Dissertation Information for Amy Woodson-BoultonNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: 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. |
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