"Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age" offers a stunning new look at late-nineteenth-century American art, and demonstrates the profound role humor played in determining the course of culture in the Gilded Age. By showing how complex humorous strategies such as deadpan and burlesque operate in a range of media - from painting and sculpture to chromolithography and architectural schemes - Greenhill examines how ambitious artists like Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint-Gaudens rethought the place of humor in their work and devised strategies to both conform to and slyly undermine developing senses of "serious" culture. Exhibiting an awareness of the emerging requirements of serious art but maintaining an investment in humor, they played it straight.
- ISBN10 0520272455
- ISBN13 9780520272453
- Publish Date 1 August 2012
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of California Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 256
- Language English