This study situates Klint’s Swan Series within the historical context of 1914, examining its engagement with gender, social hierarchy, and artistic innovation. The analysis discusses the 1914 Baltic Exhibition, where Sweden showcased cultural contributions amid rising global tensions. Despite Sweden’s neutrality, the exhibition highlighted international artistic connections, attracting modernist pioneers such as Vasily Kandinsky. Kandinsky’s Theosophical influences paralleled Klint’s spiritual and abstract explorations, demonstrating a shared departure from representational art.

The research explores the gendered dynamics of early twentieth-century art movements. While male artists, influenced by Futurism and National Romanticism, glorified war and masculine dominance, Klint’s work subtly challenged these ideals. Her engagement with the Association of Swedish Women Artists and her decision to submit a conventional work rather than an abstract piece to the Baltic Exhibition underscore the limitations placed on female artists. By analyzing the first eight paintings in the Swan series, this study positions Klint’s work as both a response to and a critique of the socio-political and gendered realities of 1914. Her transition toward symmetrical compositions and dualistic themes reflects engagement with contemporary struggles for equality and spiritual transcendence.

This presentation will focus on the work of Hilma af Klint, a Swedish painter and pioneer of modern abstraction. Centering on her series of monumentally scaled paintings known as The Ten Largest, I will demonstrate how the works use abstraction as a means to reveal a synthesis of spiritual, scientific, ecological, and artistic influences, considering the cycle of human life from a holistic perspective. The converging influences leading to The Ten’s creation include Klint’s spiritual practice and theosophical background, the era’s rapidly developing scientific frontier, her study of the natural world, and traditional Swedish folk-art imagery. Klint’s participation in seances facilitated an active dialogue with the divine, to whom she referred as “The High Masters,” giving substance to their messages through automatic drawing as a form of visual expression. Furthermore, as new scientific discoveries, including x-rays, radio waves, and electromagnetism burgeoned, she explored the implications of their more-than-material dimensions, seeking to make the invisible visible. Additionally, Klint’s meticulous study of the natural world is reflected in the visual vocabulary of The Ten Largest, including abstract floral forms, snail shells, and plant tendrils. Conceptually, these symbols acknowledge an overarching, entangled network of life, suggesting ecological interconnectivity. Lastly, Klint’s background was steeped in a rich Swedish folk-art history, allowing for traditional artistic characteristics including bright colors, flattened compositions, and outsize motifs, to weave their way into the paintings. The Ten Largest do not depict a clearly defined landscape, figure, or even horizon; instead, they merge the human life cycle with Klint’s visualization of the universe, reflecting a metaphysical and embodied worldview. In embracing a radically new kind of visual expression, The Ten Largest transcend the limits of naturalistic representation, using abstraction to convey the blurred boundaries between dimensions and the integration of self within an expansive universe.

Discourse over cosmetics has existed long before the creation of the United States of America, molded by opposing discussions of control, sexuality, and emancipation. This project will address the political and cultural impact of lipstick as represented through Western propaganda and marketing during the twentieth century, along with acknowledging the gap in cosmetic research within the art history discipline. Thus, through analyzing WWII propaganda and governmental influences, along with Revlon’s 1940s and 1950s color promotions, I will explore American women’s shifting societal roles depicted in advertising. Red lipstick became a symbol of national pride for Allied countries, especially Britain and the United States, as its use was discouraged by the Nazi party during WWII. Consequently, poster artists for government recruitment programs incorporated lipstick into their art, further connecting its association with duty and victory. Various companies, such as Elizabeth Arden and Revlon, would lean into these elements for their promotions, though the beauty standard would shift after the war. This would become evident as brands focused on how makeup could be interwoven with personal identity, a marketing tactic still used today. Despite the ever-lasting effects these marketing campaigns and posters had on cosmetic advertising, these works of art and objects are not widely discussed within academia, nor are they often displayed in such institutions at large. Many of these lipstick shades are still sold today, acting as direct links to the past, even though consumers may not know it. Hopefully, further exhibitions and research will be accomplished to share and examine these pieces, reminding buyers that something as simple as their lipstick has a long history that continues to line beauty aisles across the world.

Scholars and critics have looked at painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011) through several lenses: as a woman artist, a New York artist, and even an artist of privilege. Within that literature, the subject of Frankenthaler’s Jewishness is rarely discussed. My research, primarily focused on her 1950s work, explores how Frankenthaler returned to her Jewishness as a source of resilience and inspiration in her most turbulent moments. In her early life, Frankenthaler had a complicated relationship with her Jewish background, grappling with family loss during the Holocaust and discrimination at school. However, Frankenthaler adamantly believed in the value of personal history to power creative output. My paper analyzes how many of Frankenthaler’s paintings, produced in a period of interpersonal turmoil following her mother’s death and her split with critic Clement Greenberg, illustrate a turn to Jewish themes as a source of artistic resilience. These canvases, as well as a Torah cover executed in the otherwise uncharacteristic woven medium, show Frankenthaler embracing themes and iconography of the Hebrew Bible, both in recognition of her own Jewish background and as a rejection of the formalist principles espoused by Greenberg following their breakup. By investigating such works, my research does not attempt to further label her but rather offers a new lens through which to understand one of Frankenthaler’s least public yet most foundational identities.

My presentation focuses on the midcentury American artist Gertrude Abercrombie, a lifelong resident of the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago who was deemed the “queen of bohemian artists.” Abercrombie maintained a larger-than-life persona in public, taking on the eccentric image of a witch and hosting boisterous jam sessions in her home with jazz icons such as Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. In contrast, her paintings were intimate expressions of interiority. She created highly personal, dreamlike compositions populated by recurring motifs such as moonlit landscapes, lone women, shells, cats, owls, and other symbolic objects. Abercrombie translated significant moments in her life into her idiosyncratic surrealist visual vocabulary, and simultaneously documented her musings and memories in extensive personal writings. Through close visual analysis of Abercrombie’s works alongside archival research into her journals, notes and correspondence, this paper considers her art and writing as acts of self-archiving, blurring the boundaries between lived experience and imagined reconstruction. Specifically, I examine how her paintings operate as sites of memory-making, where personal experiences are fragmented, processed and restaged in surreal, performative scenes. Abercrombie’s artistic and written practices demonstrate a deliberate effort to craft and control her archival narrative, allowing her to reclaim agency and assert her own voice. I contend that Abercrombie’s oeuvre should be understood as both an emotionally inflected performance of her life and memories, and an active, self-determined method of constructing and preserving her personal identity. Ultimately, I argue that Gertrude Abercrombie’s surrealist paintings recursively process memory and enact performances of herself to intervene in her own archival narrative.

During the interwar period in France, there was a significant change in design approaches in art and architecture following the advent of modernism. In this paper, the designs of pioneering modernist architect Eileen Gray are discussed as spaces exhibiting an inherent queerness. Gray’s private home Tempe à Pailla is discussed primarily in accordance with this construction of queer spaces which rejected traditional models of design and modes of living. This paper argues that the intersection between Eileen Gray’s designs of private spaces and the curating for queer bodies is essential to an enriched understanding and appreciation of the nuances of Gray’s designs and status as a queer designer. Though this aspect has historically lacked scholarly discourse, there has been a significant increase in dialogue over the last two decades surrounding this aspect of discussing Gray’s intertwining of personal, private, public and professional in her approach to designing spaces, which this paper expands upon. During a time when the public sphere catered to heterosexual bodies, a society which married decadence with disease, the importance of understanding Gray’s designs as spaces capable of acting as queer sanctuaries is imperative. This paper also examines the ways in which Gray’s design of Tempe à Pailla contests the traditional structuring of modern interiors, discussed in dialogue with Jean Baudrillard’s text The System of Objects. The ways in which Gray designs her spaces to reject traditional heterosexual or familial relationships in support of queer intimacy are discussed in relation to The Schröder House and the work of Catherine Opie. Gray’s design of E-1027 in addition to Tempe à Pailla is also discussed in this paper in relation to Le Corbusier’s designs and texts to highlight the contrast in their approaches to design and attitudes towards how modern interiors reflect and assist the body.

Cindy Sherman created a photographic series in the early 80s which centers around cinematic female characters titled her Centerfold series. Through the application of visual analysis and historical research of these images, this paper argues that Sherman intervenes on patriarchal male roles in the horror films that were becoming popular at the time. Analyzing these photographs through a feminist lens and reading them through the popular horror film canon of that time allows for viewers to see the critiques Sherman was making on how females were sexualized in the media. Deploying Kristeva’s theory of abject horror, this paper shows how Sherman uses the fear of the body, specifically in how it was once related to the mother’s body, to make her critiques of masculinized horror. Mulvey’s reading of phantasmagoria of the female body as well as Linda William’s analysis of the female gaze shows how Sherman registers the sexualization and hyper fetishization of the female body and the audience’s desire to consume them. The photographs, in turn, both invite the viewer to become the voyeur by mimicking the harmful stereotypes shown in horror cinema but also deploy aesthetic strategies to undermine that way of looking. Cindy Sherman’s work creates an alternative visual model for women to embody, not just the final girl, but how to fight against the male gaze. By doing a close examination of several photographs in this series, one can see how the application of specialized females specifically in horror media, affect the way people perceive females in general. Through her own fascination and self-portraiture, Cindy Sherman takes a powerful stance of mimicking trends in horror cinema to subject herself to this kind of sexual gaze, but to ultimately resist and exceed the limitations that gaze seeks to impose on female subjectivity.

My research probes at the interdisciplinary overlap between literary, art historical and dramatic output. To this end, I take as my focus the titular motif in Yasmina Reza’s play, ‘Art’: a flat white painting with “fine white diagonal lines.” Reza intends this piece as a skewering of modernist art; reaching past her conceit, I imagine ‘Art’s central image as a real painting worthy of criticism. To achieve this critique, I unearth the work’s theoretical roots in the twentieth-century avant-garde: specifically, abstract monochrome art. From here, I discuss how ‘Art’s painting changes throughout the play, during which one of the characters (Marc) bifurcates the canvas with a stroke from a blue felt pen. Taking this motion as an affirmation of abstract principles – most strikingly, the flatness of the canvas—I reorient Marc’s graffitiing. Rather than vandalism, ‘Art’s focal piece comes to represent the ultimate realization of an avant-garde goal: de-sanctifying the artistic landscape.

Extending this conclusion, I then pivot to address the performance aspect of ‘Art.’ Because the play takes place onstage, the revolutionary pen stroke occurring every night, I maintain that ‘Art’s painting exists simultaneously as visual and performance art. By passively watching Marc as he vandalizes the piece, the audience implicate themselves in its transgressive transformation, taking on an active role in artistic modernization. This analysis culminates in a discussion of the actor playing Marc: how the same performance of creative redefinition, repeated night after night, could impact their understanding of the piece. To more profoundly interrogate their emotional response, I invoke a performance-based methodology; recreating the painting and the stroke for myself, I grapple with the subjective truth of an actor’s cyclical artistry. Ultimately, my research reconciles the painting’s abstract agenda with its dramatic medium, its unique relationship to audience carving a transdisciplinary niche for avant-garde creativity.

Jan van Eyck’s revolutionary use of oil paint enabled him to paint hyper-realistic depictions of the world around him, infused with the rich symbolism that defined the Renaissance. This focus on naturalism was fueled by a belief that every element of the world around us serves as a manifestation of God, good or evil. Small refraction of light in jewels reminds the viewer of God’s life-giving essence or the individual coils of the lamb’s wool signifies Jesus’s innocence and willingness to sacrifice for the sins of humanity. Most of Jan van Eyck’s work highlights virtuous qualities praised by God, but how does he portray the temptations and sins that challenge one’s faith? In The Last Judgment, the only depiction of Hell painted by the artist, sin is personified through imagery of hybridized animalistic demons that combine different traits of beast associated with unholy virtues. In medieval religious symbolism, imagery of animals carried profound meaning, their traits representing both virtue and vice in the eyes of God, and whether real or mythical, they served as moral guides. Popular medieval books featuring animal lore, called Bestiaries, offer illustrated deceptions with religious instruction associated with each creature’s traits, attributes, and symbolic interpretations. Jan van Eyck, familiar with these books during his time in the court of the Duke of Burgundy, likely referenced medieval Bestiaries as a symbolic guide for designing his hybrid demons of Hell. In his claustrophobic hellscape, demons claw and fight their way to the foreground. By examining the distinct features of individual demons, we can trace moral commentary drawn from Bestiaries, seamlessly blended with van Eyck’s signature realism and rich symbolism, all woven into the vivid narrative of hell. Through this painting, we gain insight into what was considered unfavorable by Van Eyck, his community, and the God of the fifteenth century.

Jan van Eyck’s famous motto, “Als Ich Kan,” is interpretable as a modest admission of personal limitations, but what if there were external ones? Pre-existing factors which had shaped the processes and ideas in creating the independent portrait? Defining Van Eyck’s changing environment, this investigation interpreted these external stimuli as social anxieties, either directed at artists or embodied. An interdisciplinary methodology of technical research and art history was adopted to analyze several works that are understood to represent stages of execution. These practices were rationalized as resulting from, responding to, or being limited by several forms of angst, directly and indirectly.

Considering the class-based anxieties directly influencing the dynamic between artist and sitter has led to the re-evaluation of metalpoint’s importance in the development of Northern European portraiture as a vital part of its origins. Having established the ontology of portrait practice as related to sculpture, the direct competition between the two arts introduced a status-based anxiety of commercial competition. This line of inquiry demonstrated the importance of the artists intellectual and professional practice in establishing the value of the independent portrait.

The implications of a successful competition were explored in the material aspect of Van Eyck’s portraiture. In light of new chemical research, this paper proposes a practical response to the growth of panel painting’s status in the development of paint medium. This approach has offered a perspective of Jan van Eyck’s practice, and by extension his peers, as a discipline shaped by the past and present. Having established the beginnings of the Northern European portrait within a realization of the individual and environment, a socialized practice was revealed.

Albrecht Dürer’s self-portraits stand as significant milestones in the history of portraiture, offering a unique visual record of his physical and artistic development. During the Renaissance, self-portraits became a medium for the artist to express his status and identity as the image of self was gradually shaped. Dürer’s works represent the major visual record of his physical and artistic development. This essay examines the authenticity of Dürer’s four major self-portraits by analyzing their alignment with established principles of the construction of human facial growth. Through the application of anatomical and forensic methodologies, this study evaluates the structural transitions depicted in his portraits. Ranging from adolescence to adulthood, focusing on the key development of the correlation between facial features and construction of face shapes, such as nasal elongation, brow ridge formation and cranial proportions. Applying human anatomy and perspective to painting can help us gain a deeper understanding of the key aspects of portrait drawing. It also enhances visual impact, making the structure of portraits more precise, solid, and natural. The analysis reveals a general consistency between the expected biological changes and Dürer’s portraits. Nonetheless, it also highlights the artistic idealization, particularly in later works. Furthermore, the essay explores the interplay between realism and artistic convention, and Dürer’s 28-year-old self-portrait indicates his self-representation was influenced by aesthetic and symbolic intentions. This study provides insights into the intersection of art and anatomical accuracy, contributing to a deeper understanding of self-portraiture as both a documentary and expressive medium.

For this symposium, I would like to present a portion of my honors thesis, which serves as a contribution to the discussion of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Vatican Pietà sculpture of 1499. While the Vatican Pietà is one of the most renowned sculptures of the Italian Renaissance, little has been contributed in terms of discussing in detail its patron, Jean Bilhères, and his unique relationship with Michelangelo that erected such a striking work of art. The Vatican Pietà does not resemble the typical forms of a Northern Late Gothic Pietà sculpture. This raises the question of what circumstances lead to the creation of such a work, and why is it so different?

This thesis seeks to broaden the art historical narrative of Michelangelo’s Pietà; first by analyzing the history and evolution of the Pietà genre as it spread throughout Europe. It will explore the life of Michelangelo’s patron, Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, and his connection to this iconography in the context of his political and religious duties in France, and what Pietà examples he would have been familiar with. Lastly, the study will look at Michelangelo’s commission itself and examine Michelangelo’s artistic vision, steeped within Florentine artistic tradition, as it completely changes the stylistic and psychological meaning of this statue type.

I argue that there is a much broader and complex story to be told of the artwork. Based on the information I have gathered, my thesis will argue that Jean Bilhères had a vision as a patron with his political representation of the French monarch, combined with his historically French religious background. This vision was blended harmoniously with Michelangelo’s views of classicism and Florentine art. As the two individuals mesh together, we see a new image that forms within Italy—a redefined version of the Pietà genre for centuries to come.

Early feminist analysis focused on uncovering and redirecting attention to female artists who had been consistently neglected, misunderstood, and excluded from art history. At a time when historical discourse was overwhelmingly male-centered, it’s no surprise they latched onto artists like Artemisia Gentileschi. Within these scholarly strides, one of the most heated debates explored female sensibility and the aesthetic expressed by women artists. Female sensibility can be defined as the level at which women are affected by the world around them. This paper explores the two primary sides of this debate, with contributions from artists, art historians, and art critics alike, most notably Judy Chicago and Pat Mainardi. The area of disagreement lies between the two sides on whether or not women and men view the art-making process and its outcome differently.

The case of Artemisia Gentileschi is central to this discourse. Female sensibility and the way she depicts women in her work are discussed quite frequently. Throughout her lifetime, Artemisia lived under oppressive patriarchal ideals similar to the women within her work. Male artists could have the same thought process and plan going into a painting but lack the “lived” experiences of the stories they are depicting. Ultimately, we must be careful when molding Artemisia into a modern-day feminist, as she cannot outwardly discuss her artistic practice. Perhaps the best way we can explore this concept is through her self-presentation. Particularly in her Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting, she combines allegorical representation with a deep intellectual engagement with the tradition of self-portraiture. By omitting traditional symbols of femininity and focusing on her active, engaged role as an artist, Artemisia challenges the notion that women’s art must adhere to gendered expectations.

Scholarship on Artemisia Gentileschi tends to limit its view of the artist in connection with her early life in Rome by focusing on the artist’s sexual assault that occurred before moving to Florence. I argue that this restrictive view prevents viewers from fully understanding and contextualizing the importance of Artemisia Gentileschi’s career as an artist. Instead, it is vital to look closely at Artemisia’s use of portraiture, specifically in her early years in Florence, as a tool to reinvent her reputation and to solidify her place amongst the highly respected male artists of the Italian Renaissance, many belonging to the Medici court. Through a feminist art historical lens, I analyze Artemisia’s use of allegorical female figures, as well as biblical and historical female heroines, to represent how women, and herself especially, are capable of having power and control over their own fate as well as promoting an independent view of themselves within male culture. Specifically, through her Florentine portraiture, Artemisia could use commissions such as the Allegory of Inclination as a turning point in her career to represent her creative position within the art world.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a new genre of Chinese import porcelain, known as kraak ware, laid the foundation for a material culture within the Dutch Republic centered on the foreign and “exotic”. Formal and contextual analysis of a porcelain charger in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) offers critical insights into the process of cultural revisioning spurred by an unprecedented influx of imported goods. Kraak porcelains represent a syncretism of international craftsmanship, functioning as symbols of imperialism and globalization, with Jingdezhen manufacturers producing unique porcelains modeled after European dishwares. The iconography of these porcelains is cross-cultural, with many examples – including Mia’s charger – depicting Dutch landscapes or citizens, created under Dutch East India Company orders to emphasize the “exoticism” of the pieces. The Dutch fascination with porcelain is well documented, in both literature around the cult of chinoiserie and genre paintings. However, the import of Chinese material culture molded not only a perception of Chinese culture, but also of Dutch culture. Porcelain embodied not only the prosperity of the citizens of the Republic, but also their global imperialist power and ability to obtain these items. Kraak ware enabled the formation of a “new kind of Dutchness”, a material culture revolving around both foreign goods and a collective imagining of how a global Dutch citizen ought to appear. Examining artists like van Kessel and van Streeck in conversation with Mia’s charger, this paper examines the process of imagining others to imagine the self.

The proliferation of printed materials in Early Modern Europe facilitated the dissemination of architectural ideas and motifs. While the impact of translated architectural treatises, such as I quattro libri dell’architettura, is well-documented in regions north of the Alps and across the Baltic Sea, their influence on Russian architecture remains comparatively understudied. The limited availability of secular education, Western-trained professionals, and a robust book market, coupled with the aftermath of the Time of Troubles, contributed to a scarcity of records regarding the transmission of Renaissance and Mannerist architectural concepts into Russia. Existing scholarship largely theorizes, rather than demonstrates, the movement of these styles via printed materials. This independent research addresses this knowledge gap by examining several pre-Petrine Russian buildings, including the Refectory of the Simonov Monastery (1683-1685), which exhibits clear, yet undocumented, Dutch influences. By analysing a range of sources, including atlases, architectural treatises, and publications, our study aims to elucidate the specific mechanisms through which Western printed materials shaped Russian architectural practices during this period.