William Harnetts Curious Objects - Still-Life Painting After the American Civil War

"Bold and innovative, Nika Elder’s book does not only challenge how historians of American art think about the motivations for and meanings of still-life painting. It also changes our understanding of the relationship between fine art, social politics, and popular culture in the immediate wake of the US Civil War.”—Tanya Sheehan, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, Colby College

"In Nika Elder’s absorbing account, the great American still-life painter William Harnett grasped at objects like a drowning man at whatever floats nearby. In the wake of the Civil War, an artist wrongly characterized as a con man set out on a mission to find enduring human values. If it proved impossible, his clear-eyed investigation of last moments is all the more grave and impressive. Harnett’s failure is Elder’s triumph."—Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University

List of contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Harnett’s Objects
1. Civil War Relics and the End of History Painting 
2. Text and the Transformation of Still Life 
3. Specimens and the Art of Trompe l’Oeil 
4. Manufactures and the Politics of Painting
Epilogue: Still Life and Its Afterlives

Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index 
 

About the author

Nika Elder is Assistant Professor of Art History at American University in Washington, DC.

Product details

• Authors: Nika Elder
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2022
• EAN: 9780520386419
• ISBN: 978-0-520-38641-9
• No. of pages: 216
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; USA, ART / History / General, ART / Individual Artists / Monographs, ART / American / General, History of Art, Modernism, United States of America, USA, Individual artists, art monographs, Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus