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Dissertation Information for Amy Woodson-Boulton

NAME:
- Amy Woodson-Boulton

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2003)

ADVISORS:
- Debora L. Silverman

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- David Warren Sabean
- Dianne Sachko Macleod
- Thomas W. Laquerur

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Temples of art in cities of industry: Municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, c. 1870--1914

Abstract: What does it mean about the relationships between art, industry, and government that in the last decades of the nineteenth century, cities across Britain established art museums along with their sanitation projects, hospitals, gasworks, and Town Halls? My dissertation addresses this question by examining the previously-neglected histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. My project diverges from abstract and theoretical interpretations of museums by analyzing these institutions in their particular cultural and historical contexts. I describe how the museums developed out of the interactions between available ideas about art, social networks of reformers, the practice of painting, and competing interpretations of the potential for active government. I argue that these municipal art museums were possible because the new visual language of nineteenth-century art and art criticism profoundly changed the role of art in society, and re-created art as a potent means of social reform. As elites in these three cities struggled to contain the many new problems of industrial, capitalist society, they used ideas about the moralizing and reforming potential of art to remake culture and government in innovative ways. I show how, by providing art museums, city governments became increasingly responsible for their inhabitants' mental and spiritual health.

With very different political, economic, cultural, and religious climates, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester created art museums with distinct institutional identities, detailed in the three case studies of Part I. In the three chapters of Part II, I use a comparative approach to explore how the development of the museums' permanent collections, opening policies, and methods of popularizing art reflected their intended purposes and audiences. Together, all six chapters show how the museums' decisions about what art to collect, when to open, and how to attract a mass public differed because they emerged out of dissimilar urban contexts. At the same time, I show the similarities between the three institutions, arguing that the development of municipal art museums paralleled and in fact encouraged the extension of local government in Britain, as city councils took on new and expanded responsibilities for providing culture, education and beauty to their citizens.

MPACT Scores for Amy Woodson-Boulton

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-12 14:46:06

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Students under Amy Woodson-Boulton

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None