Doughboys, art worlds and identities: Sculpted memories of World War I in the United States.

摘要

This dissertation highlights the complexity of World War I commemoration by focusing on the professional and personal aspirations of individual sculptors and exploring the meanings that memorials held for particular communities in the interwar period. Using research based largely on artists' papers at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, contemporary art criticism, and commentary on memorials in monument trade journals and newspapers, this study recovers the circumstances of the production of public commemorative art after the First World War.;In 1919, art professionals mobilized to distribute guidelines and offer their services to memorial committees that they felt were in need of expert advice. However, despite efforts to save the public from the “pitfalls of sentimentality” and the “maddening monotony” of stock soldiers that had dominated Civil War commemoration, locally dedicated sculptures of “doughboys,” both original commissions and mass-produced designs, proved to be one of the most popular types of memorials to the Great War. These memorials provide a unique opportunity to study the art worlds of the United States in the 1920s. At that time, immigrant artists strove to gain legitimacy in a highly xenophobic society, women sculptors increasingly took on monument commissions that had been the prerogative of men, and monument dealers attempted to perpetuate the business success they had achieved after the Civil War.;Though the impulse of local communities to commemorate their war dead with representational sculptures of soldiers was not unique to the United States after World War I, the attitudes and values of interwar American society, including those nurtured by the Red Scare of 1919, informed the significance and symbolism of such memorials in the U.S. in the 1920s. This dissertation shows how World War I memorials in the United States not only commemorated lost lives, but served as signs of loyalty and antiradical sentiment, reinforced popular conceptions of ideal manhood, and engendered debates over the authenticity of sculptural expression and the function of war memorials in general.