The spectral imagination: American art between science and superstition in the late nineteenth century

art;painting;science;superstition;Spiritualism;magic;psychology;Henry Alexander;William Merritt Chase;Edwin Romanzo Elmer;Irving Ramsay Wiles

Thomas, Adam

关键词: art;    painting;    science;    superstition;    Spiritualism;    magic;    psychology;    Henry Alexander;    William Merritt Chase;    Edwin Romanzo Elmer;    Irving Ramsay Wiles;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/50400/Adam_Thomas.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation explores how tensions between science and superstition were embedded in and constitutive of the visual arts in late nineteenth-century America. By focusing on the work of artists Henry Alexander (1860–94), William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Edwin Romanzo Elmer (1850–1923), and Irving Ramsay Wiles (1861–1948), this project examines the interplay of these ostensibly opposing worldviews in painting. It traces how the interdependence of these terms—which were very much in flux during the era—provided a creative paradigm for negotiating the professionalization of science, the emergent discipline of psychology, new theories of perception and memory, as well as scientific and spiritual efforts to unlock material, psychic, and supernatural worlds broadly. This dissertation reassesses distinctions between so-called realistic and visionary idioms in American art and offers a revised conception of the intersections between art and science in this period.