American Art History

Wird Kunst für Propagandazwecke missbraucht, beruft man sich gern auf Kunstfreiheit. Wie deutsch dieses Konzept ist, untersucht Peter Jelavich//
When art is misused for propaganda purposes, people often invoke artistic freedom. How German this concept is is examined by Peter Jelavich.

Hovsep Pushman (1877–1966), an Armenian-American artist, is recognized for his substantial contributions to the evolution of still-life painting during the early twentieth century. His oeuvre exemplifies the principles of "Oriental Mysticism," a movement grounded in the spiritual and symbolic systems of Eastern cultures. Pushman’s compositions—distinguished by their meticulously calibrated chromatic arrangements and metaphysical resonance—were informed by a multiplicity of influences, including his formative years within a family involved in Oriental carpet production, his academic formation in Paris, extensive travels throughout China and other Eastern territories, and his sustained engagement with Asian antiquities, particularly Chinese artifacts. The layered symbolism inherent in Pushman’s intricately constructed tableaux permits a plurality of hermeneutic engagements. This investigation constitutes a scholarly inquiry aimed at the identification, examination, and contextualization of the symbolic manifestations and functional integrations of Chinese art, decorative objects, and motifs within the artist’s visual lexicon. Furthermore, the analysis addresses the permeation of Chinese aesthetic paradigms into Pushman’s symbolic framework. Such an approach not only augments the discourse within Sinology and deepens comprehension of Chinese thematic presence within Western modernist practices but also delineates under-explored trajectories of Sino-Armenian cultural interchange. Pushman’s body of work thereby operates as a mediating nexus between Eastern artistic heritage, American visual culture, and the creative output of the Armenian Diaspora.

This 1962 interview in the collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri was recorded at Thomas Hart Benton's home.  It was conducted by Homer Brown, a literature instructor at Kansas State College in Pittsburg Kansas. A portion of the interview was published by the College in 1962, but most of the recording remained unpublished until 2013. SHSMO Oral Historian Jeff Corrigan supervised transcription of the tape, and Joan Stack, Curator of Art Collections at the State Historical Society of Missouri wrote the introduction and notes that accompany the interview.

This paper explores Hartley's "Ice Hole, Maine (1908-09) and his first use of initials—his monogram—overlooked until now. First identified in 2017, Aho's paper argues Hartley embedded the initials of his new name and new identity in paintings of the Maine Landscape intended as a self-portrait 30 years before he declared his intention to be known as "the painter from Maine." Hartley's use of his "MH" monogram would later shape the symbolism of his famed "German Paintings" including "Portraits of a German Officer" (1914).

Magic lantern shows were certainly a common form of American entertainment in the 1890s. This study focuses on the presentation of lantern shows in one small city in one period in 1895, documenting each presentation.  Types of presentations and lecturers are discussed.  From this sample a very rough estimate is made of the number of lantern shows in America in a year.

Der Globalhistoriker Jürgen Osterhammel hat den in vielerlei Zusammenhängen fungiblen Begriff des Westens einen »Begriff der Arroganz« genannt. Im Evidenzraum der Texte und Kontexte, auf die sich Osterhammel dabei aus großer, eben globalhistorischer Beobachtungshöhe bezieht, spricht manches für diese Einschätzung: Pausbäckig marktliberale Westreklame in Gestalt von Belobigungen der angloamerikanischen Wirtschafts-und Gesellschaftsordnung –Osterhammel nennt exemplarisch Niall Fergusons auflagenstarkes Buch »Civilization«  mit dem so angestrengt witzig wie herablassend reimenden Untertitel »The West and the Rest« – ist arrogant. Und die Diskurse, mit denen westliche Nationen ehedem ihre koloniale und imperiale Herrschaft über den sogenannten Rest legitimierten, waren es allemal. Dennoch fragt es sich, ob das zitierte Verdikt, für dessen theoretische Unterfütterung Osterhammel auf Kosellecks Analysen zur Semantik und Pragmatik asymmetrischer Gegenbegriffe – Hellenen vs. Barbaren, Christen vs. Heiden, Mensch vs. Unoder, schlimmer noch, Untermensch – verweist, nicht das Kind mit dem Bade ausschüttet, indem es von Arroganz freie und normativ einsichtige Konzeptualisierungen des Westens in den künstlich verlängerten Schatten einer als politisch inkorrekt indizierten Westideologie treten und darin unkenntlich werden lässt: »Der Nicht-Westen wird stets als inferior gesehen.« Ist das so?

„Anch’io in Italien!“ Auf Max Liebermanns Spuren in Venedig, Florenz und Rom/„Anch’io in Italien!“ Sulle tracce di Max Liebermann a Venezia, Firenze e Roma, in: Lucy Wasensteiner, dies., Gregor H. Lersch (Hrsg.): Max Liebermann in Italien / Max Liebermann in Italia, Ausst.-Kat. Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee / Casa di Goethe Rom 2024–2025, Berlin 2024

Resumen El artículo es un acercamiento al mobiliario doméstico de dos espacios de la casa: la sala y la alcoba. A partir de fuentes de archivo, iconográficas y bibliografía se hace una reconstrucción de cómo eran ambas estancias en las viviendas habaneras en los dos primeros siglos de

This exhibition features Abstract Expressionism from the permanent collection of the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, CT. The catalog includes a curatorial essay and object labels for Jimmy Ernst, Hale Woodruff, Romare Bearden, Theodoros Stamos and Louise Nevelson.

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Der Begriff der Mythenkorrektur ist innerhalb der Literaturwissenschaft (noch) nicht etabliert. Ziel dieses Bandes ist es, ihn vorzustellen und anhand exemplarischer Interpretationen seine heuristische Kraft zu dokumentieren. Angeregt wurde das Unternehmen durch Bertolt Brechts Berichtigungen alter Mythen. Brecht hatte bekanntlich nach der Lektüre von Kafkas Schweigen der Sirenen damit begonnen, über eigene Berichtigungen nachzudenken. Erschienen sind drei Texte, die sich unter dem Titel Berichtigungen alter Mythen auf bekannte Texte und Stoffe der griechischen Literatur richten: auf die Homerische Sirenengeschichte, auf den Sophokleischen Ödipus und auf Herodots Erzählung von Gyges und der Frau des Kandaules. 1 Neben diesen ausgearbeiteten Berichtigungen hatte Brecht eine weit über die Antike hinausreichende Liste von Beispielen zusammengestellt, von der nur die Titel und Themenkomplexe, die zur Bearbeitung anstanden, überliefert sind: Ödipus

The article focuses on graphic reproductions in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Italian Journey. This travel account gives a clear sense of how important prints were as part of Goethe's education and preparation for the encounter with classical Roman monuments. As the text itself was edited and rewritten thirty to forty years after the journey itself, however, prints also became crucial in the attempt to remember that journey. In other words, the author of the Journey, in contrast to the youthful traveler, no longer sees engravings of Rome, but Rome through engravings. The discussion takes as a point of departure Goethe's vast collection of prints, still kept in Weimar. Measured up against the references in the travel journal, prints not only reflected his impression of monuments, but also structured those impressions, as the elderly man looks back and reassembles his memories to make an official account of his life. However, it is too easy to ascribe this reliance on prints to a fading memory-on the contrary. As he grows into old age, Goethe's idea of graphic reproduction evolves in parallel with his increasingly refined theories of nature. His growing preference for prints depicted as ruins reflects the aging author's own sense of change and transformation.

In the face of financial disaster, Dr Lydgate attempts to share his concerns with his wife, Rosamund, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871). Rosamund's refusal to engage with the crisis, or to sympathise with her husband's despair, is repeatedly presented by Eliot as a preoccupation with inanimate, decorative objects: Rosamund 'turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantelpiece'. 1 The mid nineteenth-century novel increasingly explores what it means to own, collect and display objects, and how personal and public lives can be constructed and defined by 'things'. Recent critical discussion has examined the significance of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the subsequent international exhibitions, as a catalyst for, and an expression of, new ways of producing and consuming objects. 2 These dazzling exhibitions, in conjunction with the foundation of the South Kensington Museum (1857), began to formulate principles of design and models of taste ...

Inspired by the Willey Disaster of 1826, a landslide in the White Mountains that killed an entire family living in Crawford Notch, both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Cole produced works of art commemorating the event. Hawthorne's story "The Ambitious Guest" and Cole's painting The Notch of the White Mountains are usually read in light of their cultural significance, most often as contributions to a nationalist aesthetic that sought to celebrate American landscapes-and the history and legends associated with them-as the basis for distinctly American art forms. But applying ideas about the evolutionary basis for environmental preferences, as described in articles by Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen and Stephen Kaplan, gives us a different way to account for the lasting appeal of these classic works of landscape art and environmental literature. Recognizing the importance of habitat selection to any species, Orians and Heerwagen outline the "savanna hypothesis," "prospect-refuge theory," and the temporal and spatial frames of reference as they account for our intuitive and subconscious preference for certain landscapes. Kaplan describes a four-part "preference model," discussing the appeals of coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery in determining our landscape preferences. Together, their analyses demonstrate why we are drawn to landscapes which offer both access to resources and protection from predators, which allow us to see without being seen, and which offer the promise of successful inhabitation. Successful artists and writers like Cole and Hawthorne know how to appeal to these innate, genetically-imprinted preferences for certain kinds of environments. Landscape art, then, in all its forms, succeeds not only by invoking cultural themes and influences but by appealing to human nature.

“Signing Dynamics of the Signature Rocks” establishes more clearly than has been done the character of a significant but not yet fully explained phenomenon of one of the most iconic episodes in the history of the United States.  From 1839 to the 1870s, approximately 400,000 Euro-Americans made the overland passage from the Missouri River to the Pacific, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of signatures inscribed onto the immense rock formations that were often used as landmarks along the way--the signature rocks--one rock alone being said in 1860 to have 40,000 to 50,000 signatures.  Most trail historians have noted the practice and generally taken it for granted, seeing only a mindset inclined toward what might be called straightforward graffiti or “ego.”  However, the fact that mass signing is not found elsewhere in the expansionist culture of the time but only in what was known then as “Indian Country” suggests a deeper motivation, at least for some, for this unique social manifestation.
Strongly based on primary sources and visual images from within emigrant culture, this study concludes that mass signing was motivated by a number of cultural dynamics of self-assertion, most notably a sense of trespassing (manifested as simple fear, an awareness of consumption of Indian resources, and/or a sense of contributing to the destruction of the traditional Indian way of life as a result of this consumption), a sense of participation in a great historical movement (whether manifest destiny or a more general sense of a great moment in history of the country), “vainglory” (a superficial awareness of the individual’s own achievements in crossing the continent), and, for the vast majority, the dynamic of tourism (viewing the great landmarks not just through the lens of traditional “curiosity” but now also loosely motivated by the Romantic ideas of landscape and the sublime).  At the same time, though in a limited way, the signature rocks became sites of emigrant-Indian contention, with now one side and now another overwriting the inscriptions of the other.

Van Wittel left the Netherlands for Rome at around the age of twenty. Like many other Dutch artists, he saw the trip as necessary to the completion of his artistic training, but he was also following in the footsteps of his mentor, Matthias Withoos (c. 1627-1703). Van Wittel is thought to have set out from Amersfoort in the company of another of Withoos's pupils, Jacob van Staverden (1656-1716). 1 The two young men probably left Amersfoort in the spring of 1674 and arrived in Rome in or around July or August of that year. They joined the Bentvueghels ('Birds of a Feather'), a fraternity of Rome-based artists from both the Northern and the Southern Netherlands. The membership consisted mainly of painters, but also included sculptors, draftsmen, engravers, gold and silversmiths, and even poets. All of them had trained in the north and then moved to Rome to perfect their skills through the study of Italian masterpieces. The main purpose of the fraternity (or Bent) was social, but it also served as a counterpart to the Italian society of artists, the Accademia di San Luca. Van Wittel and Van Staverden must have joined the Bent by the end of the year, since the contemporary artists' biographer Arnold Houbraken records their presence at the admission of Antwerp-born artist Abraham Genoels (1640-1723) on 3 January 1675. 2 During the ceremony, Van Wittel and Van Staverden signed the membership document both with their official names and with the pseudonyms assigned to them by the Bent. Every new member of the society was given a nickname of this kind, often referring to a striking feature or characteristic of the artist concerned. Van Wittel was known as 'De Toor(d)ts' ('The Torch') and Van Staverden as 'd' IJver' ('Diligence'). 3 According to Caspar van Wittel's principal biographer, Giuliano Briganti, Van Wittel attached himself to Genoels, who was 35 years his senior and had previously worked for some years in Paris. 4 The Antwerp-born artist was known as 'Pittore di re di Francia', suggesting that he had already gained a considerable reputation. 5 Briganti says that the young Van Wittel was a protégé of Genoels, rather than his pupil. 6 Arnold Houbraken goes still further, describing Van Wittel as one of Genoels' best friends. 7 Be that as it may, Genoels, Van Wittel and Van Staverden were certainly close during this period, since in 1680 Van Staverden was living together with Genoels and Gommarus Wouters in the Strada de la Croce. 8 During his first few years in Rome, Van Wittel probably hired a room in the Vicolo del Carciofolo, now the Via Alibert, between the Via del Babuino and the Via Margutta. 9 G.J. Hoogewerff says that Van Wittel was Genoels' closest friend, apart from Theodoor Helmbreker, 10 while Briganti

Though not in the mainstream of American art, Philip Evergood (1901-1973) was an unusually talented artist. Labeled expressionistic, surrealistic, and even gothic, he was really an aesthetic lone wolf with a restless, quizzical glance, a slightly halting but resonant voice (distinguished by a trace of Etonian accent), and a somewhat suspicious manner that quickly dissolved into a sparkling and mischievous

Washington Irving in 1804 was the first of many American visitors to the Protestant cemetery in Rome who reflected on the tragedy of dying in a foreign land. The graves of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley provoked similar thoughts, as did the memorials to a growing number of Americans who died in the city. Sixteen American Protestants were buried there in the period 1800–49. They can be identified through their surviving monuments, some of which are recorded also in travellers’ accounts and in artists’ views of the cemetery. Memorials for Americans were designed by prominent sculptors such as E.G. Göthe, Henry Kirke Brown, and – a recent discovery – Thomas Crawford, commissioned by a South Carolina client. Thomas Cole intended, in vain, his oil painting (1833–34) of the cemetery for the Hone family of New York to commemorate their grave in Rome. Struck by the pathos of seeing their compatriots’ graves, American travellers in their memoirs nevertheless concurred with Shelley that the beauty of the Protestant cemetery provided ample solace for the tragedy of dying abroad.

Liberated from anachronistic discourse that reduces her to the category of overlooked (but now bankable) female minimalist, Castoro's early work situates her in comparison to a whole other group of contemporaries, the older artists showing and being reviewed during her formative years. She attended art school at the end of the 1950s, was taught by artists of Abstract Expressionist sensibilities. Yet she belongs to the generation of artists who rejected angst, raw emotion or mysticism as the basis of painterly expression, who renounced symbolism and metaphor, and were generally skeptical about subjective content. Her paintings reflect both influences.

In 1773, James Bowdoin III (1752-1811) and Ward Nicholas Boylston (1747-1828), both from Boston, set sail for Italy, where they devoted several months to following the prescribed route on the Grand Tour. Bowdoin was the son of a merchant who was later elected governor of Massachusetts and also a founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Boylston was connected to several wealthy merchant families in the city. Boylston kept an extensive diary of their trip, documenting dinners at the homes of various dignitaries and visits to monuments, churches, and major art collections. Their tour began in Naples, where they frequently attended gatherings at the residence of Sir William Hamilton (1731-1803), and then moved to Rome under the guidance of James Byres (1734-1817), the noted Scottish art dealer. Although no records of purchases have been traced during this trip, Bowdoin refers to paintings in letters to his family and it is likely that he bought works that would become the basis of his art collection. The collection, donated to the college he founded in Maine in 1794, includes what is almost certainly the first group of old master drawings brought to America. Through the letters written by both gentlemen, as well as Boylston’s diary, we can reconstruct the development of Bowdoin’s ideas on art during the trip and how this affected his selection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture for what would become one of the earliest influential university art museums.

Der wissenschaftliche Katalog erschien anlässlich der Ausstellung „Piranesis Antike – Befund und Polemik“ im Walraf-Richartz-Museum in Köln (25. Okt. 2013 – 26. Januar 2014). Er thematisiert anhand der Auswahl von 17 Radierungen den sogenannten Griechen-Streit, bei dem Piranesi in teils polemisch geführten Debatten mit seinen Zeitgenossen die kulturelle Überlegenheit der altrömischen Kunst und Architektur gegenüber der griechischen verteidigte. Nicht nur mit seiner ihm unverwechselbaren künstlerischen Manier mittels dramatisierender Perspektiven, Lichteffekten und Monumentalisierungen, sondern auch durch die sorgfältige Dokumentation archäologischer und bautechnischer Details arbeitete er die Größe und Originalität der Denkmäler noch in ihrem Verfall heraus. Zu den mit äußerster Akribie wiedergegebenen und mit Legenden und erläuternden Texten versehenen Denkmälern zählen Brücken (Ponte Lugano bei Tivoli), Triumphbögen (Titusbogen und Septimius-Severus-Bogen), Tempel (sog. Sibyllente...

In the face of financial disaster, Dr Lydgate attempts to share his concerns with his wife, Rosamund, in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871). Rosamund's refusal to engage with the crisis, or to sympathise with her husband's despair, is repeatedly presented by Eliot as a preoccupation with inanimate, decorative objects: Rosamund 'turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantelpiece'. 1 The mid nineteenth-century novel increasingly explores what it means to own, collect and display objects, and how personal and public lives can be constructed and defined by 'things'. Recent critical discussion has examined the significance of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the subsequent international exhibitions, as a catalyst for, and an expression of, new ways of producing and consuming objects. 2 These dazzling exhibitions, in conjunction with the foundation of the South Kensington Museum (1857), began to formulate principles of design and models of taste ...

Over the centuries philosophy has treated art and, more generally, images, with caution and hostility. In the Greek tradition, Plato presented art as twice removed from reality, as a bad simulacrum, a mere resemblance of resemblances. Reality is the world of pure form and idea. When a craftsman makes an object, he imitates the ideal form of that object, the tableness of tables. A painting of that table, on the other hand, is a poor imitation of the object, one more step removed from reality. This poverty, this distance of art from truth, makes it a secondary and dangerous concern, an accessory and supplementary activity. Plato excludes art and artists, poetry and poets from the realm of reason and good government and inaugurates the ancient quarrel between art and poetry on the one hand, and philosophy and truth. This 'ancient quarrel' is well known and has been repeatedly commented upon.' What has been discussed less is the relationship between the aesthetic and the practical, in its moral and legal aspects. Law mimes philosophy in its reservations about, if not downright hostility to, art and images. In the Greek tradition, Plato again stated in the Laws that 'when a poet or a painter represents men with contrasting characters he is often obliged to contradict himself, and he does not know which of the opposing speeches contains the truth. But for the legislator, this is impossible, he must not let his laws say two different things on the same subject.f Indeed, for Plato, the supreme achievement of the mythological Egyptian legislator was to realize that certain movements, tunes and artistic representations were harmful to the young and to legislate a list of good and acceptable styles and forms. 'Painters and everyone else who represents movements of the body of any kind were restricted' to those forms to such a degree that, according to Plato, paintings and reliefs produced ten thousand years earlier were identical to those created at his time.' The Judaic tradition and biblical law, on the other hand, are even stricter with art and images. God insists that man shall make no 'graven images, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth'. But the people created the golden calf and danced and played around it. When Moses descended from the mountain and saw the idol he was furious; he broke the tables of the law, the visual icons of God's word, he burnt the calf and ordered the children of Levi to 'slay every man his brother,

This article examines the entanglement of weather, physicality, and racial discourses in the early-19th-century landscape paintings of British-American artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848). In particular, Cole’s picture "Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga" (1826-29) reveals how his use of violent phenomena such as storms as compositional elements resulted from environmental aesthetics that framed the encounter between man and weather as a White experience of sublime terror. As such, contrary to studies framing Cole as a “proto-environmentalist”, this essay argues that the artist’s long adherence to the sublime as a pictorial mode, manifested in works like Gelyna, actually undermined the relevance of his many commentaries about environmental destruction.

On a Sunday in mid-September, I spent the day in a hospital emergency room with three friends. I was the patient. Early that morning I had tripped while I was out jogging. My husband wasn't thrilled when I arrived back with the Sunday paper and a rather distorted looking right wrist. I quickly decided that I'd rather wait in the emergency room by myself than listen to him tell me that he was always against my jogging. Drawing from my vast emergency room experience (I come from a sickly and accident-prone family, so it is almost my second home), I knew enough to bring a book with me. I had been meaning to read about a trio of Texas naturalists, so that's how I came to have Three Friends with me at Franklin Hospital. The trio referred to are J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek and Walter Prescott Webb, and I first made their acquaintance in Houston, Texas, when I was there for NABT's convention in November 1990. When I travel, I like to pick up a book on the natural history or ecology of the area I'm visiting. "Sam Houston Books" seemed like a good place to find such a tome. It had a whole section labeled "Texiana," and a large chunk of one shelf was devoted to the books of Frank Dobie. An author that prolific and

Frame designed by White, c. 1900. Gilded wood and applied cast ornament; opening size, 17½ by 21'¼ inches. The ornament is composed of rows of classical architectural elements. Several variations of this design are found framing bronze reliefs by Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by courtesy of Eli Wilner and Company, Period Frames and Mirrors.

Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting War News from Mexico, made during his
studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, is among the most iconic American images
from before the Civil War (1861–1865). Traditionally, it has been seen as a sentimentalized and politically ambiguous representation of the American “middling sort.” What has gone unnoticed is that Woodville systematically adapted every single figure and the basic composition from an even better-known painting by another
noted genre painter, the 1822 Chelsea Pensioners by David Wilkie. But whereas Wilke
presented an idealized depiction of the British “common sort,” Woodville – perhaps
because of his perspective from the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany – constructed a
critical, declarative, and even edgy view of American democracy compromised by the
inherent contradiction of slavery. Such a claim of a direct political message for War
News goes against a preponderance of scholarship that positions the artist (and to a
degree all antebellum genre painting) as non-committal.

Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting War News from Mexico made while a student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, is one of the most iconic American images from before the Civil War (1861-1865).  Traditionally, it has been seen as little more than a genre painting of American life by the noted genre painter, an idealized depiction of the American "middling sort" (an extended, upwardly mobile version of the middle class today).  But what has gone completely unnoticed is that Woodville systematically adapted every single figure and the basic composition from an even better known painting from a more noted genre painter to produce his work, the 1822 Chelsea Pensioners (receiving war news from Waterloo) by David Wilkie.  What has also gone unnoticed is that War News from Mexico is not at all an idealized depiction of the American middling sort, but rather a rigorous critique of explosive social and political situation in the United States on the verge of the American Civil War.
Whereas Chelsea presents an idealized depiction of the British "common sort," one that acts to "reinforce an hierarchical status quo," according to the British scholar David H. Solkin, War News, perhaps because of Woodville's perspective from the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany, presents a critical, even edgy view of American democracy and its middling sort.  If Woodville's adaptation of Chelsea for an American context (reception of the war news of the Mexican-American War) meant Americanizing it, Americanizing it meant "democratizing" it.  However, in general, far from simply being a question of "celebrating" the right of each adult white male to express his own political opinion through the democratic process, War News presents American democracy in all of its complexity with respect to the crossroads at which the nation found itself as a result of the imminent impact of the Mexican-American War (the admission of new Southern states) on that inherent contradiction within American democracy: slavery.  Specifically with regard to Chelsea, the democratization of War News meant a replacement of the British common sort (none of whom in Chelsea would have had the right to vote until 1918) with the American middling sort (all of whom, except the African American and the woman, would have had the right to vote in national elections by the time of War News).  It meant the distinct absence of a universal affirmation of the war news that is the ostensible subject of the image, completely contrary to its source, Chelsea.  And it meant a representation that was not only not idealizing like Chelsea but that was explicitly self-critical, from the implication of an impending national crisis brought about by a failure of true democratic ideals to unsophisticated behavior and tobacco juice spit out on the floor.
It was an unsettling tale for those of Woodville's contemporaries who cared to read closely, one in which serious challenges to American democracy--old political ideals versus new expansionism, human rights versus states' rights, freedom versus slavery--were not hidden under the glad tidings of victorious war news from afar.  Rather, brought to a head by the Mexican-American War, these smoldering political issues were deftly phrased in the tale told by Woodville of the democratized reception of war news from Mexico, a tale whose conclusion could be contemplated by understanding contemporaries only with the greatest foreboding.

Der wissenschaftliche Katalog erschien anlässlich der Ausstellung „Piranesis Antike – Befund und Polemik“ im Walraf-Richartz-Museum in Köln (25. Okt. 2013 – 26. Januar 2014). Er thematisiert anhand der Auswahl von 17 Radierungen den sogenannten Griechen-Streit, bei dem Piranesi in teils polemisch geführten Debatten mit seinen Zeitgenossen die kulturelle Überlegenheit der altrömischen Kunst und Architektur gegenüber der griechischen verteidigte. Nicht nur mit seiner ihm unverwechselbaren künstlerischen Manier mittels dramatisierender Perspektiven, Lichteffekten und Monumentalisierungen, sondern auch durch die sorgfältige Dokumentation archäologischer und bautechnischer Details arbeitete er die Größe und Originalität der Denkmäler noch in ihrem Verfall heraus. Zu den mit äußerster Akribie wiedergegebenen und mit Legenden und erläuternden Texten versehenen Denkmälern zählen Brücken (Ponte Lugano bei Tivoli), Triumphbögen (Titusbogen und Septimius-Severus-Bogen), Tempel (sog. Sibyllente...