Art Historical Interpretation Research Articles

Maximilian, Mexico, and the Invention of Empire

Most Americans’ knowledge of the French Intervention in Mexico (1861–67) begins and ends with the celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the date of the epic Battle of Puebla in 1862. But Kristine Ibsen believes Napoleon III’s mad “Mexican Adventure” and the installation of Austrian archduke Maximilian as Mexico’s puppet emperor still resounds in Mexican national identity today, and that it has been appropriated by American and European artists, filmmakers, and writers over the past 150 years to focus public attention on the dangers of dictatorship and imperialism. Ibsen employs a cross-disciplinary approach to demonstrate how Mexico’s struggle against autocratic rule shaped the country’s political and cultural identity and, at the same time, served activists beyond Mexico who sought symbols of successful resistance movements and popular sovereignty. Inspired by the work of Karl Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Mexican Imbroglio), Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project and Illuminations), and Hayden White (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism), she first examines visual culture in Maximilian’s occupied Mexico, 1864–67.Maximilian and his child-bride Charlotte became Mexico’s Maximiliano I and Empress Carlota, affecting indigenous dress and customs while playing the roles of European royals, to the delight of their conservative Mexican allies and the disgust of Benito Juárez’s Republicans. Ibsen sketches Maximilian’s enthronement and brief reign, and then follows with a chapter that views the spectacle of empire gone wrong from the vantage point of Edouard Manet’s Paris and his publicly banned masterwork, Execution of Maximilian. Next she leaps to 1930s Hollywood to dissect and explore the use of Warner Brothers’ Juárez (1939) as a deliberate attempt by the producers and the director to alert Americans and the world to the threat of Axis totalitarianism. Finally she examines Fernando del Paso’s 1987 Noticias del Imperio (News from the Empire), a historical novel that treats the tragedy of Maximilian’s imperial delusion and Carlota’s descent into madness as a metaphor for the madness inherent in all imperialism.The Manet chapter consists of dense art historical interpretation examining, it seems, every nuanced brushstroke and every symbol that generations of curators and scholars have read into the work. The Execution of Maximilian is considered by many to be the artist’s greatest achievement, but more important to Ibsen is the fact that the painting was banned in Paris during the reign of Louis Napoleon, reinforcing her contention that the politically active artist appropriated the imagery of the Mexican Adventure to undermine the credibility of the empire-mad regime of Napoleon “le petit.” Ibsen’s chapter on the making of Juárez on the eve of American involvement in WWII is engagingly written and largely devoid of the jargon that creeps into the other chapters. The author does a masterful job of demonstrating Warner Brothers’ deliberate propaganda effort, which dodged the Production Code Administration’s censorial minefield and pressure from a then isolationist United States government.Ibsen concludes with del Paso’s Noticias, a monumental (668 pages) theatricalized microhistory presenting discrete moments that explain great events, an homage to Benjamin’s work. She detects in del Paso’s pages “a symphony of voices in which historical representation and meaning itself are exposed as unstable constructs, imaginatively distorted and sometimes even reinvented by the ever-changing perspectives of time and space from which they are read” (p. 126).The author employs a rich array of primary sources, from Mexican newspapers to Warner Brothers’ film and interoffice correspondence archives, as well as a thorough survey of art and film studies and literary criticism in Spanish, French, and English. While images are essential to Ibsen’s thesis, the reader is at a disadvantage when critical illustrations do not accompany the text. A single signature of only 11 plates helps us visualize the self-centered Carlota and foppish Maximilian, but the illustrations are too few to allow the reader to fully appreciate the visual imagery and cinematic impact of Juárez, which the author attempts to describe frame by frame to convey the symbolism and subliminal meaning intended by the director. The text in each chapter is broken by ornaments that seem to indicate new ideas or themes. These stops sometimes relate to an illustration found among the plates but, frustratingly, just as often do not.This is a very creative literary approach to history, not a book intended for the general public. Familiarity with the works of art, film, and literature examined are a prerequisite, as is grounding in the works of Marx, Benjamin, and White. In sum, Ibsen has presented academic historians with a new look at the Second Empire of Napoleon III and the doomed empire of Maximilian as depicted in visual art, film, and literature. She reveals that the varied interpretations of history — though appropriated, invented, and contested — have all played a role in shaping Mexican national identity and public opinion about the dangers of autocratic empire.

Interpretation, emotion, and belief: cognitive dimensions in art historical investigation, featuring examples from Jan Vermeer, Nicolas Poussin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini

The article argues for the recognition of 'other'beliefs in arthistorical interpretations of art. There is a tendency in the practice of interpretation to avoid aspects of potential 'foreignness' i ...

Deleuze's Tensive Notion of Painting in the Light of Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer

Deleuze's Logique de la sensation is not a canonical art historical interpretation of Francis Bacon's painting and even less an illustration of Deleuze's philosophy. It is better read as a prolegomena to a semiotics of plastic art in which the visual image is related to the dialectics of touch and vision. These issues feature strongly in the art theories of Aloïs Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer and Heinrich Wölfflin. This article presents a comparative approach to the relation between Deleuze's and these writers’ conception of the image and attempts to answer the following questions: does a painting appeal strictly to the sense of vision? Does its structure point to a virtual haptic function of vision and if so, does painting overturn the stable hierarchy of senses with vision at the top? Is there a gradual relation between touch and vision? Reading Deleuze reading Riegl, Worringer and Wölfflin offers an occasion to reconsider the image as a tensive surface grasped with a touching eye and seeing hand.

Written historical sources and art-historical interpretation: The case of the church of the Virgin at Toplica

Based on the new analysis of the passage of the text of the Vita of St. Symeon Nemanja dedicated to Virgin’s church at Toplica, written by his son Stefan «the First-Crowened», and a critical recapitulation of archeological findings as well as of attitudes presented in historiography, this article offers new insight into ideological and religious reasons for the rebuilding of this, originally Early Byzantine, church. The event is explained as a part of programmatic intentions related to the restoration of the Archbishopric of Ohrid as succesor of ancient Iustiniana Prima, during the time of archbishop John (Adrian) Komnenos (1140-1163).

Progress in the application of ATR-FTIR microscopy to the study of multi-layered cross-sections from works of art

As a non-invasive or micro-invasive technique attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic (ATR-FTIR) microscopy is a valuable tool for the analysis of materials in works of art. An application for which it has received growing interest is in the analysis of paint cross-sections. However, FTIR microscope configurations, objectives' geometries and low spatial resolutions, and issues of sample preparation have often hampered the characterization of individual layers or features in cross-sections. With the use of case studies, it is demonstrated here that an ATR-FTIR microscope featuring a crystal of optimized geometry and a viewing capability feature allows characterization of individual layers, or areas within layers, of 10 microm thickness or less in single measurements. Of particular value is a remote aperturing feature which allows the analysis of selected areas within the contact footprint of the ATR crystal. Since the technique is non-destructive, the same area can be analyzed by complementary microscopic techniques such as Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive spectroscopy. Pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry was also used in some cases to corroborate the spectroscopic data. The analyses presented provided data which were important in informing art historical interpretation and conservation of the artworks examined.

Totalitarianism and the problem of Soviet art evaluation: the Lithuanian case

By taking into account dissident/political and art historical interpretations of Soviet art, I analyze how polemics about totalitarianism in the West, which generally corresponded with Cold War debates and Eastern European dissident thought, shaped the post-Soviet evaluations of national artistic legacies. It is argued that the political relationship with the totalitarian past, like in many post-socialist areas where the immediate past was subjected to radical re-evaluation, affected Lithuanian artists’ and critics’ attitude towards local Soviet art. Because of an obvious lack of underground art in Soviet Lithuania, however, the retrospective usage of political categories here became problematic. Especially in international representations, the complexities of artists’ relationship with officialdom came to be routinely assigned to the phenomenon of non-conformism; this eventually obfuscated the differences between the Lithuanian Soviet art context as somewhat different from the Russian case.

Oscillations of the Early Modern Visual Imagination

Witchcraft, a recurrent subject of early modern images, continues to confound art-historical interpretations caught up in binary oppositions such as the real and the fictitious or the rational and the irrational. Admittedly early modern interest in the occult, including the persecution of people for being witches, has consistently received diverse explanations. Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that witchcraft emerged out of religious strife and Reformation attempts to control religious dissent;1 Keith Thomas also conjoined religion and witchcraft but argued for the importance of seeing it as part of local village relations and rivalries.2 Lyndal Roper took up the ongoing argument for gender-based persecution, but argued for a psychoanalytical reading of women's subjectivities and sexuality in relation to demonological images and debates.3 More recently misogyny has been displaced, for example in Stuart Clark's lengthy study of demonology as the site for the formation of inversion and binaries that shaped rational thought in early modern Europe.4 Art history has tended to follow the lead of textual sources, and thus has addressed images of witchcraft either as allegorical or as related to the actual persecution of certain sectors of society, especially women. Where art history has been less resourceful is in addressing the visual issues raised by these images: what does it mean to bring visual form to the invisible, and how do these images pertain to contemporaneous changes in conceptions of the visual image? After all, a large proportion of these images are from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and these tend to appear in the context of collectors' cabinets in which natural specimens, bizarre objects and exotic items brought from distant places intermingled and produced new ideas of visual observation and knowledge. These images can no longer be relegated to a pre-modern world of religiosity and superstition, but how to address their seemingly contradictory character?

READING THE ANNUNCIATION

This essay explores Mieke Bal's mode of reading pictures through an analysis of several Annunciation paintings. Annunciation paintings have often posed a stumbling block to arthistorical interpretation. Supported by Bal's method of visual analysis, the author suggests that the problem of interpreting the Annunciation results in part from iconography's insufficiency, as well as its sexually repressed subject matter, as well as from their embedding in the formal apparatus of perspective. Grootenboer contends that the problem of the Annunciation lies in the mystery of the Incarnation as much as in perspective's presumed innocence as a transparent method for rendering the mystery visible. The author's aim is to demonstrate the complicity between perspective, also called construzione legittima, and the theme of the Annunciation has eventually legitimized an infinite unravelling of the secret.

Geological tools to interpret Scottish medieval carved sculpture: combined petrological and magnetic susceptibility analysis

Abstract Geological surveys of 172 early and late medieval sculptured stones from central and western Scotland have been undertaken to determine the provenance of the materials used. Non-destructive petrological studies (including grain size, mineralogy distribution, and textural and structural characteristics) and magnetic susceptibility measurements are used to characterize the sculptured stones and potential source material. The results indicate that for the early medieval sculpture: (1) all the sculptured stones are sandstone with the exception of one siltstone and one granite; (2) the sedimentary rocks are consistent with sources in the Lower Old Red Sandstone of the area; (3) from within the Lower Old Red Sandstone, a number of different geological units have been used. For the late medieval sculpture, the results indicate that: (1) various rock types have been used including schist, slate and sandstone; (2) non-locally derived material is used extensively in some areas, suggesting a more developed network for procurement of raw materials. The analytical techniques used also provide additional information in the art historical interpretation of a number of carved stones by identifying carved fragments from the same monument.

Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet's "The Meeting"

This article proposes a new reading of Courbet's The Meeting. The argument draws on French proverbs and expressions to show that complex significations of class, subservience, ridicule, and sovereignty clustered around such details in the painting as hats, beards, and canes. The essay suggests that the intersection of the linguistic and the visual produces a web of meanings thus far unexplored in Courbet's canvas. Through a focused analysis of a specific painting, the article aims to engage in dialogue with earlier methods of art historical interpretation. In doing so, it proposes other possibilities of signification and analysis.

Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet's The Meeting

This article proposes a new reading of Courbet's The Meeting. The argument draws on French proverbs and expressions to show that complex significations of class, subservience, ridicule, and sovereignty clustered around such details in the painting as hats, beards, and canes. The essay suggests that the intersection of the linguistic and the visual produces a web of meanings thus far unexplored in Courbet's canvas. Through a focused analysis of a specific painting, the article aims to engage in dialogue with earlier methods of art historical interpretation. In doing so, it proposes other possibilities of signification and analysis.

Interpreting Propaganda: Successors to Warburg and Freud in Wartime

First I want to thank Peter Rudnytsky, Jack Spector, and Gilbert Rose for making the book into an opportunity for dialogue. It is welcome to respond to the commentators. In concluding his discussion of the followers of Warburg and Freud, Jack Spector succinctly and cogently evaluates the ability of the classical tradition to comprehend contemporary political and cultural upheavals. As his essay explains, the possible limitations on that ability can be found not only in modernist critiques of classicist perspectives but also in the fascist abuse of classicism in the twentieth century. Analysis of Nazi propaganda, mentioned in the book and in Spector's essay, became one intellectual and political endeavor by classically trained scholars to expose and confront that abuse, an endeavor that entered into their scholarship and the war effort. My remarks here will further address how propaganda analysis directed itself against the deceptive and dangerous classical façade of fascism. During the Second World War, émigré scholars from several disciplines-including art history, psychoanalysis, and film studies-began to interpret propaganda. Without the archival records, laboratory conditions, or focus groups available to scholars today, they in part adapted interpretive tools and concepts from their classical training. In my current research, I have begun to explore how they reapplied tools and concepts originally directed to the ancient world. 1 Here I will consider how Ernst Kris employed the dramaturgic perspective within classicism to analyze propagandistic techniques and aims, and how his studies of propaganda shared elements with those of two cultural scientists from the Frankfurt School, who also worked in applied psychoanalysis, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno. As an art historian, Ernst Kris showed the influence not only of Sigmund Freud but also of Aby Warburg. Fritz Saxl—Warburg's successor as director of the Warburg Library—described Warburg's principle of art historical interpretation as follows: "that images with a meaning peculiar to their own [End Page 122] time and place, once created, have a magnetic power to attract other ideas into their sphere; that they can suddenly be forgotten and remembered again after centuries of oblivion" (1957, 2). Warburg concentrated on how Renaissance paintings revived visual fragments of ancient Dionysian passion, violence, and suffering—fragments that had belonged to pagan rituals of self-abandonment or to ancient experiences of loss of selfhood. Not only images but magic and astrology as well possessed an afterlife. For Warburg, at their moments of highest accomplishment and understanding, the Renaissance artist and audience incorporated mentally the primal experience of images without losing their own autonomous sense of self or identity. Warburg's conception reflected in part a dramaturgic view of the world, one born within the classical amphitheater, where both actor and spectator sought to balance their psychological, and nearly magical, identification with the dramatic action on stage against their own self-awareness and attachment to the non-stage world. The distance between the audience and performance circle protected that uneasy, even painful, psychological balance, a tragic model that gradually replaced that of Dionysian ritual. Both actor and spectator reproduced that physical distance inwardly, preserving mentally what Warburg described as Denkraum—a space for reflection, a distance from which to control instinctive reactions and emotive identifications. Before the Second World War, Kris combined Warburgian and Freudian approaches both in his career and in his studies of art. During the prewar period he served as curator of applied art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as a training analyst in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and on Sigmund Freud's recommendation, as an editor of Imago: Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Cultural Sciences. In the 1930s, before the Austrian Anschluss with Germany, he secured positions for his museum assistants, Otto Kurz and Ernst Gombrich, with Saxl at the Warburg Library in London, allowing Kurz and Gombrich to escape Austria's anti-Semitism and authoritarian regime. Kris wrote his studies of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt'...

The Sense of Art History in Art Education

All generally educated adults tacitly participate in the artworld. This is increasingly true in communities that must negotiate an often coercive and always saturated visual environment. This essay interrogates conventional assumptions about applications of art history in art education to innovate an artworld/lifeworld representation within the school years. The outlined strategy is authentic in terms of disciplinary models, inclusive of the learning interests of the student, and communicative in its outcomes. To satisfy the comprehensive nature of education the notion of human interest will be applied so as to establish relevant lifeworld uses for art historical learning to generally educated members of the community. Artworld theory will be employed to establish art historical practice that withstands the reefs of elitism and shoals of specialization by favoring the initiation of increasingly autonomous learners into practices of art historical interpretation, interrogation and revision. An initiation into art historical practices equips individuals for recurrent percipient engagements with art. This project applies and extends the aesthetic and educational platforms advocated by Ralph A. Smith through his published works. Excellence is satisfied by the application of art historical practice to generate authentic teaching and learning encounters. Equity is grounded in knowledge and human interests where the inculcation of the student into art history and theory is construed as a legitimate and fitting outcome of educational experience. The autonomy of art and the intrinsic value of art history are respected by looking to the structure and particularity of art historical knowing rather than pursuing the pedagogical tactic of shackling the value of art

Iconology of the interval: Aby Warburg's legacy

It has long been recognized that Aby Warburg played a central role, perhaps even he central role, in elevating the role of iconology in Art History. Having been traditionally regarded as an ancillary activity, iconological interpretation came to displace the concern with aesthetic form and style predominant in late nineteenth-century art historical discourse.1 Through the work of collaborators, students and followers such as Fritz Saxl, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky or Ernst Gombrich, iconology became, from the 1930S onwards, established as a canonical method in art historical interpretation. Although semiological, psychoanalytical and culturalmaterialist interpretations have subsequently dislodged iconology from its central place in the practice of Art History, iconology still maintains prominence in much contemporary scholarship.2 Indeed, while iconological methods are often regarded as the culmination of the bourgeois tradition of scholarship in Art History, it has also been argued that iconology, especially as formulated by Warburg's student Panofsky, in many ways anticipated subsequent theoretical positions, in particular, the semiological analysis of images.3 However, although the idea of the iconological ‘method’ is common currency, its origins in the writings of Warburg have become largely obscured. The reasons for this are quite clear. Until the recent translation of The Renewal if Pagan Antiquity, most of Warburg's work has remained inaccessible to anglophone readers, and those few other writings already translated lie scattered across a variety of different publications.4 Furthermore, the bulk of his work remains unpublished even in German: the texts gathered together for the publication, in 1932, of Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike, the first two volumes of a projected six-volume edition of Warburg's work, constitute only a small proportion of his total output.5 Consequently Warburg's work, though acknowledged as ground-breaking, has tended to be eclipsed by the more voluminous writings of Panofsky, Wittkower and others.

Panofskys tredje nivå och den kritiska historiografins syfte

This essay argues for the necessity of a critical historiography, exemplified through a re-reading, and an analysis, of the third level in the synoptical table of art historical interpretations introduced by Erwin Panofsky in his Studies in Iconology (1939). The analysis departs from three issues implicit of the table: (1) the relationship between the work of art and its context, (2) the interpretation and location of the "intrinsic meaning" of the work, and (3) the basic subjectivity of historical interpretations. By comparing Panofsky's "Introductory" with Mieke Bal's and Norman Bryson's Semiotics and Art History(1991) it becomes evident that the first two issues imply significant differences between the tradition of Panofsky and that of contemporary poststructuralist perspectives. On the other hand, the third issue furthers a 20th Century hermeneutic discourse, in which Panofsky tried to solve the problem of historical subjectivism as it appeared in the work by Martin Heidegger. Nevertheless, Panofsky's solution, by introducing certain "objective correctives", differs from that of Bal and Bryson. But, simultaneously, the juxtaposition of their different positions in this matter creates a dialectical relation between past and present intellectual environments. The comparison also demonstrates the need for an intensified awareness and analysis of how meaning is produced in an intellectual and social field. Critical historiography, as discussed here, aims at a profound analysis of the intellectual, social, and ideological prerequisites of meaning production within art history discourses. It will thus function both as a corrective (while not "objective") to the principal openness and subjectivity of interpretation, as well as a tool to reach new possible strategies for one's own interpretative acts.

Saptamatrka Worship and Sculptures, an Iconological Interpretation of Conflicts and Resolutions in the Storied Brahmanical Icons

This book employs the multi-disciplinary methodologies of art historical interpretation to contextualise nearly the whole range of Saptamatrka icons within the larger historical evolution of Brahmanical religion, myhtology, and theology.

Effects of Art History Instruction on Fourth and Eighth Grade Students' Abilities to Interpret Artworks Contextually

As art educators continue to debate and interpret standards against which to measure the success of art programs at the national, state, and local levels, they regularly include learning content drawn from art history. At the national level, one of the six standards reads Understanding the visual arts in relation to history and (National Consortium of Arts Associations, 1994, p. 71). Art educators in each state are incorporating art history learning into their own state standards. For decades art educators (Chapman, 1978; Eisner, 1972; Feldman, 1970; Goldstein, 1932; Lowenfeld, 1947) have identified art history as a major content area and have succeeded in convincing others to recognize its inclusion in the art curriculum. Kern has reported evidence of art history's inclusion in state guidelines, in one form or another, for over 100 years (Kern, 1987). Traditionally art educators have focused on factual recall and style recognition as the key ideas and skills that their students should learn in art history. Gardner's (1972) early study measured the effect of instruction on students' ability to recognize style. Although facts are essential to developing art historical understanding, and style recognition is an ability exhibited by connoisseurs of art, are these the most important key ideas and abilities upon which teachers should focus their students' attention? Are there higher level understandings to which students can aspire? Kowalchuk articulates the value of higher order teaching and understanding in art education. She explains that teaching for higher order understanding aims at fostering the kinds of in-depth understandings, skills, and dispositions needed to successfully apply understandings in unfamiliar or novel contexts (Kowalchuk, 1996). Johnston, Roybal, and Parsons (1988) describe a higher level of understanding when they distinguish the relatively low level skill of style recognition from the higher level skill of understanding style. One of several higher level understandings which art historians seek is historical/cultural, or contextual, interpretation. Art historians do more than establish facts and recognize styles. They also interpret artworks from various perspectives within the historical/cultural context in which the artworks were made. This study builds upon two earlier studies that reported differences in the art historical interpretation abilities of young people and adults with various art education backgrounds (Erickson, 1994; 1995). Findings from these studies suggest that intermediate and middle school students vary in their abilities to interpret an artwork from various contextual perspectives. Evidence from these earlier studies suggests that students are more able to interpret an artwork from the perspective of an historical artist who made the work, than from the perspective of the historical viewer who had an opportunity to see the work. Evidence from these studies further suggests that students are more able to interpret an artwork from the perspective of the historical viewer than from the perspective of the historical culture at large. That is, they are more able to consider the perspective of an individual in the past viewing the work, than to consider how the work may have influenced or been influenced by the ideas, beliefs, or activities of the culture in which the work was made. In the earlier two studies students selected one artwork from a number of artworks to interpret contextually. In this study the artwork to be interpreted remains constant. This study seeks to gather additional evidence about the sequence of understandings of contextual perspectives which young people find more or less challenging to use as they consider unfamiliar artworks. That is, whether students most successfully use the historical artist's perspective, next most successfully use the historical viewer's perspective, and least successfully use the perspective of the historical culture at large. …

A new lead-based yellow in the seventeenth century

Since the important rediscovery by Jacobi in 1941 of the use of lead-tin yellow as a traditional artists' pigment, and the identification by Kühn of two distinct modifications of this material, elemental analysis and crystallographic determinations using X-ray diffraction (XRD) have been applied routinely to opaque yellow pigments from Old Master paintings. We report here the discovery and characterization by these methods of a new lead-based yellow in seventeenth-century paintings, based on a ternary oxide of lead, tin and antimony. This pigment is distinct from the two varieties of lead-tin yellow and from pure lead antimonate (Naples yellow); it appears to be restricted in use to Italian painting and specifically to paintings produced in Rome. Examples in the work of Poussin, Pietro da Cortona, Salvator Rosa, Sassoferrato, Gentileschi and Lanfranco are given, and art-historical interpretations based in the presence of this pigment are discussed.

Past and Present/Fiction and Fact: Narratives in American Art History

Both of these books-Morgan's biography of a single artist, Lubin's contextualized study of six works of American Art-fall within the current reach of American Art History. Yet these two studies could not be more different in range, ambition, and approach. Their pairing provides an opportunity to think about American art as cultural and social history. Together they raise questions about what counts as evidence, and about historical and art-historical interpretation (including the role of postmodern theory in the historical enterprise). Morgan's biography is the third book and the master narrative of his project on Kenyon Cox.' As classical muralist, antimodern critic, and teacher, Cox became the major voice for standards of academic craftsmanship and the ideal in American art from the 1880s until his death in 1919. This book draws the threads of life and work together into a carefully paced, four-act drama of eight chapters. Act One describes Cox's childhood in the accomplished Ohio family that nurtured his lifelong ideals. Act Two treats Cox's development: his five-year training as an art student in Paris; his first decade as a struggling artist-illustrator, teacher and writer in New York; and his social life and courtship of the art student Louise Howland King. The third act chronicles Cox's maturity. At the heart of the book, chapter 5 traces Cox's twenty-two-year career as one of America's most distinguished classical muralists. Chapter 6 deals with the annual cycles in the artist's life-the seasons in New York followed by summers with family in Cornish New Hampshire or at artists' colonies. Chapter 7 gives us the critic who championed the artist's role in the process of building social cohesion, and opposed

Second and Sixth Grade Students' Art Historical Interpretation Abilities: A One-Year Study

This study reports on second and sixth grade students' art historical interpretation abilities through one year of intensive art history instruction. Four assessments through the year measured stud...