The spectral imagination: American art between science and superstition in the late nineteenth century
Thomas, Adam
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/50400
Description
Title
The spectral imagination: American art between science and superstition in the late nineteenth century
Author(s)
Thomas, Adam
Issue Date
2014-09-16
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Greenhill, Jennifer A.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Greenhill, Jennifer A.
Committee Member(s)
Weissman, Terri
O'Brien, David
Finnegan, Cara A.
Department of Study
Art & Design
Discipline
Art History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
art
painting
science
superstition
Spiritualism
magic
psychology
Henry Alexander
William Merritt Chase
Edwin Romanzo Elmer
Irving Ramsay Wiles
Abstract
This dissertation explores how tensions between science and superstition were embedded in and constitutive of the visual arts in late nineteenth-century America. By focusing on the work of artists Henry Alexander (1860–94), William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Edwin Romanzo Elmer (1850–1923), and Irving Ramsay Wiles (1861–1948), this project examines the interplay of these ostensibly opposing worldviews in painting. It traces how the interdependence of these terms—which were very much in flux during the era—provided a creative paradigm for negotiating the professionalization of science, the emergent discipline of psychology, new theories of perception and memory, as well as scientific and spiritual efforts to unlock material, psychic, and supernatural worlds broadly. This dissertation reassesses distinctions between so-called realistic and visionary idioms in American art and offers a revised conception of the intersections between art and science in this period.
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