Edwin Dickinson: His work, teaching and critical reception.
Item
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Title
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Edwin Dickinson: His work, teaching and critical reception.
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Identifier
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AAI9997069
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identifier
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9997069
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Creator
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Abell, Mary Ellen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Marlene Park
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Date
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2001
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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 | Education, Art | Fine Arts
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Abstract
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Labeled a "maverick" and "a painter's painter," the early American modernist Edwin Dickinson (1891--1978) has been problematical to many art historians because his work does not fit into a particular movement or category. He has been identified as a painter of fantasy, a visionary, a mystic, an American Romantic, a Surrealist, a Magic Realist and a Realist. In actuality, Dickinson was a true American eccentric who drew on European and American traditions but synthesized them to produce an original and emotionally expressive language.;Besides his artistic contribution to American art, Edwin Dickinson was a renowned and gifted teacher. An important aspect of this dissertation is its concentration on Dickinson's teaching methodology, the tradition from which it emerged, and how his artworks reflect his approach. He influenced hundreds of American artists during his years of teaching (1916--64) at numerous institutions including the Art Students League, The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, the Provincetown Art Association, and Skowhegan. Among his students were Lennart Anderson, Jean Buckley, Arthur Cohen, Francis Cunningham, Edward Denyer, Salvatore Del Deo, Louis Finkelstein, Ruth Hatch, Denver Lindley, Walter Prochownik, Susan Smith, Roger Van Damme, and Merrill Wagner.;Edwin Dickinson represents a strain of American modernism which reaches back through his primary teachers Charles W. Hawthorne and William Merritt Chase to both the Munich School's painterly realist orientation and French and Italian Impressionism. These European schools, in turn, can trace their ancestry to artists such as Titian, El Greco, Hals, Velazquez, Delacroix, and Manet. This dissertation has traced this painterly strain and analyzed its impact on Dickinson's own teaching methodology and painting practice.;This dissertation has also examined the literature on Edwin Dickinson for the first time as far as changes in critical attitudes toward his art and has shown that though the artist has traditionally been associated by art historians with the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, in actuality the period of his greatest recognition occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. The reasons for this, including why his work was so attractive to the Abstract Expressionists as well as the critical establishment, have been soundly documented.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.