Awards
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Sarah Burns
Providing a highly original alternative to the positivist understanding of American art as a celebration of national identity and religion, Sarah Burns’s Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) explores the dark, “gothic” side of nineteenth-century American painting. This beautifully written collection of eight case studies considers the darker facets of American history and eight painters’ psyches to portray a direction in American painting that parallels and relates to the strong gothic tradition in American literature.
The eight artists examined by Burns are remarkably diverse. Drawing on biography, theory, historical context, contemporary literature, and a close reading of the pictures, she traces the course of a gothic imagination in each painter’s art and life. Thomas Cole’s melancholic landscapes, David Gilmour Blythe’s urban portrayals of sordid inebriation, Washington Allston’s visionary history paintings and troubled roots as a Southern slaveholder, and John Quidor’s dark expositions of human greed exemplify very different manifestations of the gothic. Added to this are explorations of Elihu Vedder’s desolate and sometimes savage inventions related to his own early traumas, William Rimmer’s bizarre family tragedy and angst-ridden pictorial inventions, Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic seen through the lens of contemporary horrified responses, and the unconventional dream imagery of Albert Pinkham Ryder, whom one contemporary termed a “Poe of the Brush.”
This innovative portrayal of the gothic, “the shadow side of the Enlightenment,” elucidates the close relationship of art to literature, the irrational fears and racist legacies of American antebellum culture, and the striking originality of eight American artists. Burns expands and enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century American art.
Committee: Babette Bohn, Texas Christian University, Chair; Jonathan M. Bloom, Boston College; Edward J. Sullivan, New York University; Benjamin C. Withers, Indiana University, South Bend
