ARTH 3740 - Painting Nineteenth Century America

(crosslisted)
(also AMST 3740, VISST 3740)(HB) (CA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

Recommended prerequisite: ARTH 2400, VISST 2000, or ARTH 4100. Not open to freshmen.

L. L. Meixner.

Art and everyday life in nineteenth and early-twentieth century America with emphasis on Anglo-European traditions. Considers democratic cultures and identities through topical units: the Peale family and America’s first public museum; P.T. Barnum’s “freak shows,” traveling circus, and working-class audiences; daguerreotypes and the rising middle class; genre painting and regional types including the Yankee peddler, Missouri boatman, and the frontiersman; Hudson River School and the “tourist sublime;” artist-explorers, Darwin, and Latin American as spectacle; class and gender construction in the Gilded Age; the neurasthenic body and the turn of the century; Ashcan School, New York City, and urban spectators; immigrants, “slumming,” and documentary photography. Alongside paintings, we examine political cartoons, fashion, advertisements, and popular illustrations.