Sculptural Bodies of the Great Depression [electronic resource].

9780438907393

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2018.

1 online resource (352 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

In the 1930s, the conventional bronze and stone figures that had defined American sculpture since the mid-nineteenth century suddenly appeared as "errors" and "monstrosities," at odds with Depression-era political concerns and the aesthetic imperatives of emergent modernisms. And yet, the devaluation of the academic sculptural monument did not do away with the public function of sculpture. This dissertation argues that American artists in the 1930s significantly reinvented the materiality and politics of sculpture's public life. Without abandoning sculpture's civic orientation or commitment to figuration, the artists in this study responded to the era's societal turbulence and the rise of documentary photography in forms that remade conventions of monumentality, race, and public display for sculpture during a period of radical political and cultural transformation. This dissertation does not aim simply to reinstate sculpture alongside documentary photography and mural painting in the canon of American modernism. Rather, my study reveals a dynamic intermedial exchange across the boundaries of sculpture and photography. This project engages photography as the critical interlocutor for sculptural production and display, from the first chapter's analysis of Berenice Abbott's photographic portrayals of nineteenth-century bronze and stone statuary, to the second chapter's enlivening portrayals of Augusta Savage's sculptures of African American subjects in photography and film, to the final chapter's consideration of the presence of the photographed body of a lynching victim in a work of sculpture by Isamu Noguchi. I consider Abbott, Savage, and Noguchi—examined together here for the first time—through the rubric of "sculptural bodies," a term I use to suggest this study's focus on the public life and bodily presence figurative sculpture. Considering sculptural figures as bodies raises questions. Whose body? Whose space? Whose public? The works of art I discuss respond to these questions in sculptural bodies pointedly and visibly shaped by contemporary history, including the forces of labor struggles, natural disasters, and white supremacy. This dissertation restores the public life of figurative sculpture in the Depression era to a central place in our histories of American art. In doing so, I rethink dominant narratives of American modernism through the lens of critical race studies and expand media-limited approaches to the study of sculpture through a focus on intermediality. Most significantly, like the artists in this study, I seek to foreground the social and political stakes of reimagining sculpture's site, materiality, and meaning.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

August 21, 2019

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2018.

Yale University.