Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age

by Jennifer A. Greenhill

Overview

Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers a stunning new look at late-nineteenth-century American art, and demonstrates the profound role humor played in determining the course of culture in the Gilded Age. By showing how complex humorous strategies such as deadpan and burlesque operate in a range of media—from painting and sculpture to chromolithography and architectural schemes—Greenhill examines how ambitious artists like Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint-Gaudens rethought the place of humor in their work and devised strategies to both conform to and slyly undermine developing senses of “serious” culture. Exhibiting an awareness of the emerging requirements of serious art but maintaining an investment in humor, they played it straight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520272453
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/01/2012
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications have appeared in Elective Affinities, Art History, and American Art. She has received research grants for Playing It Straight from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Luce Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Chapter 1. Winslow Homer’s Visual Deadpan
Chapter 2. Laughing with J.G. Brown, E.W. Perry, and Thomas Nast
Chapter 3. William Holbrook Beard Burlesques the Monster Museum
Chapter 4. Cosmopolitan Satire in Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Henry James
Chapter 5. Exchanging Jokes with John Haberle

Epilogue
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index

Editorial Reviews

"An accomplished and fascinating book. . . . It is one that will quickly become essential to any scholar looking to understand the art and culture of Gilded Age America."

Journal of American Studies - Peter Messent

"Greenhill offers a serious, intricate, and significant study of different types of humor operating in American visual arts from the Civil War to the turn of the 20th centh century..."

CHOICE Magazine - J. Simon