Encountering Eurocentric Beauty Ideals and Childhood Identity Formation in Collages by Deborah Roberts
Using Deborah Roberts’ photocollage works as a lens, this article contemplates the influence of Eurocentric standards of beauty and stereotypes of Blackness on identity formation as represented by the child subject. Deborah Roberts reappropriates found images and materials from magazines, the internet, and her daily life to bring attention to the historic and continued treatment of the Black body within the realm of cultural production and to the vulnerability of children to the resulting conditions of objectivity and suppression. Theories of intersectionality highlight that women and children are susceptible to multiple layers of oppression as part of a minority race and subordinated gender.[1] Roberts’ focus on children brings attention to another regularly overlooked layer of subjugation and bias, as young people’s identities are in a highly developmental state that is often the most susceptible to ideas promoted by the masses. By emphasizing and subverting the original intentions of her materials and reinventing them as works of fine art, Roberts gives power back to her young Black subjects.
Lenguaje, Llengua, y La Vanguardia: Avant-gardism in Barcelona and Madrid from 1915 to 1925
Utilizing the work of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Joan Miró as illustrative examples of their intellectual circles, this essay builds a dialogue between avant-garde practices in Madrid and Barcelona from 1915 to 1925 to identify the similarities in their linguistic practices and differences in ideologies. In the context of this essay, the word “language” in Spanish, lenguaje, and in Catalan, llengua, serve as signifiers for the artistic languages of Gómez de la Serna and Miró respectively. And departing from the literal meaning of these two words, these two signifiers help to further elucidate the thesis of this paper: while on the level of artistic practice both Miró and Gómez de la Serna were engaged with a kind of artistic avant-gardism involving the play of language, on the conceptual level, the lenguaje of Gómez de la Serna differed from the llengua of Miró.
Amazon Warriors in Classical Greek Art: Exploring Patriarchal Foundations in Ancient Greece
This paper explores the iconographic representation of Amazons, a race of women warriors, in classical Greek art from the fifth century BCE through the lens of gender theory. Studying Amazonian representation provides insightful opportunities into how gender was regarded in ancient Greece, including how Ancient Greek women had little to no political voice and were controlled by men at virtually every stage of their lives. This was driven by biological notions of sex, whereas today, patriarchal oppression has evolved into a desire to overcome the “other.”i This paper discusses the mysterious history of the Amazons to establish a foundation for the narratives they tell in art, the most prevalent being a trope of the Amazon as wounded, defeated, and submissive. By focusing on a singular case study of the Marble Statue of a Wounded Amazon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the central discussion will expand to include broader themes of the male gaze, female representation, and gender roles that became archetypes for modern society.
A Closer Look: Funerary Studies, Material Culture, and the Maya
The following analysis investigates literature from the field regarding a carbonate stone bowl, designated as “Bowl with Anthropomorphic Cacao Trees,” found in a tomb and located today in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. The three-roundel bowl is regarded to feature a personified Chocolate God as its central figure. On the other hand, some scholars in the field, including Simon Martin and Karl Taube, posit that the figure considered the “Chocolate God” on this funerary bowl is instead intended to represent the Maize God embodying the Chocolate God in a call for generational rebirth. The following seeks to offer an object biography under the lens of funerary studies and the material culture of the Maya. Visual analysis and study of Maya religious principles are also employed.
“Take me Back to the Good Old Days”: Racism, Berlin Wool Work, and Comfort
Whether they be hung, worn, or used in a multitude of ways, textiles are a tangible component of material culture. They can tell us anything from political culture to stories of nostalgia.This 1876 Berlin wool table cover found in the collection of Winterthur Museum (2020.004) is a curious example of how embroidery and nostalgia intersect. This piece of textile, while overtly racist in its presentations, actually helps us consider the idea of racism in textiles as a teaching object. Even though the imagery of this piece is highly racialized and offensive, it was also evidently loved and cared for by its owners—enough so that the owner, or owners, came back multiple times to make alterations and preserve the piece. This paper discusses not only the tangible aspects of the table cover such as the stitches and design influences, but also the intangible such as what the designs in the cloth tell an audience. Given that many of the designs on this tablecloth were taken from children’s stories, the piece argues that this was intentional in order to “other” Black bodies and garner a certain type of racism—nostalgic racism. This racism is presented in this object via the space of the parlor. The parlor was no longer just a place to be with family and on special occasions, but quickly became one of the most radical forms of conspicuous consumption of the nineteenth century. It was a space to make a statement about how your family perceives the world and vice versa. While this piece might stoke immediate negative feelings, it is critical to remember that those were not the feelings experienced by the owner of this piece and their family. They saw these racist images as amusing and a cultivator for conversation and community.
Close Encounters:
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced museums to close, institutions scrambled to reposition themselves in a virtual climate. Creating virtual programming to reach visitors and patrons in their homes became a priority, and many turned to Google Arts & Culture due to its technical capabilities, visually appealing interface, and brand-name recognition. The Rijksmuseum seized this opportunity, currently using their Google Arts & Culture page to host online exhibits, images of their collections, and virtual ‘tours’ of the space using high-definition panoramic photography. One online exhibit offered by the Rijksmuseum, titled The Milkmaid, is the focus of this review. Though only one of many online exhibits offered by the Rijksmuseum, the theoretical implications the exhibit generates echo the pandemic-induced reimagination and repositioning of museums at large. The brevity inherent in online cultural programming prevents this exhibit from realizing its full educational potential, but The Milkmaid’s technical execution and virtual accessibility is commendable and speaks to broader discussions in the museum studies field. By placing conventional theoretical wisdom in conversation with the uniqueness of our present moment, The Milkmaid reveals itself to be a small but powerful embodiment of the tensions between authenticity and reproduction, physical and virtual, and ability and restriction.
Museum Orientalism:
Although museums that display from all over the world are commonplace in both Europe and North America, their histories are much more complicated than meets the average visitor’s eye. In fact, these “universal survey museums,” like the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are based upon Roman traditions of displaying war trophies. As such, the original purpose of such museums was to attest to the greatness of the modern nation-state, and consequently construe the history of art as the history of the highest European civilizations. Thus, these museum’s histories of collecting and exhibiting the arts of, for example, Asia or Africa requires critical consideration. Inspired greatly by Saidian Orientalism, this article describes and interprets how “East versus West” thinking and scholarship incorporated two early US American museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The East-West division influenced how both of these museums came to organize their administrations between experts on art history and experts on “the Orient.” Furthermore, Orientalized juxtapositions, a feature of Hegelian art historical theory popular at the time, formulated how museums organized their exhibition spaces. By following the museum’s gallery program, visitors enacted the evolution of civilization from Orient to Occident, and envisioned the differences between Western and Eastern arts as high and low respectively. This article primarily considers two juxtapositions: Greco-Roman traditions versus Egyptian traditions, and European paintings versus Oriental (East Asian) decorative arts. Part two of this article continues with the history of Orientalism at the MFA and the MET in the 1890s and 1900s. During this time, the both museums solidified the East-West binary as a part of their administrational structure and exhibition layout. Furthermore, museum engagements with East Asia led to the development of another Orientalized binary: East Asian crafts versus Western paintings.
Museum Orientalism:
Recent social justice and decolonial movements have led museums in Europe and North America to address the role they have historically played in maintaining imperial and white-supremacist hegemonies. Although museum scholarship has produced some important work on the history of museums as imperial, racist institutions, few scholars, if any, have attempted to understand the specific ways that Orientalism informed the early formations of the modern, encyclopedic museum of the West. Inspired greatly by Saidian Orientalism, this article describes and interprets how “East versus West” thinking and scholarship incorporated two early US American museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The East-West division influenced how both museums came to organize their administrations between experts on art history and experts on “the Orient.” Furthermore, Orientalized juxtapositions, a feature of Hegelian art historical theory popular at the time, formulated how museums organized their exhibition spaces. By following the museum’s gallery program, visitors enacted the evolution of civilization from Orient to Occident and envisioned the differences between Western and Eastern arts as high and low respectively. This article primarily considers two juxtapositions: Greco-Roman traditions versus Egyptian traditions, and European paintings versus Oriental (East Asian) decorative arts. Part one of this article argues that the representational nature of both Orientalism and universal survey museums warrants critical consideration of “East versus West” thinking in such museums and reviews the first two decades of these two museums’ histories regarding Orientalism as thought and a discipline, focusing on their endeavors with the ancient Middle East and Egypt.
Corrigendum to “Her Perfection Is My Wound: A Look at Hans Bellmer’s La Demie Poupée.”
In the article by Wahlen, Samantha, a few claims and terms are in need of further contextualization and qualification. This corrigendum, written with the help of the author and CMSMC editors, seeks to clarify language that may be outdated, and therefore interpreted as harmful or offensive.
Her Perfection is My Wound:
In this art critical essay, Hans Bellmer’s sculpture La Demie Poupée (1971) is proposed as the consummate feminine alter ego of the artist. This thesis is supported by research of the artist’s own writings, drawings, photographs, as well as accounts of friends and the work of notable Bellmer scholars. Through the examination of Bellmer’s personal history, accounts of transvestitism, obsessions with androgyny and the pubescent female, this proposition delves into a brief look at this Surrealist German artist who was and continues to be a shadowy, controversial figure in early twentieth century art history. The importance of this thesis resides in the psychology of Bellmer and is meant to shed light upon the possible extent to which Bellmer created his doll series, why he did so, and what liberation he may have found within his work. Ultimately, the vulnerability and discombobulation of La Demie Poupée attests convincingly of Bellmer’s tormented psyche as well as to the emotional manifestations of his frustration, angst, and need for domination.
Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth (1857):
Since the late-eighteenth century, artists have replicated and disseminated George Washington's image and likeness to preserve his memory and legacy. The popularization of history painting compelled artists to decorate a canvas with decisive moments in the country's founding years. Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868) is one such artist who won praise for his monumental Washington Crossing the Delaware in 1851. Two years later, Leutze created a companion piece, Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth (1853). This work shows an unfavorable side of Washington, a commander scrambling to catch his retreating troops. While the public and scholars often focus on Leutze’s more famous image of Washington, the companion piece offers a deviation from sacrosanct portrayals of the first president.
This article examines how David Leavitt commissioned Leutze to recreate this piece in 1857 for his daughter, Elizabeth Leavitt Howe. It argues that the shift in tonality speaks to its change in display, from a monumental canvas intended for a gallery, to the veneration of Washington's image as a form of emulation and active remembrance in a domestic domain. The gifting of the 1857 painting informs the cult of domesticity and code of household governance ever-present in American culture. The painting, therefore, becomes a material way to understand the relationship between objects and family members in nineteenth-century America. Through provenance research, visual analysis, and object networks, this piece will illuminate the divergence in Washington's iconography, while also highlighting the changes made for its placement in a nineteenth-century domestic domain.
The Consequences of an Unfinished Christ
This paper considers several possible explanations for the state of unfinish of Albrecht Durer’s Salvator Mundi. The painting was done sometime around 1505, on the eve of the trip to Venice which would elevate Durer from regional phenomenon to European artistic icon. There is no record of the painting having been commissioned and no obvious explanation for his decision to start work on it. Despite its being unfinished, he kept the painting in his possession until the end of his life, after which his wife kept it until the end of her life ten years later. It was eventually sold into the collection of the grandson of his close friend, Willibald Pirckheimer. He did not recycle the materials. All of this evidence suggests a reason for the painting’s survival greater than mere chance. Possible explanations range from the purely pragmatic to the abstract spiritual. The painting could have been a teaching tool for the apprentices in Durer’s workshop. It may have had sentimental value to Durer, as a reflection of the evolution of his relationship with God. He may have also realized that existing in a state of unfinish gave the artwork additional meditative value that it would not have otherwise had. This paper explores each of these possibilities in depth, as well as the legacy of such an object into modern times.
“Rust-Flavored Air”:
The verso of Charles Burchfield’s 1920 watercolor Hillside Homes reveals contextual information not afforded by the work’s title. Here, the artist’s hand-written inscription reads: “LOCALITY-ON THE OHIO RIVER/BETWEEN E. LIVERPOOL + WELLSVILLE.” Roland Barthes observes that such accompanying text functions as a “parasitic message” intended to load an image by quickening its connotation procedures. Taking this “parasitic message” as starting point, this paper employs new materialism and ecocriticism to read Hillside Homes as Burchfield’s toxic discourse on environmental damage caused by southeastern Ohio’s thriving clay industry during the early twentieth century. My analysis examines Hillside Homes in relation to contemporaneous textual accounts of the region’s ecological welfare from the artist’s personal journals and the geologist James Harold Hance’s 1918 PhD dissertation “Geology and Mineral Resources of the Wellsville, Ohio, Quadrangle.” Ultimately, this watercolor is both a prescient commentary on ecological toxicity and a material product of distributed agency that records natural degradation not only in subject matter, but also in its deteriorated physical condition resulting from environmental exposure. Conceiving of Hillside Homes as an assemblage—Jane Bennett’s term to describe the complex, interconnected, and surprising networks of agents that act upon material things—helps to explain one of its distinct visual features: the soiled yellow smog that discolors the blue sky. A study of this unplanned formal quality, a result of the paper’s reaction to relative humidity, acidity, or pollution, challenges 2 preconceived notions of artist intentionality. Heeding the call of Lawrence Buell, this piece aims to reinvigorate scholarly understanding of Burchfield’s work through a more earth-conscious mode of art historical inquiry.
A Tale of Two Murals:
This piece examines the history and legacy of Chicana/o muralism in the historically Chicana/o neighborhood of La Alma-Lincoln Park in Denver, Colorado. Members of the Chicana/o community who participate in, observe, or support mural-making contribute to physical transformations of the urban landscape while also creating memories that result in affective attachments to these spaces, contributing to the process of placemaking and a communal sense of belonging for this marginalized group. In recent years, street art has gained popularity in Denver, increasing competition for public spaces. Many people claim that street art culture provides Denver a positive form of public art that beautifies the city and breaks up the monotony of the urban landscape. By comparing two murals in La Alma-Lincoln Park, one Chicana/o mural and one street art mural, this piece demonstrates how city officials, urban planners, and corporate developers have effectively co-opted street art practices to commodify the urban landscape in the name of the “creative city.” Street art becomes a type of marketing scheme through which to communicate a neighborhood’s “authenticity” and attractiveness to visitors and members of the upper classes to accumulate profit through tourism and development plans. The appearance of street art murals in La Alma-Lincoln Park transforms its distinctly Chicana/o public spaces, negatively affecting longtime residents’ sense of belonging and signaling the gentrification of public space. The author situates transformations to public spaces as not an effect of gentrification, but rather a cause. This thesis challenges public sphere theory by emphasizing the importance of public space to counterpublic spheres. The Chicana/o counterpublic has repeatedly faced geographic displacement at the hands of the US government and the Anglo-American public, rendering access and control of public spaces especially meaningful.
In the Absence of Body Hair:
This paper focuses on a painting by the Safavid artist Riza-i Abbasi called “Reclining Nude” (ca. 1590) from Isfahan, Iran. The image portrays a naked female figure dressed in diaphanous cloth resting near a small stream. She holds a letter in her hand and appears to be daydreaming or contemplating with her eyes closed. Such printed images circulated in Safavid Iran through European merchants and Christian missionaries who were invited to the court of Shah Abbas I (r: 1588-1629). Scholars have considered this image to be based on a Renaissance engraving of Cleopatra by Marcantonio Raimondi.The suggestion that the recumbent nude of Riza Abbasi was worked from the Cleopatra engraving of the Italian Renaissance printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi (ca. 1480-1534) plays into the notion that a Persian woman was assumed to be European solely due to her naked form. Even the name “Reclining Nude” inherently imposes the concept of the farangi and further removes the subject from her Persian attributes; however, the depiction of Riza Abbasi’s nude female follows the traditional concept of ideal women in Persian literature. In this paper, I will further analyze the imposed European identity on Riza Abbasi’s nude. Through this examination, I will argue that the theme of a female nude with long dark hair without body hair has its roots in the love portrayal of the beloved from Persian poetry and paintings rather than a European prototype. Furthermore, I will examine Reclining Nude’s Persian origins with the implications of her body hair, or lack thereof, derived from depictions of the archetypal pubescent beloved in Persian literature.
CW: This article features discussion of past sexual practices that included the involvement of children, which may make some readers uncomfortable, anxious, or angry. Please continue at your own discretion.
Winckelmann Revisited:
In 1964, Andy Warhol released a short film titled Blow Job. The film captures a man with an ecstatic facial expression, presumably due to his reception of oral sex. Watching Blow Job, we are voyeurs to a scene of mystery and homoeroticism, invoking our imagination as to what could or could not be happening beyond Warhol’s camera lens. When the film was first released, viewers heckled it and attempted to block the monitor. Warhol was homosexual. We have missed Warhol’s full intentions because of marginalization embedded in Art Historical discourse from its beginnings in the eighteenth-century. I would like to rethink Warhol in light of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the so-called Father of Art History. Warhol was aware of Winckelmann’s art historical traditions and reflected on them in his own practice.
William Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd:
Typically understood as a pointed criticism of the English clergy, the message of The Hireling Shepherd by William Holman Hunt is uncovered in Beaulieu’s paper as a complex intersection between humankind, nature, and religion. Beaulieu applies an ecocritical approach to argue that, amid rapid and aggressive industrialization in England, The Hireling Shepherd represents an early articulation of a theory of environmental change steeped in the language of Christian theology. Beaulieu argues that Hunt deploys the Christian parable of the bad shepherd—inattentive to his flock—to draw attention both to the loss of morality in English society as well as its nefarious impact on the natural world. A study of Hunt’s artistic ideology points to a “Victorian ecology” which dictates that nature is balanced and fundamentally moral. Natural harmony for Hunt was thus a reflection of religious, divine order. Introducing Timothy Morton’s theory of the “Victorian hyperobject,” Beaulieu further elucidates Hunt’s understanding of the intricate, divine relationship between humankind and nature, connecting what he saw as the consequences of a transgression of Christian morality with a degeneration of the natural order. For Hunt, a degradation of the natural environment is thus fundamentally a product of a society which loses its spirituality. Through her analysis, Beaulieu forwards a theory that with The Hireling Shepherd, Hunt was warning against the dangers of a burgeoning atheism and a negligent clergy, while proclaiming a rebirth of the religious spirit as the solution to a deteriorating Victorian society and ecology.
Sir John Soane’s Maori Spear
The Sir John Soane’s Museum, an exceptional house museum that holds the personal collection of its namesake, provides a unique context for a case study on objects within museums and personal collections. In focusing on the artefacts in the museum, in particular object number M 607- ‘a Maori spear’, the theoretical framework of object biography is utilised to provide a more holistic understanding of this artefact beyond that presented by the institution that holds it. In considering the changing attitudes and perceptions of objects in the museum, a more comprehensive understanding of this objects’ relevance in the Sir John Soane’s Museum and beyond is discussed.