Overview

"Voices from the dark, or 'gothic', side of American life are well known through the work of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. But who were the Poes of American art? Until now, art historians have for the most part seen the gothic as the province of misfits and oddballs who rejected the bright landscapes and cheerful scenes of everyday life depicted by Hudson River School and other mainstream painters. In ""Painting the Dark Side"", Sarah Burns counters this view, arguing that far from being marginal, the gothic was a pervasive and potent visual language used by recognized masters and eccentric outsiders alike to express the darker facets of history and the psyche. A deep gothic strain in the visual arts becomes evident in these beautifully written, richly illustrated pages, illuminating the entire spectrum of American art. Weaving a complex tapestry of biography, psychology, and history, Sarah Burns exposes dark dimensions in the work of both romantic artists such as Albert Pinkham Ryder and Thomas Cole and realists like Thomas Eakins. She argues persuasively that works by artists who were generally considered outsiders, such as John Quidor, David Gilmour Blythe, and William Rimmer, belong to the mainstream of American art. She explores the borderlands where popular visual culture mingled with the elite medium of oil and delves into such topics as slave revolt, drugs, grave-robbing, vivisection, drunkenness, female monstrosity, and family secrets. Cutting deep across the grain of standard nationalistic accounts of nineteenth-century art, ""Painting the Dark Side"" provides a thrilling, radically alternative vision of American art and visual culture."

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9780520249875

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Reviews

[E]xpertly intertwines the strains of gothic imagery and art of nineteenth century America with the fears and anxieties of a country torn apart by war and racial strife, facing the specters of growing urban slums, mass industrialization, unchecked immigration, and natural disasters. - Kraig A. Binkowski, Art Documentation Leads readers through the interior worlds of seven troubled nineteenth-century painters. With a splendid eye for historical detail, she probes relationships between the work of these tormented individuals and the national upheavals associated with slavery, immigration, industrialization, and women's rights. - David Lubin, author of Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America It is Sarah Burns's mission - and gift - to ask the really interesting questions about what has often been overlooked, underestimated, or otherwise minimized in nineteenth-century American painting. In this striking new book, she looks at works we thought we knew by artists like Thomas Cole, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Thomas Eakins, discovering in their dark side the shadows that give form and depth to the standard 'sunny-side-up' version of American art history. - Barbara Groseclose, author of Nineteenth-Century American Art

Author Information

Sarah Burns is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University. She is the author of Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (1996) and Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (1989).

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