Fine art and popular entertainment: The emerging dialogue between "high" and "low" in American art of the early twentieth century.
Item
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Title
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Fine art and popular entertainment: The emerging dialogue between "high" and "low" in American art of the early twentieth century.
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Identifier
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AAI9707162
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identifier
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9707162
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Creator
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Weintraub, Laural.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gail Levin
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Date
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1996
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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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Art History | Theater | American Studies | Cinema
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Abstract
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My dissertation focuses on the representation of vaudeville and movie phenomena in American art between circa 1900 and 1920. Subjects related to vaudeville and motion pictures first emerged in realist painting--particularly in works by John Sloan, Everett Shinn and William Glackens--at a time when the academic tradition was waning in American art and "democratic" values were on the rise. The progressive spirit of the realists was inherited by younger artists, like Stuart Davis, who would turn to modernism in the 1910s. As modernism gained ground in the United States, formal issues took precedence over concern with subject matter. Nonetheless, the entertainment spectacle remained a subject of interest for several major artists during this period of formal enlightenment.;In the mid- to late 1910s, popular entertainment imagery was conspicuous in the work of Man Ray and Charles Demuth, two artists who were involved, each in his own way, with the phenomenon of New York Dada. Marcel Duchamp, the guiding light of New York Dada, was himself a great fan of American movies and vaudeville, and he shared his enthusiasm with American colleagues. This enthusiasm was also manifested in his own work. His notorious alter ego Rrose Selavy was inspired, at least in part, by American vaudeville.;I approach this study of popular entertainment imagery as a problem in the evolving relationship between fine artists (and representatives of the "cultural elite" in general) and popular culture in twentieth-century America. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the novelty and distinction of American movies and vaudeville were widely recognized by the most conscientious critics and observers of culture in America. Thus, in addition to interpreting the imagery of popular entertainment in paintings, prints and illustrations, I undertake to assess the related tendency to address popular entertainment phenomena in the literature and journalism of the period. My ultimate goal has been to evoke, in the most convincing way possible, the larger cultural context in which a fascination with popular entertainment developed among artists and writers active in New York in the early twentieth century.
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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.
