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 Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917 is the first book in almost a century to concentrate exclusively on the beaux-arts mural movement in the United States. Beginning with a short history of the movement from its inception in Boston during the American Renaissance, Bailey Van Hook focuses on the movement’s public manifestations in the period between the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the First World War.
Professor Van Hook explores different aspects of the mural movement, the concept and meaning of “decoration,” the claim that murals are inherently democratic, the shift in preference from allegory to history, the gendered concept of modernity, the ideologies behind the iconography, and, finally, the decline of the movement when it began to be seen as old fashioned and anachronistic.
The Virgin and the Dynamo raises our understanding of the beaux-arts movement to a new level. For the general reader, this illustrated history will explain many familiar representations of local and national values.
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. More info →
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Ohio Decorative Arts, 1890–1960
By Carol Boram-Hays
Ohio enjoys a rich artistic heritage: its inhabitants have made significant contributions in the arts; its schools have produced artists of international acclaim; and its companies have employed progressive manufacturing techniques and pioneering materials in the production of their wares. Ohio’s artistic tradition is especially impressive in the area of the decorative arts from the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.
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The French Influence on the Architecture and Art of Washington, D.C.
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In 1910 John Merven Carrère, a Paris-trained American architect, wrote, “Learning from Paris made Washington outstanding among American cities.” The five essays in Paris on the Potomac explore aspects of this influence on the artistic and architectural environment of Washington, D.C., which continued long after the well-known contributions of Peter Charles L’Enfant, the transplanted French military officer who designed the city’s plan.Isabelle
Architecture History · Art History · Architecture | History | General · Washington, DC
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After designing and installing the massive murals for the Cincinnati Union Terminal in the 1930s, German immigrant artist Winold Reiss fell into relative obscurity, despite the vibrancy and boldness of his meticulous mosaic works. Art historian Garner pays this early modernist his due, putting him in the context of his international peers and the art movements that continue to invigorate our aesthetic landscape today.
