Art History Dissertations and Theses

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Synaesthetic Dress: Episodes of Sensational Objects in Performance Art, 1955-1975
(University of Kansas, 2019-12-31) Lyons, Samantha; Cateforis, David; Kaneko, Maki; Pultz, John; Eldredge, Charles; Tveit, May
This study examines the significance of clothing-like sculptural forms in the performance practices of three international postwar and contemporary artists: Atsuko Tanaka (Japanese, 1932-2005), Hélio Oiticica (Brazilian, 1937-1980) and Robert Kushner (American, b. 1949). These three artists occupy a special position within the development of performance and body art during the postwar decades for their focus on the sensorial and interactive properties of clothing-like objects. I propose the new term of synaesthetic dress as an interpretive concept to characterize and study the wearable, multi-sensory, and participatory forms in their diverse practices and as a strategy for collaboration and social engagement. My research seeks an understanding of how Tanaka, Oiticica, and Kushner draw upon the language of clothing—a form that typically contains and defines the individual body—to create alternative material, social, and artistic sites for collective experience. Counter to traditional interpretations of clothing that tend to view it as a marker or relic of the artist’s body, or as a material that can construct, perform or contest various identities, this study proposes to see—or rather—sense clothing in a new light, through the thought-provoking performances of artists who foreground the multisensory experience of their audiences and participants. This project advances the importance of embodied experience in performance practices and contributes to an evolving body of art historical scholarship that addresses the entire human sensorium in aesthetic encounters.
The life and art of Ōtagaki Rengetsu
(University of Kansas, 1988-12-31) Johnson, Lee
Ōtagaki Rengetsu was a poetess, potter, calligrapher and painter. The aim of this thesis is to describe the general characteristics of her style in each of these fields, particularly those which give some insight into her personality. Since Rengetsu's artistic development is most clearly defined in the area of calligraphy, analysis of her calligraphic style and its change through time plays a key role in this paper. Previous scholarship has examined the development of Rengetsu's calligraphic line, but other elements such as composition of the lines and their placement have never been discussed in relation to her overall development. These elements reveal a distinct change between her works of her sixties and early seventies and those of the last ten years of her life. Another omission to scholarship has been in the area of signature analysis. Although charts have been published illustrating her signature at different ages, there has been little discussion of the development displayed in the signature. This paper will discuss the development of Rengetsu's signature which, except for some minor variations, does follow a clear progression and can be used to define different periods within her art.
Like Life: Royal Portraits of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) in Ritual Context
(University of Kansas, 2018-05-31) Son, Myenghee; Haufler, Marsha; Fowler, Sherry; Lee, Jungsil; McNair, Amy; Yun, Kyoim
This dissertation examines the functions and meanings of Joseon royal portraits by investigating them in light of the material culture and the ritual practices of royal ancestor worship in royal portrait halls, where offerings of wine and food were presented before portrait paintings for royal ancestral rites. This study classifies portrait halls as either official or informal, depending on their inclusion in or exclusion from the official state rites and goes on to discern the different features and functions of specific portrait halls through in-depth investigation of the ritual goods used therein and the interior settings and adornment of the halls. By distinguishing repositories, where portraits were not formally worshipped, from portrait halls, it also offers case studies of portraits in the repositories and illuminates their original function and distinctive character in form and style. The first chapter focuses on the way the early Joseon court legitimated the rituals for the portrait halls of King Taejo and King Sejo by incorporating them into the state rites, which drew on Confucian textual traditions rooted in Chinese antiquity. It demonstrates that the principle of “serving the dead as if they were alive” shaped both the ritual practice and the material culture of portrait worship and resulted in the adoption of contemporary secular objects for use as offering vessels and furnishings in the portrait halls. The second chapter elucidates the functions of Yeonghuijeon, Jangnyeongjeon, and Hwaryeongjeon, the official portrait halls of the late Joseon and discusses the ways the status of individual halls was expressed through the material goods used in their rituals and physical environment. The third chapter concentrates on the distinguishing, exceptional features of Seonwonjeon, the informal portrait hall for the royal family in the inner quarter of the palace. Through an analysis of its material culture, this chapter addresses the origin of Seonwonjeon and identifies the distinguishing features and functions of the hall that arose out of popular customs and religious traditions other than state rites. Within this overarching scheme, the fourth chapter considers the issues of status and formality related to the displayed portraits as objects of worship in specific portrait halls. Recognizing the commemorative and “quasi-public” function of official portrait halls, it also examines the Joseon concepts of “rulership” embodied by the portraits displayed in them and the way the visual formulas for these portraits changed over the course of the dynasty. For the latter, I use the history of the imperial portraits of the Ming Dynasty as a foil. The fifth chapter notes the emergence of several repositories in the late Joseon period and discusses portraits of certain late Joseon kings that were installed in the repositories. It argues that these portraits functioned not only as stand-ins for the kings but also served broader political agendas.
The Thun-Hohenstein Album: Constructing and Commemorating the Armored Body in the Holy Roman Empire
(University of Kansas, 2018-05-31) Kirchhoff, Chassica Felese; Hedeman, Anne D; Goddard, Stephen H; Marina, Areli; Bourgeois, Christine; Meyertholen, Andrea
Through the lens of the Thun-Hohenstein album, this dissertation explores the ways that late medieval constructions of martial identity continued to inflect how the armored body was represented and perceived in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. The album includes 112 artworks with diverse origins and antecedents, which were created from the 1470s through the 1590s. This diversity lends itself to the use of case studies of individual drawings as foci from which chapters depart to explore thematic nodes within the bound collection. These case studies illuminate the ways that the drawings’ pictorial antecedents and retrospective representation of specific armors situate the album within a culture of remembrance centered around Maximilian I and his court. The chapters’ progression roughly parallels the viewer’s progress from the beginning of the album through its codicological arrangement. It simultaneously evokes a temporal progression through the martial culture of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and its retrospective representation in the middle and late 1500s and into the early seventeenth century, when the album was bound. Chapter 1 introduces the album’s history and codicology, as well as the artistic circles from which the drawings that fill it emerged. This chapter also traces the development of European plate armor as well as the historiography of arms and armor studies, and establishes theoretical foundations for considering how armor functioned within the commemorative imaginary of the early modern Holy Roman Empire. Chapter 2 focuses on three late-fifteenth-century drawings placed between the album’s first and second quires. As the oldest works that the Thun album collects, these images represent fifteenth-century pictorial and literary genres that established visual languages of the armored body that resonate through the album’s later drawings. Identification of the drawings’ original contexts or antecedents exposes aspects of the unknown compiler’s body of source material, which, in turn, hints at what associations he was seeking to evoke in compiling the collection of drawings in the album. Chapter 3 considers visualizations of the tournament collected in the album and the pictorial traditions that influenced them. It suggests that the Thun album derived meaning not only from its own content and from the meanings associated with the real armors represented on its pages, but also from the pictorial strategies, representational lineages, and retrospective focus that it shared with the tradition of Augsburg artworks from which it emerged and in which it took its place. Chapter 4 examines a drawing that depicts Maximilian I clad in armor and riding a horse that is also fully encased in steel plates from its head to its hooves. This image was drawn during the 1540s, but it retrospectively imagines Maximilian’s ceremonial entries into the cities of Namur and Luxembourg in 1480. By analyzing this drawing and its models, Chapter 4 places the drawing within a tradition that mythologized Maximilian’s Burgundian exploits and retrospectively celebrated his idealized knightly identity. Chapter 5 considers a drawing of a splendid armor that is part of a group of sixteen full-figure drawings that form the album’s fourth and fifth quires, at least nine of which picture recognizable armors crafted for imperial or princely wearers. This chapter analyzes the drawing and its codicological context within the album alongside exploration of the real armor’s history as a component of a commemorative collection in the so-called Heroes’ Armory of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tirol. In each case, the armor—both real and depicted—was juxtaposed with other armored bodies that were associated with the Habsburg imperial court. The Conclusion highlights conceptual narratives that unfold through the five chapters and identifies pathways for future research. Four Appendices support this study by providing diagrams of armor for man and horse, a table of codicological data that details the previously unstudied physical structure of the album, visualizations of the familial and social networks that connected Augsburg artists and armorers, and a glossary of common technical terms that appear throughout the dissertation.
Situating Contemporary Korean Art in the Age of Globalization
(University of Kansas, 2018-05-31) Park, Eunyoung; Cateforis, David; Kaneko, Maki; Haufler, Marsha; Pultz, John; Baskett, Michael
This dissertation examines the development of contemporary Korean art from the late 1980s through the first decade of the 21st century under the influence of globalization through case studies of selected internationally known Korean artists, Yiso Bahc (1957-2004), Do-ho Suh (b.1962), and Gimhongsok (b.1964) who are engaged with globalization through their personal experiences, works of art, and critical responses surrounding their works and activities. Bahc, Suh, and Gim exemplify a new generation of Korean artists who were born in the 1950s and 1960s and studied abroad in the 1980s and 1990s. Based on their transnational experience, these artists emerged in the Korean and global art scene from the 1980s to the early 2000s responding to different temporal, ideological, and discursive backgrounds. This dissertation not only analyzes these three artists’ work in relation to the impact of globalization in the Korean and global art scene, but also discusses the transformation of social, cultural, theoretical, and discursive settings of their works and activities through the investigation of curatorial projects and art criticism surrounding them. The first chapter broadly maps out social, cultural, institutional, and critical spaces from the late 1980s by tracing the changes in Korean society, art institutions, tendencies of curatorial projects and artists’ activities and situating these three artists in these sociocultural, institutional, and discursive spaces. The next three chapters analyze each artist individually, but focus on drawing common issues from these three artists’ works. First, these chapters address these three artists’ examination of the formation, conflict, and transformation of identities through the encounter with different physical, cultural, linguistic, and social spaces. Second, these chapters consider the possibilities and limitations of connection, communication, and translation across different communities, cultures, and societies, as seen in the three artists’ works. Third, these chapters discuss the change of social structure and the notion of the public under globalization advanced in the three artists’ works. In other words, the research of these artists focusing on common issues enables the tracing of the construction of cultural identity of contemporary Korean art encountering outside worlds. Complementing the current scholarship, this dissertation, at the basic level, not only provides in-depth art historical analysis of Bahc, Suh, and Gim beyond the current essays mainly published in exhibition catalogues, but also comprehensively weaves the analysis of artists, art institutions, curatorial projects, and art criticism together beyond fragmented discussions. By exploring the social, cultural, and critical spaces with which these artists personally engage, in which their works are produced, and in which their works are received and critical responses are created, this dissertation attempts to locate Bahc, Suh, and Gim in contemporary Korean art history and situate Korean art in the globalization age.
The Kōfukuji Nan’endō and Its Buddhist Icons: Emplacing Family Memory and History of the Northern Fujiwara Clan, 800-1200
(University of Kansas, 2018-12-31) Chan, Yen-Yi; Fowler, Sherry; McNair, Amy; Kaneko, Maki; Stiller, Maya; Lindsey, William
This dissertation investigates how the memorial function of the Nan’endō (Southern Round Hall) at Kōfukuji in Nara began, continued, and transformed within the history of the Northern Fujiwara clan from the ninth through the twelfth centuries. Departing from the previous scholarship on the Nan’endō, this study considers that ancestral commemoration is as important as religious devotion in considering the visual forms of the sanctuary and its relationship with the Northern Fujiwara clan. With a longue durée approach to the Nan’endō along with analyses of its visual program and an array of texts such as courtier diaries, setsuwa tales, travel journals, and temple records, I demonstrate that the architecture of the building and its Buddhist images functioned as a locus of memory and an engine of remembering for the maintenance of family institution, its tradition, value, and ways of thinking. Spatial and visual components of the Nan’endō were like “building bricks” employed to construct an image of the Northern Fujiwara as a familial group, present their preoccupation with lineage and kinship, and make their existence and experiences visible. This dissertation therefore uses a novel approach to illuminate the interactions between place, memory, and family in Japanese Buddhist studies and unravel the role of religious sites as a visual means through which the faithful developed ideas about themselves and attitudes toward their lives. Chapter One outlines the history of Kōfukuji, the tutelary temple of the Fujiwara clan, from the eighth to twelfth century. This delineation sets up a religious and familial context, in which the Nan’endō was situated and its history unfolded. Chapter Two examines the creation of the Nan’endō as a memorial in 813, exploring how the practices of religious devotion and ancestral commemoration coalesced and manifested in the architectural features of the hall and its iconographic program. Chapter Three deals with the transformation of the Nan’endō as a miraculous site beginning in the mid-eleventh century. I explore the factors that contributed to this transformation and analyze Nan’endō setsuwa tales and replications of the building that testified to the sanctification of the site. Chapter Four delves into the devotion history of Fukūkenjaku Kannon (Skt. Amoghapāśa Avalokiteśvara) in the Northern Fujiwara family from the eighth to the twelfth century. I analyze the process in which the icon of this deity in the Nan’endō became identified as the protector of the Northern Fujiwara clan in the late eleventh century. In doing so, I examine images of the deity, accounts of the family’s devotion to it, and copies of the Nan’endō Fukūkenjaku Kannon. Chapter Five investigates the reconstruction of the Nan’endō and its images during 1181-1189 with a focus on the patronage of Fujiwara (Kujō) no Kanezane (1149-1207), showing how his role as the chieftain of the family, his Pure Land devotion, and contemporary belief in living Buddhas (shōjin butsu) informed the restoration of the hall.
Embracing Death and the Afterlife: Sculptures of Enma and His Entourage at Rokuharamitsuji
(University of Kansas, 2018-12-31) Kwon, Ye-Gee; Fowler, Sherry D.; McNair, Amy E.; Stiller, Maya; Kaneko, Maki; Yun, Kyoim
This dissertation investigates a sculptural group of Enma and his entourage that was once enshrined in an Enma hall located within the Kyoto temple Rokuharamitsuji precinct, and hopes to highlight the role that significant yet understudied sculptures played in the development of the cult of Enma and the Ten Kings in premodern Japan. Rokuharamitsuji is of great importance to study the cult of Enma and the Ten Kings not only for its rare early sculptures of Enma and his two assistants created in the thirteenth century when the cult began to flourish in Japan, but also for the later addition of a seventeenth-century Datsueba sculpture, which reveals the evolution of the cult through its incorporation of Japanese popular belief. This study examines how the Rokuharamitsuji sculptural group presented images of hell within a designated space and conveyed messages of salvation to their beholders, responding to the environs of the salvation-oriented temple. It demonstrates that historical, geographical, and cultural attributes of the temple’s surrounding area, namely Rokuhara (a field of skulls), strengthened the belief in Enma and the Ten Kings and contextualized the cult in combination with another belief in Datsueba.
Picturing Processions: The Intersection of Art and Ritual in Seventeenth-century Dutch Visual Culture
(University of Kansas, 2017-12-31) Blocksom, Megan Carpenter; Stone-Ferrier, Linda; Kessler, Marni; Hedeman, Anne D.; Goddard, Stephen; Fourny, Diane
This study examines representations of religious and secular processions produced in the seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands. Scholars have long regarded representations of early modern processions as valuable sources of knowledge about the rich traditions of European festival culture and urban ceremony. While the literature on this topic is immense, images of processions produced in the seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands have received comparatively limited scholarly analysis. One of the reasons for this gap in the literature has to do with the prevailing perception that Dutch processions, particularly those of a religious nature, ceased to be meaningful following the adoption of Calvinism and the rise of secular authorities. This dissertation seeks to revise this misconception through a series of case studies that collectively represent the diverse and varied roles performed by processional images and the broad range of contexts in which they appeared. Chapter 1 examines Adriaen van Nieulandt’s large-scale painting of a leper procession, which initially had limited viewership in a board room of the Amsterdam Leprozenhuis, but ultimately reached a wide audience through the international dissemination of reproductions in multiple histories of the city. I argue that the painting memorialized a storied, yet defunct ritual and, in doing so, inscribed the values of community, civic charity and tolerance within Amsterdam’s cultural memory. Chapter 2 investigates Caspar Barlaeus’s Medicea hospes, a lavishly illustrated book produced to honor the 1638 visit to Amsterdam of Marie de’ Médici, Queen Regent of France. Intended for an elite European audience, the text featured a series of etched and engraved images depicting the Queen’s ritual procession through the city as well as the tableaux vivants and water spectacles staged in her honor. I suggest that Barlaeus and the Amsterdam city council capitalized on Marie’s ritual entry and its subsequent representation in the Medicea hospes as opportunities to aggrandize and disseminate the city’s reputation at home and abroad. Chapter 3 considers paintings and prints of religious processions designed for an open, middle-class market. Often intimate in scale, these images demonstrate an ongoing interest in and demand for depictions of processional subjects, which civic and ecclesiastical bodies routinely subjected to legislation. I focus on scenes of parades held on Twelfth Night and Shrovetide, the two processional rituals most often depicted by Dutch artists, and argue that viewers desired such images for their pictorialization of communal identity and the concomitant cultural values they espoused. Chapter 4 examines Hendrick van der Burch’s unusual painting of the graduation procession of a doctoral candidate at Leiden University. The subject of such an institutional rite of passage, I suggest, would have appealed to residents of the surrounding university neighborhood as a familiar, seasonal marker of celebration and as a symbolic representation of the intersection between academic ritual and the local community. Collectively, the four chapters assert the changing roles, yet continued relevance of Dutch processional images within an increasingly secular, urban and culturally pluriform society.
Familial Identity and Site Specificity: A Study of the Hybrid Genre of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Family-Landscape Portraiture
(University of Kansas, 2017-12-31) Giannino, Denise; Stone-Ferrier, Linda; Cateforis, David; Goddard, Stephen; Hedeman, Anne D; Keel, William
In the seventeenth century, the proliferation of Dutch family portraits among the broad middle class was a distinctive facet of artistic production. Within this visual trend, the vast majority of such paintings present the sitters in outdoor environs rather than the domestic sphere. This dissertation focuses on such images and adopts the term “family-landscape portrait” to highlight the hybrid nature of the images that commemorate a particular family within a specific locale. I consider the particularities of seventeenth-century Dutch family-landscape portraiture as a separate pictorial genre and attend to the ways in which these images construct identity and generate meaning, including through the blending of portraiture and landscape conventions. In order to investigate the complex meanings of family-landscape portraits, this dissertation will consider the images from the perspective of the biographical circumstances of the sitters’ lives; contemporary cultural, socioeconomic and political issues that inflect the choice of symbols or locale; and the pictorial traditions from which the images stem. Chapters divided by commonalities in locale reveal that mercantile or professional identities and values resonated strongly with families pictured along a coast. Kin groups portrayed near urban landmarks tended to highlight communal memory and political or civic values as facets of familial ideals. Groups adjacent to ruins displayed a concern with history, familial memory and cultural sophistication. Families depicted on their country estates highlighted communal and professional identities, earned leisure and hospitality as integral to familial identity.
Chu-lu : a northern Sung ceramic legacy
(University of Kansas, 1989) Xie, Margaret Carney
In 1108 A.D., Chu-lu Hsien and neighboring areas, all located in China's present-day southern Hopei Province, were inundated by a flood of the Yellow River. Northern Sung Chu-lu, including its ceramics, remained preserved, intact, buried in the silt of the Yellow River for nearly 800 years, until 1919 when drought-stricken farmers were digging wells. At that time, farmers unearthed ceramic wares--cream-colored porcellaneous stonewares with a characteristic rust-colored crackling and staining in the glaze caused by burial in the silt of the Yellow River for over 800 years. Hundreds of pieces were unearthed, many being taken abroad by foreign collectors. In the early 1920's inscribed Chu-lu ceramics were collected and published by the Tientsin Museum, and two dwelling sites were excavated by a team of archaeologists from Peking. The primary ceramic ware recovered from this inundated area were Tz'u-chou wares, wares distinguished by the use of a white slip over a buff or light grey body with a clear glaze over the white slip. This site offered several unique opportunities. Chu-lu contained datable (inscribed) pieces from a datable site. By gathering the pieces together that had been scattered throughout the world, there was still the opportunity to identify a significant and comprehensive collection of datable ceramics from one Hopei Province site--and see how it has influenced our perception of Sung ceramics. Additionally, insights into the innovations and vitality of Tz'u-chou wares in 1108 A.D. were gained. These Chu-lu wares were put in historical perspective with earlier and later periods, and contemporaneous Sung materials. Through this investigation, their significant contribution to the modernization of the ceramic industry in China became clear, in terms of both the evolution of true porcelain and overglaze and underglaze decorating techniques, and the practice of marking ownership on Chinese ceramics. Gathered together during this project, this comprehensive collection of datable materials from one site has given undeniable proof of the high level of technical virtuosity and creativity which existed in 1108 A.D. Furthermore, it has given us both a collection to use for later comparative purposes, and a glimpse into Northern Sung China.
KITAGAWA TAMIJI’S ART AND ART EDUCATION: TRANSLATING CULTURE IN POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO AND MODERN JAPAN
(University of Kansas, 2017-05-31) Kumagai, Takaaki; Kaneko, Maki; Cateforis, David C; Fowler, Sherry D; Gerbert, Elaine; McNair, Amy E
This dissertation investigates the life and career of the Japanese painter, printmaker, and art educator, Kitagawa Tamiji (1894-1989), and his conception of Mexico as cultural Other. Today, Kitagawa is widely recognized in Japan as an artist and educator, whose thought and practices were deeply inspired by his long-term residence in postrevolutionary Mexico (1921-1936). Kitagawa left Japan at the age of twenty to study art in the United States. After engaging in several temporary jobs and briefly being trained at the Art Students League of New York, he went to Mexico in 1921, to eventually spend the next decade and a half working as an artist and art educator. Kitagawa’s conception and narrative of Mexican culture—especially that of the Mexican indigenous population—are noteworthy for an early twentieth-century artist/intellectual. Rather than seeing Mexico in terms of its widespread stereotype as a distant tropical country, he regarded the country as a key locus of the emerging anti-colonial notion of culture. Based on his experience in the utopian political/social milieu immediately after the Mexican Revolution (c.1910-1920), after his return to Japan, Kitagawa took Mexico as a crucial reference point in conceiving the future trajectory of post-1945 Japanese modernity. In this dissertation, Kitagawa’s career as an artist and educator will be investigated alongside the notion of “ethnography” as addressed by James Clifford in the late 1980s. Beyond the common understanding of the term within academic anthropology as a professional practice of participant observation and writing, Clifford defines ethnography as an omnipresent experience of displacement and cultural encounter in the contemporary global world shared by a variety of subjects such as immigrants, tourists, and “native” informants. Clifford emphasizes the experience of travel in ethnography, or a process of moving away from “home” in modern Euro-America, which often leads one to critical meditations on the normative cultural/political values in the West, including those represented by the discourse of nationalism, socio-economic progress and colonial domination over non-Western Other. According to Clifford and others, ethnography is a practice that prompts an alternative understanding of the modern/contemporary global world, in which the conventional boundary between “civilized” Self and “backward” Other has increasingly been blurred. Keeping Clifford’s notion of “ethnography” in mind, this dissertation argues that Kitagawa’s experience of travel over the Americas and his long-term residence in Mexico equipped him with an ethnographic perspective of modernity. After his return to Japan, expressing such critical standing on modernity, Kitagawa embarked on a difficult task of cultural translation in order to exercise his Mexican-inspired art and pedagogy within a post-1945 Japanese social context. His activities revolved around knowledge of the cultural Other that emphasized an alternative mode of modernity. In negotiating the dominant West-centered narrative of culture, Kitagawa’s art and pedagogy dealt with social ethics and worldviews that were inherently incompatible with the dominant ideologies of Western modernity.
An American Jesuit Treasury of Religious Art: The Van Ackeren Collection in the Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University
(University of Kansas, 2017-05-31) Whittaker, Loren; Cornelison, Sally J.; Hedeman, Anne D.; Dow, Douglas; Stinson, Philip; Pultz, John; Mostafa, Heba
Abstract On 13 October 1967 Virginia P. and Robert C. Greenlease donated a walnut crucifix by French sculptor César Bagard to Rockhurst University’s Jesuit community in Kansas City, Missouri. This gift initiated a collaboration of thirty years between Mrs. Greenlease and Rockhurst’s president, Father Maurice E. Van Ackeren, S.J. Together they sought to enhance the university and its students’ spiritual and educational experience by making fine religious works of art accessible for viewing on campus. Virginia financed the purchases that Father Van Ackeren made, the sum of which came to be known as the Van Ackeren Collection of Religious Art. Throughout their endeavor, the two took advantage of the expertise of the curators of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (now known as The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) and employed that institution as an intermediary station for evaluating works before they were purchased. The majority of objects were acquired during the 1970s. This timing proved fortuitous for the assembly of the university’s collection, as museum-quality sacred works were available at fairly reasonable prices. The result for Rockhurst was a diverse collection of exemplary objects depicting religious subjects and/or with liturgical functions that date from the late medieval through the rococo periods. The works that comprise the collection are of Italian, German, Austrian, French, and Spanish provenance and their mediums range from lindenwood, polychromed wood, alabaster, and marble statues, to paintings rendered in tempera on wood panel and in oil on canvas and copper, as well as to works on paper, furniture, textiles, and silver. Many of the collection’s works are associated with known artists, but most have scarcely been considered with regard to those artists’ respective oeuvres. Painters and sculptors of Italian and non-Italian origins whose works are represented in the collection include Andrea di Bartolo (1360-1428), Gil de Siloé (c. 1450-1501), Francesco d’Ubertino Verdi, also called Il Bachiacca (1494-1557), Antiveduto Grammatica (1571-1626), Peter Strudel (1660-1714), Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669), Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), Francesco Trevisani (1656-1746), Ehrgott Bernhard Bendl (1660-1738), Felix Planner (active 1690-1710), Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665-1747), and Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770). The dissertation is divided into three sections. Part one chronicles the collection’s history and discusses the acquisition process, how choices were made in the selection of objects, which works were chosen, and what those decisions might indicate about personal taste, contemporary art market trends, and addressing the rationale for assembling a collection for educational purposes. Following the introduction is a catalog of the collection’s objects. The entries are divided into two categories: “Paintings and Works on Paper” and “Sculptures and Metalwork,” and each is arranged in chronological order. The contextual and iconographic assessment of these objects comprises the core of this study.
Mother of the Nation: Femininity, Modernity, and Class in the Image of Empress Teimei
(University of Kansas, 2016-05-31) Miller, Alison; Kaneko, Maki; Fowler, Sherry; Cateforis, David; Pultz, John; Takeyama, Akiko
Abstract This dissertation examines the political significance of the image of the Japanese Empress Teimei (1884-1951) with a focus on issues of gender and class. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Japanese society underwent significant changes in a short amount of time. After the intense modernizations of the late nineteenth century, the start of the twentieth century witnessed an increase in overseas militarism, turbulent domestic politics, an evolving middle class, and the expansion of roles for women to play outside the home. As such, the early decades of the twentieth century in Japan were a crucial period for the formation of modern ideas about femininity and womanhood. Before, during, and after the rule of her husband Emperor Taishō (1879-1926; r. 1912-1926), Empress Teimei held a highly public role, and was frequently seen in a variety of visual media. Through the investigation of various discursive forms of visual materials featuring Empress Teimei, this dissertation aims to reveal the political significance of Teimei as a role model of middle-class and aristocratic femininity. To this end, this dissertation examines Empress Teimei’s appearance in formal portraiture, representations of Teimei in popular media, and emulations of the Empress by upper class women, as well as tracing changes in her image through time as related to political circumstances and her personal biography. As a public figure, Empress Teimei held great sway over women’s decorum in the first three decades of the twentieth century; she was the first Empress to establish monogamous modern family relations, and was the first modern Empress to mother the successive Emperor. Despite her relevance to the narrative of Japanese imperial history, very few publications, particularly in English, have fully discussed the historical importance of the Empress. Furthermore, the visual representation that was so crucial to the formation of her public persona and image has received scant scholarly consideration. This dissertation will fill a void in art history, visual culture, and Japanese studies, opening up future avenues of research on how art and visual culture impacted the politics of gender and power in modern Japan. Specifically, this dissertation will pioneer the study of how the media presentation of the Imperial Family was intrinsically connected to the construction of feminine norms in the 1910s-30s. By bringing the image of Empress Teimei to the center of study, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of issues of gender and power as related to the Imperial Family in early twentieth-century Japan.
Carved into the Living Rock: Japanese Stone Buddhist Sculpture and Site in the Heian and Kamakura Periods
(University of Kansas, 2016-05-31) Voorhies, Rachel; Fowler, Sherry; Kaneko, Maki; Lee, Jungsil; Lindsey, William; McNair, Amy
This dissertation examines cliff-carved Buddhist stone sculpture through four site-specific case studies: two from the Heian period (794-1185) and two from the Kamakura period, including both central and peripheral sites in Nara Prefecture, the eastern Kantō region, and eastern Kyushu. The discussion of each site will focus on the role these sculptures played in the creation of a local sacred geography and the relationship between each site and its local pilgrimage practices, ranging from small-scale individual practice to the development of large-scale, multi-temple pilgrimage routes in the Edo period.
Re-Framing the American West: Contemporary Artists Engage History
(University of Kansas, 2015-12-31) Besaw, Mindy N.; Eldredge, Charles C; Cateforis, David C; Pultz, John; Goddard, Stephen; Krueger, Michael J
This study examines contemporary artists who revisit, revise, reimagine, reclaim, and otherwise engage directly with art of the American Frontier from 1820-1920. The revision of the historic images calls attention to the myth and ideologies imbedded in the imagery. Likewise, these contemporary images are essentially a framing of western imagery informed by a system of values and interpretive strategies of the present. The re-framing of the historic West opens a dialogue that expands beyond the frame, to look at images and history from different angles. This dissertation examines twentieth- and twenty-first century artists such as the Cowboy Artists of America, Mark Klett, Tony Foster, Byron Wolfe, Stephen Hannock, Bill Schenck, and Kent Monkman alongside historic western American artists such as Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Timothy O’Sullivan, Thomas Moran, W.R. Leigh, and Albert Bierstadt. The goals of the contemporary artists vary greatly, but collectively they challenge the notion of a singular history and interpretation of the American West. They examine the way in which the American West was framed through history, contributing to our understanding of both the nineteenth-century images and the contemporary experience.
The Diamond Ordination Platform of Tongdosa: Buddhist Spaces and Imagery in 18th-century Korea
(University of Kansas, 2016-05-31) Jung, Ghichul; Haufler, Marsha; Stevenson, Daniel; Stiller, Maya; McNair, Amy; Fowler, Sherry
The Diamond Ordination Platform at Tongdosa is a stone structure reportedly constructed in the early seventh century by the eminent Silla monk Jajang 慈藏 (fl. 636-645). It was intended to enshrine the true-body relics of Śākyamuni Buddha that Jajang had allegedly procured from Mañjuśrī Bodhisattva on Mt. Wutai in China. The history of the Diamond Ordination Platform and the rarity of the true-body relics enshrined there are the core reasons why Tongdosa was granted the prestigious status of “the Buddha Jewel Monastery” in Korea. Of particular interest is the manner in which the title and visual form of the Diamond Ordination Platform have come to be perceived in Korean Buddhism today. Indeed, not only do the name and form of the Diamond Ordination Platform combine to evoke an awareness of the true-body relics being housed within it, but its architectural form is also perceived as validating the authenticity of these relics. The question of how this phenomenon developed has not been raised thus far by modern scholars. Scholarly neglect of this critical component in the history of the Diamond Ordination Platform can be attributed to the widely accepted assumption that the prestigious status and absolute authority of the Diamond Ordination Platform today are natural outcomes of its original founding by Jajang in the seventh century. This dissertation reconsiders historical accounts of the cultic ascendancy of the true-body relics brought to Silla by the monk Jajang as well as the construction of the Diamond Ordination Platform at Tongdosa. It argues that, in the face of challenges to the authenticity of their relics and in competition with other monasteries, the late-Joseon Tongdosa monks successfully conferred absolute authority to their Diamond Ordination Platform while maintaining active interaction with the platform to visualize its supposed, invisible power. This dissertation asserts that the popular perception that the title and architectural form of the Diamond Ordination Platform function together to validate the enshrined objects as true-body relics and also lends sacred authority to them was a logical result of a shift in emphasis. That shift, which acknowledged that such sanctity was granted not merely by the presence of the true-body relics themselves but was also conferred by the Diamond Ordination Platform’s status as a specially demarcated place through the ritual spaces and images consecrated in various ceremonies over the centuries.
A Parade of Pictures: An Examination of the Illustrated Evolution of Gion Matsuri Throughout Japanese History
(University of Kansas, 2016-12-31) Miller, Sasha J.; Fowler, Sherry; Kaneko, Maki; McNair, Amy
This study of the Japanese festival known as Gion Matsuri examines a range of images, from seventeenth century painted screens of the capital and its environs to early twentieth century woodblock prints, based on their political and economic relationship with society. By viewing the illustrations through a political lens, in contrast to previous scholarship that focused on the religious evolution of the celebration, I show how the Japanese government utilized images of a traditional festival to bolster its authority over the city of Kyoto. Through iconographical and iconological analysis, I found that representations of the festival were directly tied to shifts in political eras throughout history and, in some cases, they functioned as false claims of prosperity. I also consider the impact Westernization had on the portrayal of the Matsuri. The incorporation of Western style features and imagery into the images aligns with the transformation of the festival from a religious celebration into a contemporary tourist and commercial holiday experience.
Bertram Hartman (1882-1960), an early modernist from Kansas
(University of Kansas, 2004) Elton, Martha Gage
This dissertation is a biographical study of the American artist Bertram Hartman (1882-1960). Hartman was born in Junction City, Kansas, to a German-American family. After graduating from high school in 1900, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed a traditional course of study in both fine and commercial arts. In 1911 he traveled to Munich, Germany, where he enrolled at the Royal Academy. There, he was influenced by the Jugendstil movement, and he developed an imaginative, decorative style of painting, as well as an interest in the integration of arts and crafts. In 1913 Hartman married Gusta Frank, whom he met in Munich. The couple then moved to New York, where they spent most of the rest of their lives. Hartman met other early modernist artists in Greenwich Village where the artistic ferment in the 1910s and 1920s encouraged experimentation in the arts. He had a gift for cultivating friendships with luminaries such as John Marin, William and Marguerite Zorach, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Untermeyer and others. Hartman was not only an easel painter, but also created batik designs and commercial art, including magazine illustrations, as well as mosaics and glass windows for New York architecture. Shortly after returning from a sojourn in France and Austria in 1925, Hartman focused his career on easel painting. He struggled financially due to the economic downturn in the 1930s and gradually his career sank into an eclipse. This study attempts to shed light on, and call renewed attention to, Bertram Hartman's career and work.
The Exotic Gift and the Art of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic
(University of Kansas, 2013-05-31) Rife, Ellen O'Neil; STONE-FERRIER, LINDA; CORNELISON, SALLY J; GODDARD, STEPHEN; MCNAIR, AMY; KEEL, WILLIAM
This dissertation examines the intersection between art and the gifting of exotic objects in the seventeenth-century United Provinces, directing attention to a special class of imagery visualizing the remarkable extent to which Europe's first consumer culture became intertwined with foreign goods and influences. Its four chapters present representative case studies encompassing a range of media, including prints and paintings, and artistic genres, such as still life, portraiture, landscape, and allegory, from the mid- through the late- seventeenth century. These episodes of exotic gift exchange and their manifestation in art belonged to public and private spheres, the gifting of men and women, and multiple classes of society. In analyzing these images, my methodology draws on close readings; socioeconomic, historical, pictorial, and cultural contexts; gender; and issues in gift theory, including reciprocity, identity, personalization, and commodity/gift status, to explore the pictures' meanings or functions for their audiences. Chapter one posits that Rembrandt van Rijn's 1650 print of a Filipino shell was designed by the artist to function as a gift necessitating reciprocation, and/or as a work of art for sale, in an effort to ameliorate his tenuous financial situation. Chapter two provides a cultural biography of two c. 1665 paintings depicting Brazil by Frans Post, which Johan Maurits van Nassau gave to Louis XIV in 1678, and considers the pictures' significance for their original Dutch audience, the giver, and the French court. Chapter three focuses on Nicolaes Berchem's c. 1665 Harbor Scene and proposes that the exotic gift exchange portrayed in the allegorical picture conflates trade and gift in the context of the burgeoning commercial city of Amsterdam. Chapter four highlights Gerard Hoet's c. 1678 Portrait of Anna Elisabeth van Reede that appears to make a statement about the noblewoman's role in her family and society by virtue of her wearing a garment evocative of Japanese robes gifted to the Dutch, which became a convention of male portraiture. This representative selection of pictures reveals the incorporation of the exotic gift into the fabric of Dutch art and culture, indicating the significant role the exotic played in the formation of Dutch identity.
Upending the Melting Pot: Photography, Performativity, and Immigration Re-Imagined in the Self-Portraits of Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew
(University of Kansas, 2016-05-31) Raimond, Ellen Cordero; Pultz, John; Cateforis, David C; Fowler, Sherry D; Chong, Kelly H; Molina, Ludwin E
Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew each employ our associations with photography, performativity, and self-portraiture to compel us to re-examine our views of immigrants and immigration and bring them up-to-date. Originally created with predominantly white European newcomers in mind, traditional assimilative narratives have little in common with the experience of immigrants of color for whom “blending in” with “white mainstream America” is not an option. Through self-portraiture, then, Tseng, Lee, and Matthew significantly confront the issue of the “raced body” directly, such that their work reveals as much about their adoptive country’s attitudes towards each artist’s perceived group—Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian—as the individuals themselves. In approaching their imagery as case studies of the contemporary immigrant experience, this dissertation argues that Tseng’s East Meets West (1979-89), Lee’s Projects (1997-2001), and Matthew’s An Indian from India (2001-07) share affinities with trends in contemporary literature in that the three artists’ self-portraits, like the writings of their author counterparts make a claim for the immigrant’s rightful place within the U.S. The first chapter contextualizes the three artists’ series by providing an overview of the history of Asian immigration in the United States. Each of the subsequent chapters explores one of the photographic series of interest, beginning with Tseng’s East Meets West; this chapter delves into the intersectionality of identity, by looking at how the artist cleverly employs Western stereotypes of the “inscrutable Chinese” to promote a worldview in which is is regarded as an artist first, gay Asian man second. Amongst Lee’s larger photographic series, her Schoolgirls and Young Japanese (East Village) Projects have been paid little scholarly attention. By addressing this lacuna in the third chapter, this dissertation claims that the the two “subprojects” play a key role in understanding Lee’s Projects as a whole. The fourth and final chapter looks to Matthew’s An Indian From India as providing the most “personal” glimpse into the immigrant experience by noting her use of audiences’ associations with nineteenth-century portraiture of Native Americans to affirm her South Asian Indian identity within the U.S.

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