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

Sarah Burns

Yale University Press, 1996 - Art - 380 pages

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.

Contents

• Acknowledgments: 1
• Finding the Real American Artist: 19
• The Culture of Display and the Taint: 46
• Aestheticism Degeneration and the Regulation of Artistic: 79
• Painting as Rest Cure: 120
• Outselling the Feminine: 159
• Winslow Homer and the American Business Spirit: 187
• Performing the Self: 221
• Performing Bohemia: 247
• Cartoons and Artistic Identity: 277
• Populist versus Plutocratic Aesthetics: 300
• Notes: 329
• Index: 373

About the author

Sarah Burns is the Ruth N. Halls Professor Emerita in the Department of the History of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America
• Author: Sarah Burns
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: Yale University Press, 1996
• ISBN: 0300078595, 9780300078596
• Length: 380 pages
• Subjects: Art / American / General; Art / History / General; History / United States / 20th Century