Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age - Hardcover

Schwain, Kristin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801445779 ISBN 13: 9780801445774

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Religious imagery was ubiquitous in late-nineteenth-century American life: department stores, schoolbooks, postcards, and popular magazines all featured elements of Christian visual culture. Such imagery was not limited to commercial and religious artifacts, however, for it also found its way into contemporary fine art. In Signs of Grace, Kristin Schwain looks anew at the explicitly religious work of four prominent artists in this period-Thomas Eakins, F. Holland Day, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Henry Ossawa Tanner-and argues that art and religion performed analogous functions within American culture. Fully expressing the concerns and values of turn-of-the-century Americans, this artwork depicted religious figures and encouraged the beholders' communion with them.Describing how these artists drew on their religious beliefs and practices, as well as how beholders looked to art to provide a transcendent experience, Schwain explores how a modern conception of faith as an individual relationship with the divine facilitated this sanctified relationship between art and viewer. This stress on the interior and subjective experience of religion accentuated the artist's efforts to engage beholders personally with works of art; how better to fix the viewer's attention than to hold out the promise of salvation? Schwain shows that while these new visual practices emphasized individual encounters with art objects, they also carried profound social implications. By negotiating changes in religious belief-by aestheticizing faith in a new, particularly American manner-these practices contributed to evolving debates about art, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.

About this title

Review:

"Kristin Schwain considers the influences and interpretations of 'art' in the everyday lives of 'average' Americans. Concentrating her attention on four leading artists--painters Thomas Eakins, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Henry Ossawa Tanner and photographer F. Holland Day--Schwain attends to their place outside the elitist frames of academic art and theological debates.... Recommended."

--Choice

"Schwain's work forms part of a revival on scholarship on American religion that focuses on visual and material culture. She successfully challenges the concept that religion occupies a conservative, nostalgic, retrograde perspective within modernity. Schwain argues that it is precisely through their turn to religious themes that American artists (and art critics) forged a new, modern way of seeing, one in which art prompted personal contemplation and emotional transcendence.... This is a refreshing and thought-provoking study of a topic that has been marginalized for too long. Schwain's book deserves a broad readership for its keen core insight: that religious sensibility has a close affinity to the modernist way of seeing."

Synopsis:

Schwain (American art and architecture, U. of Missouri-Columbia) examines the religious work of four late 19th-century American artists--Thomas Eakins, F. Holland Day, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Henry Ossawa Tanner--arguing that art and religion at that time performed similar functions within American culture. Schwain also shows that these new vi

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0801445779
• ISBN 13: 9780801445774
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192