Acknowledgments

Burns, Sarah

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Acknowledgments

Sarah Burns

Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America

Author

Sarah Burns

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14776

Acknowledgments

Over the course of several years spent researching and writing this book, it has been my good fortune to have strong intellectual, moral, and practical support from many colleagues and friends. For their vital assistance in locating hard-to-find paintings and illustrations, I thank Lynn Corbett and Vicky A. Clark, The Carnegie Museum of Art; Catherine Gordon and Colum Hourihane, Witt Library; Susan Marcotte, Archives of American Art; Mary Holahan, Delaware Art Museum; Elizabeth Broun, National Museum of American Art; and Sarah J. Moore. Abigail B. Gerdts read a draft of the chapter on Winslow Homer and generously volunteered important information. Erica Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, graciously shared research and ideas on Edward W. Hooper. I also thank the staffs of the Boston Athenaeum; Massachusetts Historical Society; Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Harvard Archives; and the Boston branch of the Archives of American Art. For reliable cooperation and consistently excellent work, I am grateful to the office of Photographic Services, Indiana University. A year’s sabbatical leave granted by Indiana University provided me with much-needed time for writing. To Terri Sabatos, who as my research assistant tracked down innumerable niggling details, I owe a special debt of gratitude for her efficient and energetic sleuthing. Heidi Downey at Yale University Press edited the manuscript with a sharp eye and a deft hand.

When the work was in progress, a number of colleagues provided important opportunities to try out versions of the material in public—in print or “on stage.” I thank Katherine Manthorne, Cécile Whiting, Elizabeth Johns, Marianne Doezema, Barbara Groseclose, Erika Doss, Eric Rosenberg, and Gloria Fitzgibbon; also Tamar Garb, Jane Van Norman Turano, and Jayne Kuchna. I am most grateful to David C. Miller for his invaluable criticism and support of my ideas about late nineteenth-century studios and their meanings. David Tatham, Neil Harris, and Roger Stein were also helpful at an early stage of the project. I thank Bryan J. Wolf for his illuminating and thoughtful reading of the manuscript, and Judy Metro at Yale University Press for her consistent enthusiasm, engagement, and encouragement, which have been fundamental to the development and completion of this book. Finally, I owe a special thanks to the comrades-in-arms whose long-sustained interest, good humor, and friendship never failed to charge my batteries and keep me on track, especially Michèle Bogart, Vivien Fryd, Karal Ann Marling, and Angela Miller.

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Book details

BOOKInventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America

Sarah Burns

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00068

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14774

Sarah Burns tells the story of artists in American society during a period of critical transition from Victorian to modern values, examining how culture shaped the artists and how artists shaped their culture. Focusing on such important painters as James McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, she investigates how artists reacted to the growing power of the media, to an expanding consumer society, to the need for a specifically American artist type, and to the problem of gender.

With the vigorous growth of the magazine industry, says Burns, information about art and artists was diffused to a larger audience than ever before. Burns examines how stories and features in magazines, newspapers, and books forged reputations, established canons, and made the artist an important figure in American culture. She demonstrates how artists learned to "package" themselves in the early advertising age to create a desire not only for their products but also for the trappings of their artistic life. Next Burns examines how European models of the overrefined aesthete were reworked into more wholesome American versions, while painting took on an increasingly therapeutic role. She investigates gender dilemmas of the period, revealing how women artists were marginalized as professionals, and how the close fit between contemporary business values and the image of Winslow Homer explains why he was so often celebrated as the ultra-masculine, all-American painter. Burns also analyzes a variety of other artist images, ranging from theatrical Bohemians to clean-cut, civic-minded young professionals and down-to-earth commercial draftsmen. Illustrated with portraits, photographs, cartoons of artists, and paintings, this book demonstrates how patterns of artistic identity emerging in the late nineteenth century set the stage for those that have dominated the history of twentieth-century art and image making in America.

Author

Sarah Burns

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date March 1999 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300078596

EISBN 9780300230000

Illustrations 130

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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