On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-century American Art

On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-century American Art

by PMcDonnell (Author)

Synopsis

American artists in the early decades of the 20th century found rich inspiration in vaudeville halls, revue theatres and moving-picture houses. The spectacular new visual attractions in these venues, emerging partly as a result of such technological advances as electrical lighting of the stage and the invention of motion pictures, emboldened artists to translate the arresting stimuli to their own medium. This illustrated work is devoted to American artists' responses to film, popular theatre, and other urban amusements from 1890 to 1930. The volume presents more than 100 paintings, drawings, watercolours and photographs that convey the highly-charged experience of attending vaudeville, early moving-picture shows, and other forms of popular amusements. These works of art reveal much about the beginnings of modernity in the United States and about how artists in early 20th-century America searched for new pictorial vocabularies to express the profound change and dynamism of their time. The contributors to the volume represent a wide variety of expertise - from art history to film to theatre - and they examine works by such key artists as Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, Walt Kuhn, Everett Shinn and John Sloan, each of whom found a different formal and stylistic means to portray popular entertainment and, along the way, what it meant to be modern.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 240
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 08 Apr 2002

ISBN 10: 0300092407
ISBN 13: 9780300092400
Book Overview: This is the catalogue for an exhibition on view at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, from 27 April to 4 August 2002. It will then travel to the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, from September 2002 to January 2003, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts, Philadelphia, from February to May 2003. (Temporary)

Author Bio
Patricia McDonnell is curator at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota.