ARTH5565: American Art in the Gilded Age

In 1873, Mark Twain coined the phrase “Gilded Age” to describe an era in which public displays of national prosperity and optimism barely covered over the deeper realities of racial violence, labor inequities, and strident political divisions in the barely reunited republic, still recovering from a bloody Civil War. This class will examine the social and cultural history of the United States from 1865-1910, by following the visual record of paintings, sculpture, photographs, architecture, and landscape and furniture design. We will look closely at works by artists including Winslow Homer, Abbott Thayer, Cecilia Beaux, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jacob Riis, Gertrude Käsebier, Thomas Nast, Bernhard Gillam, Frederick Law Olmsted, McKim, Mead & White, and Candace Wheeler. We will consider the role of creatively made images and objects as both a tool of the elite and the weapon of the critic. And we will actively investigate the kinds of questions art historians ask about this era, so as to ask new questions and produce new scholarship that might productively address the concerns of our own. Open to interested students from all majors, this course culminates in an independent research project suitable for development as a senior capstone project.

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