The Unfinished Exhibition: Visualizing Myth, Memory, and the Shadow of the Civil War in Centennial America
- ISBN-10
- 1315453118
- ISBN-13
- 9781315453118
- Category
- Art
- Pages
- 188
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-12-08
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Author
- Susanna W. Gold
Description
The Centennial decade was an era of ambivalence, the United States still unresolved about the incomprehensible damage it had wrought over four years of Civil War, and why. Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition -- a spectacular international event celebrating one hundred years of American strength, unity, and freedom -- took place in the immediate wake of this trauma of war and the failures of Reconstruction as a means to restore power and patriotism in the nation’s struggle to rebuild itself. The Unfinished Exhibition, the first comprehensive examination of American art at the Centennial, explains the critical role of visual culture in negotiating memories of the nation’s past that conflicted with the optimism that Exhibition officials promoted. Supporting novel iconographical interpretations with myriad primary source material, author Susanna W. Gold demonstrates how the art galleries and the audiences who visited them addressed the lingering traumas of battle, the uneasy re-unification of North and South, and the persisting racial tensions in the post-Emancipation era. This careful consideration of the visual record exposes the complexities of the war’s impact on Americans and clarifies how the Centennial art exhibition affected a nation still finding its direction at a critical moment in its history.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-12-08
- 211 pages
- Paperback
- Taylor & Francis
Similar books
-
Blue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
By William Edwin DayBlue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
-
New Deal Art in Alabama: The Murals, Sculptures and Other Works, and Their Creators
By Anita Price Davis, Jimmy S. EmersonPeter Jennings and Todd Brewster, The Century (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 154. 8. Time-Life Editors, This Fabulous Century, Vol. IV, 23. 9.
-
The World of Bob Timberlake
By Bob TimberlakeOffers a selection of eighty-seven full-color reproductions of Timberlake's paintings, with an introduction by the painter
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesTHE FERRELL BROTHERS, WILBUR AND WARREN , in their own words "were not known as singular artists but a duo." Wilbur began his career as a motion picture ...
-
John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss
By Karen Corsano, Daniel WillimanAdelson, Warren, “John Singer Sargent and the 'New Painting,'” in Stanley Olson, Warren Adelson, and Richard Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist ...
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesThis is a rich undiscovered history—a history replete with competing art departments, dynastic scenic families, and origins stretching back to the films of Méliès, Edison, Sennett, Chaplin, and Fairbanks.
-
Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History
By Karen LangThrough careful research, Carol Gibson-Wood exposes the mythology surrounding the Morellian method, especially the mythology of the coherence and primacy of his method of attribution. She argues that it “could also be said that Berenson ...
-
Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity
By Karen B. SternGibson translates from the Phoenician: “Beware! Behold, there is disaster for you ... !” (SSI 3, no. 5=KAI nr. 2). Examples from Cyprus include SSI 3, no. 12=KAI nr. 30. Gibson's translation of the Phoenician reads (SSI 3, ...
-
Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960
By Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Kevin Stayton, Brooklyn Museum of ArtExamines the emergence of abstract organic forms and their assimilation into the popular arts and culture of American life from 1940-1960, covering advertising, decorative arts, commercial design, and the fine arts.
-
Typography: A Very Short Introduction
By Paul Luna... S. Newman ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith ADVERTISING ... ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer AMERICAN IMMIGRATION ...