Playing It Straight - Art and Humor in the Gilded Age

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-520-27245-3
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 187 mm x 257 mm, Gewicht: 776 g

Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers a stunning new look at late-nineteenth-century American art, and demonstrates the profound role humor played in determining the course of culture in the Gilded Age. By showing how complex humorous strategies such as deadpan and burlesque operate in a range of media—from painting and sculpture to chromolithography and architectural schemes—Greenhill examines how ambitious artists like Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint-Gaudens rethought the place of humor in their work and devised strategies to both conform to and slyly undermine developing senses of “serious” culture. Exhibiting an awareness of the emerging requirements of serious art but maintaining an investment in humor, they played it straight.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Greenhill, Jennifer A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Winslow Homer’s Visual Deadpan

Chapter 2. Laughing with J.G. Brown, E.W. Perry, and Thomas Nast

Chapter 3. William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum

Chapter 4. Cosmopolitan Satire in Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Henry James

Chapter 5. Exchanging Jokes with John Haberle

Epilogue

Notes

List of Illustrations

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jennifer Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications have appeared in Elective Affinities, Art History, and American Art. She has received research grants for Playing It Straight from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Luce Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.