Becoming Walker Evans: Photography, Literature, and Transnational Modernism, 1926-1938

Oehlrich, Kristen

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Year:: 2014
Contributor:: Oehlrich, Kristen (creator); Nickel, Douglas (Director); Trachtenberg, Alan (Reader); Vanel, Herve (Reader); Brown University. History of Art and Architecture (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Walker Evans; transatlantic avant-garde; photography and literature; American Modernism; the Museum of Modern Art; Eugène Atget; Hart Crane; Carleton Beals; William Faulkner; Diego Rivera; Edith Wharton; Berenice Abbott; Edward Hopper; Charles Burchfield; Muriel Draper; Transnationalism; Photography; Literature and photography; Great Depression; Vernacular architecture; Evans, Walker > 1903-1975; Atget, Eugène > 1857-1927; Crane, Hart > 1899-1932; Beals, Carleton > 1893-1979; Rivera, Diego > 1886-1957; Wharton, Edith > 1862-1937; Abbott, Berenice > 1898-1991; Hopper, Edward > 1882-1967; Burchfield, Charles > 1893-1967; Draper, Muriel > 1886-1952
Extent:: vii, 509 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0Q23XMN

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Abstract:: This project foregrounds the connections between American, European, and Latin American influences in American art history as signaled by the use of “transnational” in my dissertation title. Using a contextualist approach, I demonstrate how the iconic American photographer Walker Evans’s images from the Great Depression were created in a period that forged aesthetic alliances between disparate international influences, including the work of the French photographer Eugène Atget, the poetry of Hart Crane and other American writers, the agrarianism of William Faulkner, and the radical politics of the Diego Rivera circle. Moreover, I examine how debates about immigrant policy and racial politics in the United States and cultural relations with Cuba informed the subjects of Evans’s photographs. This project contributes to the discipline of visual studies by renegotiating the parameters and delineations of art history. It questions traditional regional and continental divisions, preferring instead to adopt a more culturally integrative approach to the study of American art, one that focuses on the fluidity of artistic and intellectual exchange in a broadly defined North America. Chapter one situates Walker Evans within the polarized context of modernism and considers his work both as product of American vernacular traditions and as representative of a progressive aesthetic movement towards what would become an iconic American documentary style during the 1930s. The following chapter shifts to a discussion of Evans’s photographs of interiors of working class and immigrant homes during the Great Depression. Chapter three examines Evans’s first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses. The final chapter looks at two remarkably different projects by Evans created during the 1930s. The first is his photographic work for Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba (1933), a project for which he traveled to a politically unstable and violent Cuba during a period of strained cultural relations between that country and the United States. The second is his publication in 1938 of his well-known book, American Photographs.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)

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Rights: In Copyright
Restrictions on Use: Collection is open for research.

Citation

Oehlrich, Kristen, "Becoming Walker Evans: Photography, Literature, and Transnational Modernism, 1926-1938" (2014). History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0Q23XMN

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History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the History of Art and Architecture department.
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