Examines how and why religion matters in the history of modern American art.   Andy Warhol is one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century. He was also an observant Catholic who carried a rosary, went to mass regularly, kept a Bible by his bedside, and depicted religious subjects throughout his career. Warhol was a spiritual modern: a modern artist who appropriated religious images, beliefs, and practices to create a distinctive style of American art.   Spiritual Moderns centers on four American artists who were both modern and religious. Joseph Cornell, who showed with the Surrealists, was a member of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Mark Tobey created pioneering works of Abstract Expressionism and was a follower of the Bahá’í Faith. Agnes Pelton was a Symbolist painter who embraced metaphysical movements including New Thought, Theosophy, and Agni Yoga. And Warhol, a leading figure in Pop art, was a lifelong Catholic. Working with biographical materials, social history, affect theory, and the tools of art history, Doss traces the linked subjects of art and religion and proposes a revised interpretation of American modernism.  

Edward Hopper's world-famous paintings articulate an idiosyncratic view of modern life. With his impressive subjects, independent pictorial vocabulary, and virtuoso play of colors, Hopper continues to influence to this day the image of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. He began his career as an illustrator and became famous around the globe for his oil paintings. They testify to his great interest in the effects of color and his mastery in depicting light and shadow. The Fondation Beyeler is devoting its large exhibition in the spring of 2020 to Hopper's iconic images of the vast American landscape. The catalogue gathers together all of the paintings, watercolors, and drawings from the 1910s to the 1960s on display in the exhibition, and supplements them with essays focused on the subject of depicting landscape.

From the commemoration of September 11 to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the 2004 unveiling of the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C., recent decades have witnessed a substantial increase in the number of new public memorials built in both Europe and the United States. This volume considers the contemporary explosion of public commemoration in terms of changed cultural and social practices of mourning, memory, and public feeling. Positing memorials as the physical and visual embodiment of our affective responses to loss, Erika Doss focuses especially on the memorial ephemera of flowers, candles, balloons, and cards placed at sites of tragic death in order to better comprehend how grief is mediated in contemporary commemorative cultures.

It doesn't matter how you remember him-rockabilly rebel, all-American boy, B-movie idol, patriotic G.I., or Las Vegas superstar. Elvis Presley is the most enduring image in American popular culture. This book explains why.

Other authors have explored Elvis's life and music, but Erika Doss now examines his multifaceted image as the key to understanding the adulation that has survived his death. She has talked with fans and joined their clubs, studied their creations and made pilgrimages to Graceland, all to explore what these images mean to those who gaze upon them, make them, and collect them.

In researching Elvis Culture, Doss discovered that the visual image of Elvis endures because it was so carefully constructed from the start. Sifting through the visual glut of Elvisiana, she looks at how fans collect, arrange, and display Elvis paraphernalia, make Elvis artwork, and participate in the annual August rituals of Elvis Week. By engaging in these acts, she explains, they continually reinvent Elvis to mesh with their own personal and social preferences and to keep his memory alive.

Doss examines Elvis in specific contexts: as a religious icon honored in household shrines, as a focus of sexual fantasy for women and men (both straight and gay), as an inspiration for countless impersonators, and as an emblem of whiteness held in disdain by many blacks-despite his having crossed racial lines with his music. She also looks at how Elvis has become a sanitized, legally protected image controlled by Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., which bans the sale of black velvet paintings and licenses his likeness around the world.

As engrossing as it is informative, Elvis Culture strikingly demonstrates the power of pictures in our visual culture and reveals much about American attitudes toward religion, sex, race, and celebrity-as well as about the construction of American identity in the late twentieth century.

The first comprehensive consideration of Life magazine’s groundbreaking and influential contribution to the history of photography

From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and consumed in the United States appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines. Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this volume examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. The work of photographers both celebrated and overlooked—including Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Fritz Goro, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith—is explored in the context of the creative and editorial structures at Life. Contributions from 25 scholars in a range of fields, from art history to American studies, provide insights into how the photographs published in Life—used to promote a predominately white, middle-class perspective—came to play a role in cultural dialogues in the United States around war, race, technology, art, and national identity.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives, as well as photographers’ archives, this generously illustrated volume presents previously unpublished materials, such as caption files, contact sheets, and shooting scripts, that shed new light on the collaborative process behind many now-iconic images and photo-essays.

Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Laurie Anderson are just some of the major American artists of the twentieth century. From the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to the 2000 Whitney Biennial, a rapid succession of art movements and different styles reflected the extreme changes in American culture and society, as well as America's position within the international art world. All the key movements are fully discussed, including early American Modernism, the New Negro movement, Regionalism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Neo-Expressionism.

In this acclaimed revisionist study, Erika Doss chronicles an historic cultural change in American art from the dominance of regionalism in the 1930s to abstract expressionism in the 1940s. She centers her study on Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, Benton's foremost student in the early thirties, charting Pollock's early imitation of Benton's style before his radical move to abstraction. By situating painting within the evolving sociopolitical and cultural context of the Depression and the Cold War, Doss explains the reasons for this change and casts light on its significance for contemporary culture.
"A welcome addition to the growing body of literature that deals with the art and culture of the depression and cold war eras. It is a pioneering work that makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of a puzzling conundrum of American art--the shift from regionalism to abstract expressionism."--M. Sue Kendall, "Winterthur Portfolio"
"An important scholarly contribution. . . . This book will stand as a step along the way to a better understanding of the most amazing transition in the art of our tumultuous century."--James G. Rogers, Jr., "Art Journal"
"A valuable and interesting book that restores continuity and political context to the decades of depression and war."--Marlene Park, "American Historical Review"

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials - to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism - have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania", Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express - and claim - those issues in visibly public contexts. Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania, " Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express--and claim--those issues in visibly public contexts.

Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, "Memorial Mania "is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.