Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Les monnaies grecques ont de tout temps été considérées comme les plus belles monnaies jamais produites. Evoquant Goethe, José Maria de Hérédia ou le Président Theodore Roosevelt, cette conférence s’interroge sur les raisons qui fondent ce sentiment. On évoquera le très haut relief, la diversité des types, la qualité de la gravure et l’adaptation à la petitesse du format. On traitera également de la beauté (fondée sur la symétrie) et du sublime (fondé sur la dissymétrie), avec une attention particulière pour les types représentés de trois quarts face et pour l’évolution du goût du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours. Platon, Longin, Raphael, Rubens, Winckelmann, Kant, Burke et Ruskin sont quelques-uns des grands noms évoqués à cette occasion.

Abstract
Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers a stunning new look at late-nineteenth-century American art, and demonstrates the profound role humor played in determining the course of culture in the Gilded Age. By showing how complex humorous strategies such as deadpan and burlesque operate in a range of media—from painting and sculpture to chromolithography and architectural schemes—Greenhill examines how ambitious artists like Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint-Gaudens rethought the place of humor in their work and devised strategies to both conform to and slyly undermine developing senses of “serious” culture. Exhibiting an awareness of the emerging requirements of serious art but maintaining an investment in humor, they played it straight.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Chapter 1. Winslow Homer’s Visual Deadpan
Chapter 2. Laughing with J.G. Brown, E.W. Perry, and Thomas Nast
Chapter 3. William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum
Chapter 4. Cosmopolitan Satire in Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Henry James
Chapter 5. Exchanging Jokes with John Haberle

Epilogue
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index

Reviews
"An accomplished and fascinating book. . . . It is one that will quickly become essential to any scholar looking to understand the art and culture of Gilded Age America."—Peter Messent Journal of American Studies

"Greenhill offers a serious, intricate, and significant study of different types of humor operating in American visual arts from the Civil War to the turn of the 20th centh century..."—J. Simon CHOICE Magazine

"Playing It Straight deftly examines the often subtle and always complex role of humor in the making, exhibition, and patronage of art. In addition to offering a much-needed lesson in the various forms of nineteenth-century humor, Greenhill looks beyond the surface of art to yield new insights and meanings regarding canonical artists and their chosen media. This book sheds light not only on the artists and artworks analyzed, but on the historical period as a whole.”—Peter John Brownlee, Associate Curator, Terra Foundation for American Art

Playing it Straight provides the first comprehensive analysis of visual humor in late nineteenth-century America. Greenhill's intensive research and brilliant, intricate analyses span several disciplines, tracing the evolution of American art's 'sense of humor' from one of conspicuous comic performance to an aesthetic of the deadpan. This prism of the 'deadpan' opens the field to whole new districts of understanding, providing stunning new readings of well-known works while also revealing the pivotal role that previously obscure projects played in American cultural history.”—Jennifer L. Roberts, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University