ABSTRACT: In the 1924 Venice Biennale, an entire room was dedicated to a personal exhibition by
Felice Casorati (1883-1993). The paintings on display shared a limpid volumetric
plasticity and a naturalistic but geometrical figure style – features that the critics did not
hesitate to describe as neoclassical, associating Casorati’s style to other tendencies of the
so-called return to order. Six years later, in 1930, Casorati came back to the Venice
Biennale with a fresh set of paintings that marked a stark contrast with the previous
works: elegant deformations, softer hues, an emphasis on surfaces distinguished a new
style that critics now recognized as dissonant from surrounding tendencies. The present
work will study the shift in Casorati’s style exemplified by his 1924 and 1930 Biennale
exhibitions, with the aim of assessing its implications and presenting possible
explanations behind it. The thesis reconnects to recent historiographical trends that have
assimilated investigations of individual artist’s styles with explorations of the period of
the return to order. The examination of Casorati’s experience will be an opportunity to
reflect on the validity of some approaches to the study of this period that rely on broad,
overarching narratives and interpretative schematizations. A picture will emerge of the
intricate urgency of discourses on style at the time, and will allow for an assessment of
the capability of Casorati’s style to validate, evade, or undermine interpretative efforts
and their frequent implicit attempts of exhortation, categorization, association, and
appropriation. Further considerations on Casorati’s relationship with the surrounding
artistic world will reveal that possible motivations for his stylistic change can be found in
his attitude towards state art and fashions, in his friendship with Gobetti, in his activity
and philosophy as a teacher, and in his relationship with the Sei pittori di Torino.
ABSTRACT: As a successful woman painter in fin-de-siècle America, Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) represented a notable exception, an unexplored creature belonging to a shifting social and cultural scenario that continuously redefined assumptions on personal identities and public roles. American artists strove to construct their public façade as well as their art in compliance with dominant modes of thought, vision, and behavior. Working in alliance with the critics, they sought to respond to public expectations on the nature of artistic identity as much as on their adherence to culturally approved notions of masculinity, femininity, and Americanness. This thesis will explore how Beaux navigated the late-nineteenth-century re-definition of artistic identity by way of a consistent and visible performance of femininity. The critical reception of her work will be re-considered with respect to the gendered language used to code it as “feminine,” and to the tendency of assessing it by way of comparison with the “masculine” work of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). The critical construction of Beaux’s paintings as “feminine” will be understood as an intended response to the artist’s conscious enactment of a feminine-evoking pictorial mode. I will analyze how Beaux forged a prominent public façade by incorporating in her outward appearance and behavior a set of traits that latched on to shared notions of exemplary womanhood. More specifically, I will argue that Beaux manipulated the protocols of fashionable portraiture both formally and thematically. Mother and Daughter (1898) and Portrait of Mrs. Roosevelt and Daughter Ethel (1902) provide particularly interesting cases to witness Beaux’s enactment of a feminine pictorial sensitivity. In the portraits, Beaux detected and recorded the sitters’ specific psychological and social circumstances, extrapolating from their individualities larger narratives of female experiences that are embedded in, and also augmented by the distinct operations of self-aggrandizement entailed in each commission.
ABSTRACT: Artemisia Gentileschi is recognized as an important painter working in the style of Caravaggio from the Baroque period. Her 20th century rediscovery has resulted in a large body of scholarship and a number of important international exhibitions. A critical component of Artemisia’s scholarship takes feminist perspectives, though such perspectives have been challenged from issues such as iconography and connoisseurship. This thesis reaffirms the necessity of a feminist perspective in analyzing Artemisia’s work, particularly through a close examination to her Florentine Judith Slaying Holofernes (1620). After an analysis of the recent historiography of the artist, the thesis analyzes Artemisia’s subject matter, her many heroines that have been seen as representing a developed sense of feminist consciousness and intuition. Based on the artist’s intuitive portrayals, it is important to reiterate the role that certain biographical aspects of the artist’s life, training and patronage, had upon her work. Chapter 3 consists of an in-depth comparison of Artemisia’s Judith to that by Caravaggio, studying specific naturalistic elements, and especially the representation of blood, to demonstrate Artemisia’s stylistic innovations, drawn from her particular gender position as well as from her contact with prominent intellectuals. From this analysis, it becomes clear that Artemisia Gentileschi should be regarded independently of her father’s work and that of other Caravaggisti painters, and that her feminist contribution to the history of painting be reaffirmed.
