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Available From UC Press
Playing It Straight
Art and Humor in the Gilded Age
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.
Jennifer Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications have appeared in Elective Affinities, Art History, and American Art. She has received research grants for Playing It Straight from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Luce Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"Playing It Straight deftly examines the often subtle and always complex role of humor in the making, exhibition, and patronage of art. In addition to offering a much-needed lesson in the various forms of nineteenth-century humor, Greenhill looks beyond the surface of art to yield new insights and meanings regarding canonical artists and their chosen media. This book sheds light not only on the artists and artworks analyzed, but on the historical period as a whole.”—Peter John Brownlee, Associate Curator, Terra Foundation for American Art
Playing it Straight provides the first comprehensive analysis of visual humor in late nineteenth-century America. Greenhill's intensive research and brilliant, intricate analyses span several disciplines, tracing the evolution of American art's 'sense of humor' from one of conspicuous comic performance to an aesthetic of the deadpan. This prism of the 'deadpan' opens the field to whole new districts of understanding, providing stunning new readings of well-known works while also revealing the pivotal role that previously obscure projects played in American cultural history.”—Jennifer L. Roberts, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
Playing it Straight provides the first comprehensive analysis of visual humor in late nineteenth-century America. Greenhill's intensive research and brilliant, intricate analyses span several disciplines, tracing the evolution of American art's 'sense of humor' from one of conspicuous comic performance to an aesthetic of the deadpan. This prism of the 'deadpan' opens the field to whole new districts of understanding, providing stunning new readings of well-known works while also revealing the pivotal role that previously obscure projects played in American cultural history.”—Jennifer L. Roberts, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University