The University of Alabama and The University of Alabama at BirminghamJoint Program for the M.A. in Art History presents the

Twentieth AnnualGraduate Student Symposiumin Art History

Friday, March 6, 2015sessions: Anderson Society Room, Ferguson Student Center 313, 9:00 AM-3:00 PMkeynote: Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library Room 205, 3:30 PMThe University of Alabamahosted by the ua department of art and art history

• Department of Art and Art History• Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences• The Graduate School• Department of American Studies• Harrison Galleries, Tuscaloosa

symposium supported by• The Summersell Center for the Study of the South• Roger Sidje, Associate Dean• Paul R. Jones Collection of

American Art at The University of Alabama

keynote lecture supported by

Symposium Program9:00-9:30 coffee: Anderson Room, Ferguson Ctr. (302)

Session 1 9:30-11:15 Anderson Society Room (313)Welcome and introductory comments

Caitlin Huber (UA) Reinterpreting Alabama’s Greek Revival: The Battle House and Architecture’s Effect on Religion, Race Relations and Slavery Justification

Celeste Paxton (UAB) Identity, Territorial Demarcation and Self-Defense at Chaturbhujnath Nala

Shane Harless (Tulane) The Donna Regina Passion Frescoes: A Portrayal of the Interior Altars of Invisible Women

11:15 to 11:30 coffee break: Anderson Room (302)

Session 2 11:30-12:30: Anderson Society Room (313)

Lauren Walter (Florida) The Ambiguity of the Pink Dress in Later Nineteenth- Century French Painting

Amy Williamson (UAB) ‘The Ladies’ Who Founded MoMA: How Three Female Art Collectors Created One of World’s Leading Museums

12:30 to 1:30 lunch: Anderson Room (302)

Session 3 1:30-3:00: Anderson Society Room (313)

Kelly Allen (UAB) O’Keeffe’s Skyscraper Series as a Symbol of Power and Social Independence

Rachel Fesperman (FSU) The Devil Behind: Castrated Sodomy and the Sexuality of Uncanny Violence in Man Ray’s Monument à D.A.F. de Sade

Megan Moore (UA) The Forgotten Beats: Photographing a Generation

Keynote address 3:30: Gorgas Library 205

Dr. Barbara Burlison Mooney (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Iowa) From Jumping Jack to Jump Jim Crow: The Origins of a Pernicious Southern Stereotype?

Reception following

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ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM AND THE JOINT PROGRAM FOR THE M.A.

The Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History, sponsored and shared by the departments of art and art history at The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, alternates campuses each year. The event was begun in 1996 by faculty on both campuses to bring their students together to hear and be heard by eminent scholars working in the field of art history. This year, the symposium has been opened to submissions from MA students around the region. Renowned scholars such as Paul Barolsky in the field of Italian Renaissance art, Allison Kettering in Dutch Baroque art, and emerging leaders such as Michael Yonan and Graham Boettcher, the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, have been keynote speakers.

The Joint Program for the M.A. in Art History was begun in 1987 to combine resources from each school and from their communities to provide a stronger program than either could offer alone. The program offered the first, and still the only, graduate degree in art history in the state of Alabama.

This year’s symposium and keynote speaker would not be possible without the generosity of our sponsors: UA Department of Art and Art History; the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; the Graduate School; the Department of American Studies and Harrison Gal-leries of Tuscaloosa. Our keynote speaker is generously supported by the Summersell Center for the Study of the South; Roger Sidje, Associate Dean; and the Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at The University of Alabama.

cover image credit:Scrapbook image late 19th century Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, no. 70x1.7, Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Delaware

Celeste Paxton, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Identity, Territorial Demarcation and Self-Defense at Chaturbhujnath Nala

Chaturbhujnath Nala, located in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India, is the longest rock art gallery known in the world today. It consists of open-air rock shelters found in a rift valley, along an ephemeral tributary that pours into the Chambal River. The shelters are composed primarily of Vindhyan sandstone, which has metamorphosed to quartzite over time. Because the site is located within the state-protected Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary and safeguarded by the Archaeological Sur-vey of India, the majority of the rock shelter paintings are still in immaculate condition. However, these artworks have yet to garner much attention by art historians, having been studied almost exclusively by archaeologists as evidence of regional cattle domestication during the Neolithic period. A number of fascinating images appear throughout Chatur-bhujnath Nala portraying horse-drawn chariots with armed warriors. While these are common motifs found at this partic-ular site, such depictions are quite unique among other rock art galleries in South Asia. One particular painting of interest features a fire-bearing humanoid figure, armed foot soldiers and a horse-drawn chariot with two charioteers. Utilizing a socio-cultural approach, I will contextualize this painting, and by extension similar artworks, within the broader scope of the technological warfare advancements of the Neolith-ic-Chalcolithic era. I will argue that such paintings were not only identifying markers of an emerging warrior class, but also strategically manufactured visual modes of territorial demar-cation and self-defense. Thereby, this will reveal the extraordi-nary level of complexity and self-awareness found within the prehistoric artworks at Chaturbhujnath Nala.

Caitlin Huber, The University of Alabama

Reinterpreting Alabama’s Greek Revival: The Battle House and Architecture’s Effect on Religion, Race Relations and Slavery Justification

Greek Revival architecture has long been revered as the national style for antebellum America. It became fashionable partly as a result of contemporary events such as the Greek War for Independence and worldwide archaeological discov-eries. The intention of this presentation is not to discredit the theories of previous scholarship regarding the Greek Revival. Instead I seek to illustrate one overlooked reason that many plantation owners in the southern region of the United States, particularly those in Tuscaloosa, Alabama chose to use Greek Revival in the construction of their homes. How might the style have symbolized its builder and affected his community? Through study of Alfred Battle’s 1844 Greek Revival renovation of his Tuscaloosa townhouse, now known as the Battle-Friedman House, I have identified a correlation in southern domestic architecture between classical motifs and concepts of control and hierarchy. Taking a social histo-ry approach, I demonstrate how this house serves as a case study for architecture’s regulative rule over slavery and race relations during the antebellum period in Alabama as well as a hierarchical tool meant to dictate a higher level of morality for the community and cement Battle as a commanding pres-ence in Tuscaloosa society.

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Lauren Walter, University of Florida

The Ambiguity of the Pink Dress in Later Nineteenth-Century French Painting

During the eighteenth century, pink was an expensive color reserved for wealthy French elites. However, by the nine-teenth century, with the democratization of color and fashion, it began to be worn by women across classes. The emergence of the department store in the 1850s and 1860s marked a new availability of ready-to-wear clothing for women of all classes. Now, both a demimondaine and a bourgeois woman could visit Bon Marché or La Samaritaine and purchase a pink dress. In paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet (pictured above), Henri Gervex, Mary Cassatt, and Jean Béraud, pink was a color that had different connotations depending on who was wearing it and when and where it was being worn. This essay examines the meaning of the pink dress in later nineteenth-century French painting. It considers implications of the color’s respectability, taking into account the behavior of the women wearing the dresses as well as the time and setting in which they are depicted. Exploring the works of these artists, it looks at women in pink of different classes and backgrounds within the context of rules of dress in later nine-teenth-century Paris. In December 1876 the Parisian Journal des Modes proclaimed that women should dress, “in unno-ticeable colors like the stone of the walls and the dust of the pavement.”* Far from the color of stone and dust, pink was a color that could raise more than a few eyebrows.

* Cited in Aileen Ribeiro, “Gustave Caillebotte: Paris Street, Rainy Day,” in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, ed. Gloria Groom (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), 194.

Shane Harless, Tulane University

The Donna Regina Passion Frescoes: A Portrayal of the Interior Altars of Invisible Women

By the thirteenth century, Eucharistic devotion had reached a crescendo of adoration among medieval Christians. Contem-porary sources recount how worshippers attended mass only for the moment of elevation, racing from church to church to see as many consecrations as possible. As the priest raised the transubstantiated wafer above his head, the assembled con-gregation was granted the momentary luxury of gazing upon God. While this awe-inspiring vision was believed to unify the gathered people, one should bear in mind those women whose eyes were shielded from witnessing the Eucharistic miracle. This paper discusses the Clarissan nuns of the Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina in Naples and the manner in which their strict claustration prohibited them from visually observing the liturgical celebration of the Mass. This presen-tation will seek to demonstrate how the Donna Regina Pas-sion frescoes (ca. 1318-1320), which adorned the walls of the conventual worship space and were commissioned solely for the nuns’ visual consumption, served as intercessory portals offering the cloistered community an alternative means to en-visage the Eucharist. This study aims to reconstruct the nuns’ experience of the liturgy of the Mass from their enclosed choir loft, capturing how the obstruction of their corporeal senses forced a different means of Eucharistic participation, which could only be achieved through the devotional practice of performative vision.

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Amy Williamson, University of Alabama at Birmingham

‘The Ladies’ Who Founded MoMA: How Three Female Art Collectors Created One of World’s Leading Museums

Three visionary women were instrumental in founding the Museum of Modern Art in 1929: Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, and Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan. In reaction to the lack of modern art in New York City’s museums, these women combined their collections, money and resources to present Matisses, Picassos, and other contemporary masters to the public to create what would become the core of the muse-um’s permanent collection. Both challenging and accepting the limitations of gender, the women enlisted the help of A. Conger Goodyear and Alfred Barr to help them navigate the art world whilst they built and insured the future of what would become one of the world’s leading repositories of modern art. This paper approaches the early history of MoMA from the perspective of gender studies by calling into question issues relating to museum studies. Studies of the founding of the museum often overlook the role of gender norms in the his-tory of art collecting and display. While not wholly dismissive, the particular pressures facing women in the field of museol-ogy are often lost in the current literature. With this paper, I hope to mitigate the exclusion of “the Ladies” from contem-porary histories.

Kelly Allen, University of Alabama at Birmingham

O’Keeffe’s Skyscraper Series as a Symbol of Power and Social Independence

The “roaring twenties” was a decade of phenomenal industri-alization and unmatched cultural change in the United States that fueled the race toward modernity. One of the epicenters of modernity was New York City, and at the center of the art world in the Big Apple was Georgia O’Keeffe. This presen-tation examines selected works from O’Keeffe’s skyscraper series, completed between 1925 and 1930. In these paint-ings O’Keeffe tackled the subject of the urban landscape, which had been previously relegated nearly exclusively to the “expertise” of men. I argue that it was because of her success-es in this controversial subject matter that she was able to challenge the gendered stereotypes of her critics and her hus-band, Alfred Stieglitz, the father of modern photography, and to establish herself as an artist whose merits deserve respect and admiration. O’Keeffe’s paintings express a palpable ten-sion between nature and technology, and between photogra-phy and painting. The competitiveness between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz is illustrated especially in her Shelton with Sunspots (1926), in which she appropriated photographic mistakes, such as “lens flare” and halation into a masterful composition. By effectively rendering in paint that which would be consid-ered useless in a photograph, O’Keeffe asserted her artistic voice in the socially claustrophobic and male dominated cul-ture of New York. In particular, the Shelton Hotel, where she lived with Stieglitz, became a repeated subject of some of her most photographically inspired paintings, in which she silently won back her own artistic power, through the American icon of the skyscraper.

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Megan Moore, The University of Alabama

The Forgotten Beats: Photographing a Generation

While there are numerous extant photographs of Beat Gen-eration personalities, including the group’s core members Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, art historical research has thus far ignored questions concerning the existence of a particular Beat aesthetic in photography. Although the Beat Generation is primarily recognized as a literary movement, hindsight has demonstrated that there were artists working at the same time whose ideologies were similar to the Beats. Robert Frank’s much-esteemed collec-tion, The Americans, is the photographic document most of-ten cited in conjunction with the Beat Generation because of its shared values and treatment of subject matter. Ginsberg’s photographs have also received much critical consideration. However, there are many other photographers of the move-ment who have received little to no recognition. As such, their unique perspectives on the people, places, spaces and hap-penings of the Beat world remain largely invisible. And also, until now, has the question of a Beat photographic aesthetic. It is imperative, therefore, to ask why figures like Ann Char-ters, John Cohen, Larry Keenan, Fred W. McDarrah, and Harry Redl are not acknowledged in canonical histories of American photography. It is the intention of this project to highlight the achievements of these artists in an attempt not only to clarify their role in Beat history, but also – through an analysis of select images – to suggest how these images might revise our understanding of the Beat Generation and its representation.

Rachel Fesperman, Florida State University

The Devil Behind: Castrated Sodomy and the Sexuality of Uncanny Violence in Man Ray’s Monument a D.A.F. de Sade

Man Ray’s photographs taken in interwar Paris capture many of Surrealism’s interests, including sexualized violence. His 1933 Monument à D.A.F. de Sade, originally occupying a full-page in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, memo-rializes the (in)famous eighteenth-century French libertine Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, known as the Marquis de Sade. Pairing a gelatin silver print of a woman’s posterior with a superimposed cross drawn on the image in ink, Man Ray’s work has been used largely as an example of sadism in Surrealism.

In light of the photograph’s original form of dissemination—accompanying Maurice Heine’s “L’Actualité de Sade: IV,” I offer that in Monument à D.A.F. de Sade, Man Ray is posing a visual contradiction: castrated sodomy. By memorializing the writer and social miscreant to whom he ascribed “freedom in its purest form,” the photographer calls into being two com-miserate practices that are at odds with one another. In doing this, the image successfully reappropriates sexual violence in light of the Surrealists’ rebirth of the “Grand Marquis.” Just as the photograph is comprised of two components, my approach to the work is twofold—I scrutinize the cross by way of castration before examining it in light of Freud’s uncanny. I then dissect the dismemberment and violence directed at the female body, synthesizing the sexual tension between the penetrative cross and the nude backside. Using Man Ray’s image as catalyst, I expose a darker narrative of the Surrealist movement, where sexualized violence interplays with gender and subversive politics.

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