Chair of the department of art and art history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Bailey Van Hook is the author of Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876-1914, which explored the idealization of women in American painting during that period.
Listed in: Architecture · Art
The Virgin and the Dynamo
Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893–1917
By Bailey Van Hook
The beaux-arts mural movement in America was fueled by energetic young artists and architects returning from training abroad. They were determined to transform American art and architecture to make them more thematically cosmopolitan and technically fluid and accomplished. The movement slowly coalesced around the decoration of mansions of the Gilded Age elite, mostly in New York, and of public buildings and institutions across the breadth of the country.The
