Playing It Straight

Art and Humor in the Gilded Age

Jennifer A Greenhill author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:3rd Aug '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Playing It Straight cover

"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.

"An accomplished and fascinating book... It is one that will quickly become essential to any scholar looking to understand the art and culture of Gilded Age America." -- Peter Messent Journal of American Studies "Greenhill offers a serious, intricate, and significant study of different types of humor operating in American visual arts from the Civil War to the turn of the 20th centh century..." -- J. Simon CHOICE Magazine

ISBN: 9780520272453

Dimensions: 254mm x 178mm x 28mm

Weight: 771g

256 pages