Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905-1945

Synopsis

Often seen as backward-looking and convention-bound, genre painting representing scenes of everyday life was central to the work of twentieth-century artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence, and others, who adapted such subjects to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art. Re-envisioning the Everyday asks what their works do to the tradition of genre painting and whether it remains a meaningful category through which to understand them.Working with and against the established narrative of American genre painting’s late nineteenth-century decline into obsolescence, John Fagg explores how artists and illustrators used elements of the tradition to picture everyday life in a rapidly changing society, whether by appealing to its nostalgic and historical connotations or by updating it to address new formal and thematic concerns. Fagg argues that genre painting enabled twentieth-century artists to look slowly and carefully at scenes of everyday life and, on some occasions, to understand those scenes as sites of political oppression and resistance. But it also limited them to anachronistic ways of seeing and tied them to a freighted history of stereotyping and condescension.By surveying genre painting when its status and relevance were uncertain and by looking at works that stretch and complicate its boundaries, this book considers what the form is and probes the wider practice of generic categorization. It will appeal to students and scholars of American art history, art criticism, and cultural studies.

Copyright:

2023

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780271095813

Publisher:

Penn State University Press

Date of Addition:

10/17/23

Copyrighted By:

John Fagg

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.