The Relationship of Art and Society

The Relationship of Art and Society

Krystal Mabone

Arts/125

08/15/16

Sarah Baer

The Evolution of Art

As old as I am, I never knew or understood how much art and the artists had such an effect on the world that we live in. As we move along further in our dealings on how art and the world around us intertwines, I will do my best to display what knowledge I have gained over this class to depict how art influenced us in a positive or negative way. The art world is just as sexist, racist, underhanded, beautiful, and fabulous like anything else in this world. I will attempt to show you through my eyes, the art world From Gilded Age to Diversity.

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age began with the end of the Civil War. The United States had returned its focus in rebuilding its infrastructure both politically and economically, asserting a new national unity as well as having a growing presence internationally. The last quarter of the 19th century was called the Gilded Age after the popular novelists Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that cast a critical eye on post-Civil War America. In this time frame, it was money, money, money everywhere, it seemed as if it were floating through the air. American industrialists and financiers, unbothered by anti-trust, health, labor, and income tax legislations, amassed large and vast fortunes, and were able to gain control over large segments of the United States economy.

They took advantage of the large waves of immigrants who entered the country. Frederic Remington used his artwork in a negative way, in my opinion because he supported the greed of those who gained their fortunes on the backs of immigrants. He made the immigrants out to be the bad guys when all they wanted was favorable working conditions and decent pay. Remington described the workers as “vicious wretches with no blood circulating with blood above the ears” and drew them as scruffy and ill dressed. Remington also blamed the labor unrest on the “malodorous crowd of anarchist foreign trash”. I wonder how many people took his words at face value without doing any of their own thinking or investigation.

                                        The Doctors

In the last half of the 19th century industrial and factory workers not only increased but also a new development of professions increased as well. Medical doctors, professors, engineers, scientists, architects, and lawyers either trained in the fledgling institutions of the United Stated or Europe, were replacing the self-educated counterparts. I am going to focus on the medical profession and the artwork of one Thomas Eakins. Eakins painted a picture of Dr. Samuel D. Gross pausing in the midst of the operation in the midst of medical students in an amphitheater. Eakins who was also had medical knowledge choose Gross because he was an intellectual, humble, and a pillar of the Philadelphia community. Eakins also put himself in painting as well.

Fourteen years later Eakins did another medical painting in which a surgeon pauses in the midst of surgery. The Agnew Clinic, in which Dr. D. Hayes Agnew was removing tissue from a cancerous breast. What is new to this painting that was not in the former is Mary V. Clymer who was the top woman in her nursing class. There is a shift because the patient is a female unlike the other patient who was male. She is there to assist Dr. Agnew who strongly opposed the education of women in regular medical classes. He thought that teaching women anything more than “housekeeping, hygiene, and belle-lettres” was a waste of time.

                                The Female Movement

Middle-class women could not enjoy the same benefits as men from the changes that were taking place at the end of the century. This all changed thanks to The New York Woman Suffrage Association. This came to be under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two prominent advocates of women’s rights, to initiate a battle for the social, civil, and religious rights of women. A Declaration of Sentiments, written in large part by Stanton, and modeled after The Declaration of Independence, declared that all men and women are created equal. It began a women’s right movement that would mobilize both sexes across the nation and end in the passing of the Equal Suffrage (Nineteenth) Amendment to the constitution in 1920 granting women the right to vote. It’s hard to wrap my head around that almost a century ago, women were just given the right to vote.

                                       Social Justice

While Frederick Douglas and Ida B. Wells were condemning the segregated admission policies of the World’s Columbian Exposition and the racist stereotypes contained in its exhibits, another African American was arguing for the significance of the work of African American artists. His name is Henry Ossawa Tanner, and in a presentation at the Congress on Africa, Tanner pointed out that the actual achievements of African American artists “proved negroes to possess ability and talent for successful competition with white artists. While Tanner was clearly a gifted artist who studied under Thomas Eakins, he could not escaped the blatant racism that was egregiously thrown his way.

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