Description: This thesis examines images of women shopping in the art of Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh during the 1920s and 1930s. New York City's Fourteenth Street served Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh, respectively, as a location generating the inspiration to study and visually represent its contemporaneity. Of particular interest to this thesis are relationships between developments in shopping and the images of women shopping in and around Fourteenth Street that populate the paintings of Miller and Marsh. Although, as Ellen Todd Wiley has shown, the emerging notion of the New Woman helped to shape female identity at this time, what remains unstudied are dimensions that geographically specific, historical developments in shopping contributed to the construction of female identity which, this thesis argues, Marsh and Miller related to, by locating in, the department store and bargain store.

Description: The primary objective of this thesis is to identify patterns of appearance among the flora and fauna of selected eighteenth-century New Spanish casta paintings. The objectives of the thesis are to determine what types of flora and fauna are present within selected casta paintings, whether the flora and fauna's provenance is Spanish or Mexican and whether there are any potential associations of particular flora and fauna with the races being depicted in the same composition. I focus my flora and fauna research on three sets of casta paintings produced between 1750 and 1800: Miguel Cabrera's 1763 series, José Joaquín Magón's 1770 casta paintings, and Andrés de Islas' 1774 sequence. Although the paintings fall into the same genre and within a period of a little over a decade, they nevertheless offer different visions of New Spain's natural bounty and include objects designed to satisfy Europe's interest in the exotic.

Description: This thesis uses reception theory, as formulated by the late Wolfgang Iser, as well as ideas about interpellation or hailing, to compare and analyze two paintings: The Annunciation (c. 1435) by Roger van der Weyden and Personal Values (1952) by René Magritte. It demonstrates that interpellation and reception are part of the same process, and that reception theory is especially suited to this comparison and analysis-because it allows consideration of ways in which the comparable pictorial structures of both paintings facilitate their intentions. It argues that those intentions are to engage viewers in a dialogue that ultimately is beneficial to both pictures and viewers. Furthermore, based on this shared intent, and on visible structural similarities, it argues that each of the two paintings identifies and receives the other as a picture of the same image-that is, of the Annunciation.

Description: During World War II, Lee Miller was an accredited war correspondent for Vogue magazine. Miller was trained as a surrealist photographer by Man Ray, and her wartime work, both photographic and written, is indicative of a combination of journalism and surrealism. This thesis examines Lee Miller's war correspondence within the context of Vogue magazine, establishing parallels between the photographs and writing to determine how surrealism informs it stylistically and ideologically. Using surrealist techniques of juxtaposition and an unmanipulated photographic style, and the surrealist concepts of the Marvelous and Convulsive Beauty, Miller presented the war as a surreality, or a surreal reality. This study concludes by using Miller's approach to suggest a new concept of journalistic practice: surrealist journalism.

Description: This thesis identifies and analyzes gendering in the art writing devoted to Lee Bontecou's metal and canvas sculptures made from the 1959 - 1964. Through a careful reading of reviews and articles written about Bontecou's constructions, this thesis reconstructs the context of the art world in the United States at mid-century and investigates how cultural expectations regarding gender directed the reception of Bontecou's art, beginning in 1959 and continuing through mid-1960s. Incorporating a description of the contemporaneous cultural context with description of the constructions and an analysis of examples of primary writing, the thesis chronologically follows the evolution of a tendency in art writing to associate gender-specific motivation and interpretation to one recurring feature of Bontecou's works.