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Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Art
Sarah Burns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
In Painting the Dark Side, Sarah Burns argues that the canonical narrative of nineteenth-century American art describes a quest for a national visual identity, while at the same time, a number of artists unmasked a "darker side" of the narrative in which anxiety, fear, superstition, and madness ruled. This book presents a thoughtful, rigorous examination of the "dark side" in nineteenth-century American art. Burns claims that an exploration of the dark world lurking beneath the surface of nineteenth-century art actually allows us to understand the mainstream more fully. Thus, she explores the work of eight artists in biographical and historical, social, and cultural terms to reveal broader cultural anxieties about social, political, and economic instability in a rapidly changing, industrializing society. Burns traces the personal demons and artistic anxieties in the art of four artists working in antebellum America (Thomas Cole, David Gilmour Blythe, Washington Allston, and John Quidor), and of four artists active in postbellum America (William Rimmer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Eakms, and Albert Pinkham Ryder). Each chapter is dedicated to a single artist and contains expansive but detailed explorations of how local anxieties prove symptomatic of larger societal insecurities.
The nineteenth-century society that Burns describes was one that prized enlightenment, industrialization, imperialism, hard work, self-help, science, order, and progress, and sought to establish a stable and balanced society in which everyone had a well-defined place and a clear set of proscribed and prescribed behaviors. Fissures caused by rapid industrialization, slavery, immigration, and urban poverty, however, generated fears of societal chaos and disorder. Painting the Dark Side explores how the particular fears of eight artists-plagued by self-doubt, torn between their public personae and private selves, caught between the rational and irrational world-are indicators of larger social and cultural anxieties. Burns explores how fears of Jacksonian democracy, downward social mobility,...