Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520282896)

Rendering Violence explores the problems and possibilities that the subject of political violence presented to American painters working between 1830 and 1890, a turbulent period during which common citizens frequently abandoned orderly forms of democratic expression to riot, strike, and protest violently. Examining a range of critical texts, this book shows for the first time that nineteenth-century American aesthetic theory defined painting as a privileged vehicle for the representation of political order and the stabilization of liberal-democratic life. Analyzing seven paintings by Thomas Cole, John Quidor, Nathaniel Jocelyn, George Henry Hall, Thomas Nast, Martin Leisser, and Robert Koehler, Ross Barrett reconstructs the strategies that American artists developed to explore the symbolic power of violence in a medium aligned ideologically with lawful democracy. He argues that American paintings of upheaval "render" their subjects in divergent ways. By exploring the inner conflicts that structure these painterly projects, Barrett sheds new light on the politicized pressures that shaped visual representation in the nineteenth century and on the anxieties and ambivalences that have long defined American responses to political turmoil.

Author: Ross Barrett
ISBN-10: 0520282892
ISBN-13: 9780520282896
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 08/29/2014
Pages: 244
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 3.36lbs
Size: 10.38h x 7.27w x 1.55d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2015 pg. 1133