Explore the vast range of titles available.

Looking beyond mushroom-cloud imagery, this dissertation investigates the greater effect that radiation science had on intellectually and imaginatively stimulating the visual artists László Moholy-Nagy, Ralston Crawford, Ben Shahn, and Bruce Conner, who sought knowledge of the long-range consequences of nuclear testing. Primarily concerned with the specter of the tests' aftermath rather than the spectacle of the explosions themselves, these artists explored the toxicity of radiation and ultimately discovered, I argue, that they lived in perpetual and uneasy co-existence with their subject. This study chronologically follows the course of scientific inquiry into radiological effects, from the Second World War to the height of the Cold War, beginning in the first chapter with a discussion of the role of nuclear medicine in the work of Moholy-Nagy. In postwar Chicago, he developed his earlier engagement with x-ray photographs into a deeper knowledge of atomic processes, which culminated in two paintings that suggest the healing and hazardous effects of nuclear energy. The second chapter considers Crawford's commission by Fortune magazine in 1946 to illustrate an atom-bomb test in the Pacific, for which he made several renderings based on post-blast meteorological and radiological data. The critical response to these works exposed not only the public's lack of understanding about the invisible phenomena of the bomb, but also Crawford's own loose grasp of the pertinent science. Continuing the focus on newsworthy nuclear events, the third chapter examines Shahn's portraits of J. Robert Oppenheimer, following the latter's official censure by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, and Shahn's paintings and drawings about a contemporaneous fallout disaster leading to the death of a Japanese fisherman. Both series link the heedless actions of scientists and their government employers to the rise of universal radiation sickness, precipitated by what Shahn perceived as mass dehumanization. The fourth and final chapter addresses Conner's long-held view that San Francisco, the city in which he lived, was radioactively contaminated and a potential target of nuclear attack. Through the representation of self-destruction in his assemblages and films, Conner mimed a cultural malaise that struck him as particularly rampant in the local environment of nuclear experimentation.

\"Saturday night bath\" depicts a detailed scene from the self-trained black artist Horace Pippin's memory of his childhood home in Goshen, New York. As owner of the Downtown Gallery, the premier commercial venue for contemporary American art, Edith Halpert initially presented Pippin as the contemporary successor to folk masters of the past, celebrated for their simplified visual language and non-naturalistic palette. This article addresses Pippin relationship with Halpert, his primary art dealer in New York. [Publication Abstract]

At the height of the Great Depression in 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal sought to reform the southern economy by offering novel methods for rehabilitation. Elsewhere in 1938, having just made his second major trip to the deep South, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) put the finishing touches on the manuscript for his autobiography, \"An artist in America.\" Published the following year, the book recounted the midwestern painters artistic pursuits and sketching jaunts throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including in 1928 an extensive exploration of the cotton plantations that ran from the Carolinas through Texas. Although Benton was primarily recalling evidence of the \"southern feudal system\" that he had witnessed firsthand in the previous decade, particularly while passing through the cotton belt of central Georgia, his comment also applied to the enduring difficulty of farm tenancy up to the present. Benton's view on the subject of cotton farming can be witnessed in his painting \"Weighing cotton\" (1939), a pictorial essay on the pernicious inequalities built into management-and-labor relations on plantations, which programmatic efforts had done distresingly little to remedy. [Abridged Publication Abstract]

During the Second World War, painter George L. K. Morris abandoned pure abstraction for ordered expression with elements of figuration. His paintings aimed to show the realism of the time. Morris also wanted to become part of the war effort so worked as a naval architect. This essay examines his career during the period and discusses the techniques and influences in his paintings.