Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age
Category: Books,History,World
Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age Details
Review "Kristin Schwain considers the influences and interpretations of 'art' in the everyday lives of 'average' Americans. Concentrating her attention on four leading artists―painters Thomas Eakins, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Henry Ossawa Tanner and photographer F. Holland Day―Schwain attends to their place outside the elitist frames of academic art and theological debates.... Recommended." (Choice) Read more Review "In Signs of Grace, Kristin Schwain weaves together art history and the history of religion to delineate broad patterns and demonstrate the importance of the exchanges between art and religion at a time when both aesthetic and religious thought were fully engaged with the transformative processes of modernization." (Sarah Burns, Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts, Indiana University)"Signs of Grace offers a revealing window on the way in which the visual arts were given a distinct religious bearing in late Victorian America―one that accentuated momentary experiences of spiritual and aesthetic illumination. In this rich and sumptuous book, Kristin Schwain has done an excellent job of analyzing these forms of spiritualized visuality through the works of Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner, F. Holland Day, and Abbott Handerson Thayer." (Leigh Eric Schmidt, Princeton University)"Schwain's work forms part of a revival on scholarship on American religion that focuses on visual and material culture. She successfully challenges the concept that religion occupies a conservative, nostalgic, retrograde perspective within modernity. Schwain argues that it is precisely through their turn to religious themes that American artists (and art critics) forged a new, modern way of seeing, one in which art prompted personal contemplation and emotional transcendence.... This is a refreshing and thought-provoking study of a topic that has been marginalized for too long. Schwain's book deserves a broad readership for its keen core insight: that religious sensibility has a close affinity to the modernist way of seeing." Read more From the Back Cover "In Signs of Grace, Kristin Schwain weaves together art history and the history of religion to delineate broad patterns and demonstrate the importance of the exchanges between art and religion at a time when both aesthetic and religious thought were fully engaged with the transformative processes of modernization."-Sarah Burns, Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts, Indiana University "Signs of Grace offers a revealing window on the way in which the visual arts were given a distinct religious bearing in late Victorian America-one that accentuated momentary experiences of spiritual and aesthetic illumination. In this rich and sumptuous book, Kristin Schwain has done an excellent job of analyzing these forms of spiritualized visuality through the works of Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner, F. Holland Day, and Abbott Handerson Thayer."-Leigh Eric Schmidt, Princeton University Read more About the Author Kristin Schwain is Assistant Professor of American Art and Architecture at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Read more
Reviews
I enjoy reading this book. Very well written, very informative and inspiring.Personally I love the American art between 1840s to 1950s, a lot of masterpieces (e.g. from Abbott Thayer and Henry Tanner) which are visually beautiful, emotionally profound and spiritually humble.One passage in the book “between the Christianity of white, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest difference, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy”. This inspired me to check my faith, is it a faith of Christ or a faith of self-righteousness?If you like the American art in 19th or 20th century and insterested in spirituality, this is a must read.
