects. By the early 1890s, as a well-established and overcommitted artist, Saint-Gaudens's involvement in art venues diminished. His unique artistic talent and the unwavering backing of certain loyal critics propelled him to the position of role model and tastemaker by 1893.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
