Alexander Nemerov

Wendy Bellion

Andrew McClellan

Lance Mayer

Gay Myers

Richard Read

Jean-Philippe Antoine

David Bjelajac

Peter John Brownlee

Rachael Z. DeLue

Sarah Kate Gillespie

Tanya Pohrt

Catherine Roach

"Samuel F. B. Morse's (1791-1872) large-scale painting Gallery of the Louvre (1831-33) is one of the most significant, and enigmatic, works of early-19th-century American art. It is also one of the last works Morse painted before turning his attention tothe invention of the telegraph and Morse code. Gallery of the Louvre, owned by the Terra Foundation for American Art, was the focus of three separate international symposia held in 2011-13 at the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This collection of essays, carefully drawn from the proceedings of these scholarly sessions, brings together fresh insights by academics, curators, and conservators, who focus on the painting's visual components and the social and historical contexts that make it such a rich, complex work. The book accompanies a multi-year tour of the painting to prominent museums around the country"--

Samuel F. B. Morse's "Gallery of the Louvre" and the Art of Invention

Outgrowth of the author's thesis (Northwestern University).

Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America

Citizen Spectator

King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book, Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George III-and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue's destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and material violence-and tracing its resurrection through pictures and performances-Bellion advances a history of American art that looks beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite spectators to encompass a riotous cast of public sculptures and liberty poles, impassioned crowds and street protests, performative smashings and yearning re-creations. Bellion argues that iconoclasm mobilized a central paradox of the national imaginary: it was at once a destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued to enact British cultural identities. Persuasive and engaging, Iconoclasm in New York demonstrates how British monuments gave rise to an American creation story. This fascinating cultural history will captivate art historians, specialists in iconoclasm, and general readers interested in American history and New York City.

Revolution to Reenactment

Iconoclasm in New York

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

Wendy Bellion

Books

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