미국 도금시대(Gilded Age) 미술에 나타난 차의 미학과 문화정치학

Abstract

This article examines the tea culture-related themes represented in late 19th and early 20th century American visual images, especially in the Gilded Age. In an attempt at an in-depth interpretation, this study discusses the era s aesthetic and cultural trends and politics of representation that are imbued in these images. It analyzes a series of paintings in the contexts of femininity issues that emerged from changing social structures in America s patriarchal society as well as American women s tea culture that was widely popularized among the affluent and privileged class, and moreover, its relation to Orientalist taste, Western obsession for Asian ceramics, and Japanese tea ceremony. The Gilded Age s representative paintings depicting the subject matter of American tea culture are produced by artists primarily from the Northeastern regions of the United States, including Mary Cassatt, William Paxton, and Edmund Tarbell. American female figures portrayed in these works are mostly upper or upper-middle class women having afternoon tea or morning tea in the aesthetically and elegantly decorated women s space, or they are fashionable women posing alongside tea instruments or Asian collectables of high-quality, which appear as symbols of the leisure class and its refined taste. The unifying similarities in these paintings point to the aestheticized life-style and feminine ideal promoted by Americans of privilege and also depicted by such contemporaries as Thorstein Veblen, Henry James, and James McNeill Whistler. This study shows that complex historical issues and cultural politics intertwined with gender and class are embedded within these paintings of the Gilded Age.