The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The United States ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Oriental Mysticism

During the nineteenth century, Americans encountered Asia through a number of exchanges. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, this chapter surveys the development of American Orientalism across three areas: academic Orientalism, representative Orientalism, and Orientalist discourses of power. Academic Orientalism first developed in the United States as the work of British Orientalists in India filtered into the country. Later, Americans such as William D. Whitney placed American Orientalism on par with its European competitors. Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, imagined Asia as a land of Oriental mysticism and contemplation in contrast to American materialism and reason. Finally, the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893 used representations of the Orient to bolster claims of American cultural supremacy. Through all of these examples, Orientalism collapsed the line between religion and race such that the Orient always represented racial and religious inferiority to white Christian America.

The Challenges of Displaying “Asian American”: Curatorial Perspectives and Critical Approaches

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
ShiPu Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Racial Demographics

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

scholarly journals The Gilded Interior: French Style and American Renaissance

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura C. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Architectural Tradition

ABSTRACT In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, New York was seized by a passion for things French in interior decoration. The influx of French eighteenth-century decorative arts from London and Paris exerted a powerful influence over the imaginations of a new millionaire class, while the emergence of the professional dealer-decorator established channels for the incorporation of these materials into the luxury residence. While these interiors were developed in collaboration with leading US architects such as Richard Morris Hunt and George B. Post, they also posed a subtle challenge to the discourse of intellectualism developed on architects’ behalf. Governed by issues of taste and commerce as well as by artistic judgement, these French interiors presented a compelling vision of aristocratic stature that was at once in keeping, and in conflict, with the aspirations of an American Renaissance. This article considers the role of eighteenth-century French-style interiors in the articulation of a ‘civilised’ architectural tradition in the United States during the so-called Gilded Age. Focusing on the private mansion, it reconsiders the notion of the American Renaissance as a principally academic movement by calling attention to the ways in which it also responded to the requirements of the elite class as well as the commercial marketplace.

scholarly journals Kollektiv (Collective)

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Sina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Implications ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

The idea of the ‘collective’ plays a key role in Goethe’s late work. It denotes a balance between multiplicity and unity, heterogeneity and homogeneity, which is characteristic both of Goethe’s authorship and of his literary work, above all his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years). Etymologically, Goethe’s use of the term refers back to its original meaning from the Latin colligere; for him, a collective emerges when parts are gathered and arranged into some sort of ordered whole. It has formal, intellectual, and social implications. The term is semantically close to the concepts of the ‘aggregate’ and the ‘compendium,’ which are also essential to Goethe’s late poetics. The collective, the aggregate, and the compendium are all situated between mere particularity and full systematicity, in a sphere of the intermediary. Finally, Goethe’s idea of the collective found resonance primarily and early on in the United States, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

scholarly journals The Social Oikos

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Michael Lee Humphrey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Core Points

In one of the foundational articles of persona studies, Marshall and Barbour (2015) look to Hannah Arendt for development of a key concept within the larger persona framework: “Arendt saw the need to construct clear and separate public and private identities. What can be discerned from this understanding of the public and the private is a nuanced sense of the significance of persona: the presentation of the self for public comportment and expression” (2015, p. 3). But as far back as the ancient world from which Arendt draws her insights, the affordance of persona was not evenly distributed. As Gines (2014) argues, the realm of the household, oikos, was a space of subjugation of those who were forced to be “private,” tending to the necessities of life, while others were privileged with life in the public at their expense. To demonstrate the core points of this essay, I use textual analysis of a YouTube family vlog, featuring a Black mother in the United States, whose persona rapidly changed after she and her White husband divorced. By critically examining Arendt’s concepts around public, private, and social, a more nuanced understanding of how personas are formed in unjust cultures can help us theorize persona studies in more egalitarian and robust ways.

scholarly journals Reflections on The American Renaissance 1876–1917 exhibition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Richard Guy Wilson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Cultural Developments

ABSTRACT This article considers the origins, both scholarly and personal, of The American Renaissance 1876–1917 exhibition (1979) and the accompanying book catalogue, setting them in the context of architectural and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s. It traces how the exhibition came about, what it was trying to achieve and how it was received, both at the time and subsequently. It shows that the exhibition was not conceived as an attack on modernism as such or as a work of architectural conservatism. Rather, it was an attempt to rescue from obscurity an entire chapter of American architectural history that had been excluded by the modernising narratives of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Vincent Scully and others, and to reassess what this architecture might contribute to the present.

Merchants of Asianness: Japanese Art Dealers in the United States in the Early Twentieth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-46
Author(s):  
CONSTANCE J. S. CHEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Japanese Art ◽  
Art Dealers ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries

This article explores the role of Japanese merchants within American art and collecting circles and analyzes the ways in which the construction of “Asianness” and, in particular, “Japaneseness” became intertwined with the classification of Asian art. In order to reconstitute the market for high art and to create their own positionalities as legitimate cultural intermediaries, Asian art dealers such as Bunkio Matsuki (1867–1940) and Sadajiro Yamanaka (1866–1936) used their connections to Japan as cultural capital. Ultimately, their experiences illuminate the complexities of the reconceptualization of ethnic–racial identities through the lens of aesthetic discourses.

Matthew Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. 240 pp. Matthew Baigell, Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880–1940. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 280 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 282-285
Author(s):  
Matthew Baigell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
The Arts ◽  
American Press ◽  
Thomas Cole ◽  
Syracuse University

Matthew Baigell has accomplished the enviable achievement of juggling two distinguished careers as an art historian. He first came to prominence as a scholar of the arts of the United States, writing both on canonical painters (among them, 19th-century landscapists Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt) and on 20...

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