This dissertation aims in part to redress the shortage of close readings of Vladimir

Mayakovsky and Aleksandr Rodchenko's joint project, the book Pro Eto. It explores the

relationship between the book's visual and verbal aspects, treating the book and its images as

objects that repay attentive looking and careful analysis. By these means this dissertation finds

that the images do not simply illustrate the text, but have an intertextual relationship with it:

sometimes the images suggest their own, alternative narrative, offering scenes that do not exist in

the poem; sometimes they act as literary criticism, suggesting interpretations, supplying

biographical information, and highlighting with their own form aspects of the poem's.

This analysis reveals Pro Eto's strong links with distant forms of art and literature. The

poem's intricate ties to the book of Genesis and Victor Shklovsky's novel Zoo, written while the

former literary critic was in exile in Berlin, evince an ambivalence about the manifestations of

socialism in early-1920s Russia that is missing from much of Mayakovsky's work. At the same

time Rodchenko's images, with their repeated references to Byzantine icons and Dadaist

photomontage, expand the poem's scope and its concerns far beyond NEP-era Moscow. Thus my

analysis finds that although Pro Eto is considered to be an emblematic Constructivist work,

many of the received ideas about Russian Constructivism--the unswerving zeal of its

practitioners, the utility of its production, and in particular the ideology-driven, sui-generis

nature of the movement itself--are not supported by the book. Pro Eto's deep connections with

art and literature outside of Bolshevik Russia contradict the idea--first set out by the

Constructivists themselves and widely accepted by subsequent scholars--of Constructivism as

an autochthonous movement, born of theory, and indebted neither to historical art movements

nor to contemporary western ones. My analysis suggests that reading Pro Eto through the lens of

Constructivist theory denies the work the richness, ambivalence and humor it gains when that

theory is understood as being in conversation with artistic practice, rather than defining it.

This dissertation investigates the construction of the figure of Botticelli in European culture, c. 1860-1915, and its unexpected impact on understandings of art as historical. Botticelli's "rediscovery" by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and the Aesthetes has become a notorious episode in the history of taste. Yet why those engagements occurred; what it was, exactly, that these and other figures saw in his paintings; and how the specific texture of the phenomenon became the crucial testing ground for the emergent discipline of art history--these questions remain unanswered. In addressing them, the dissertation argues for the special importance of the heterogeneous body of writing and art-making that accrued around the figure of Botticelli in the second half of the nineteenth century, in any attempt to come to grips with modernity's fraught sense of the historicity of art.

"Art History and the Invention of Botticelli" is a study in the emergence of art history from a complex of writings about art, and about the past, that included modes of "criticism," "connoisseurship," philosophical meditation, an "iconography" not yet claiming the name, imaginative recreation, rhapsodic free-association, and, as constant ground-bass, the invention of further "Botticellis" by artists of the time. It is, in the main, about two things. The dissertation tells the story of the rediscovery of Botticelli itself, the work of English painters like Simeon Solomon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Walter Crane and, in their wake, of a string of strong writers about art: Walter Pater, John Ruskin, Giovanni Morelli, Bernard Berenson, Herbert Horne, Aby Warburg. Moreover, it reveals that in and through this rediscovery, a great battle was waged about the nature of writing on the visual arts. A mode of writing with an orientation towards description, ethics, and the affective impact of works of art faced off against an ascendant mode that valued the stabilization of the artist's oeuvre via "scientific" criticism and the patient, scholarly reconstruction of his life-world. Artwriting increasingly made a claim to the grander status of Kunstwissenschaft. In this paradigmatic contest, the paintings of Botticelli--in particular, the strangeness of their historical position--proved crucial. The result was a set of exaggerated, self-reflexive interactions between the verbal and the visual that gives special insight into the treatment of art as an embodiment of the past.

Chapter one concerns the strategies of pictorial reference and reconfiguration by which late Pre-Raphaelite painters first constructed the figure of "Botticelli." Chapter two centers on the peculiar sense of art's history as it develops in the writings of Walter Pater and John Ruskin on Botticelli. It argues for the centrality of these accounts: positively or negatively, they would orient all those that followed. Chapter three turns to the so-called "scientific" connoisseurship of Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson, focusing in particular on the impact of their attempts to stabilize Botticelli's oeuvre through the figure of the artistic follower. Chapter four discusses the writings of Aby Warburg and Herbert Horne in relation to the tradition out of which they emerged, attempting to situate their phobic refusal of the "cult of Botticelli."

This dissertation is about barricades and image production in the 1830s and `40s. It comprises three chapters, each of which centers on a single work of art: Auguste Préault's Tuerie (1834), Ernest Meissonier's Souvenir de guerre civile (1849-1850), and Honoré Daumier's L'Émeute (c. 1848-1852). Together, the three chapters describe how the barricade oriented the period's multiple, often contradictory conceptions of class, revolution, history, and art. A new grammar of democratic politics took shape in the `30s and `40s, and it was one in which the street figured as both the site and medium of social transformation. Some would say, as I do, that the barricade was the 19th century's most poignant and meaningful "symbolic form." It was also the most enchanting.

Triumph is rare in these pages; tragedy sets their key. They turn on Préault's bas-relief, the political re-entrenchments of 1833-1834, horror, defeat, and disillusion rather than, say, the affirmative image of the barricade Eugène Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple is often thought to have engendered; the uncertainties, ambivalences, and violence of artistic production in times of radical disintegration anchor their pivot. Not infrequently, they emphasize paintings, lithographs, and sculptures that evoke the barricade only in its absence. Yet while this dissertation reconfigures the image-map formerly in place, it does so not in pursuit of greater comprehensiveness - with the hope, as it were, of producing a total picture - but to capture something of the dividedness and fragmentariness that the barricade asserts even as it prefigures a world in which reconciliation is possible. Much was at stake in the `30s and `40s, and this dissertation aims to sharpen our sense of the true diversity and depth of the contemporary response, both to the limbo of the July Monarchy and the "dark times" (Brecht's phrase) after June 1848.

This dissertation is about the image and the reality of traffic in early twentieth-century France, from the late 1890s to the mid-1930s. It comprises three chapters, each of which centers on a different artist’s encounter with the emergence of the modern traffic system: Camille Pissarro’s Boulevards Montmartre and Avenues de l’Opéra series of 1897-98, Le Corbusier’s first projects in and around Paris between 1917-1923, and Fernand Léger’s “object-drawings” of 1928-33. Together, these chapters shed light on the emergence of a new scene of modernization three decades after Baron Haussmann’s first campaign of urban renovations, from which would result the transformation, not simply of the old core of central Paris, but of the road network in its entirety, encompassing city and country alike. Tracking the development of the traffic system in broad strokes, from the policing of the street in the moment of the Dreyfus Affair to the planning of the first autoroutes in the late 1920s and early ’30s, my dissertation asks how the modernization of street traffic came to be seen as a natural and normal aspect of the human environment, and how, in turn, artists, architects, and other advocates of modernism sought to grapple with the contradictions of the new infrastructural landscape.

This dissertation examines photography's relationship to beliefs in universal order, and the emergence of a photographic "world picture" in art. It argues that the concept of a "taken" picture arises with empirical scientific methods in the early eighteenth century, and ties the "taken" pictures of four artists in the early modern and contemporary eras to the emergence of period worldviews: Canaletto's paintings to Newtonian mechanics, Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies to structuralism, and Andreas Gursky's large-scale digital photographs to globalization.

Chapter 1 uncovers the "taken" picture's origins as a commodity in Canaletto's paintings of 1730s Venice, and shows how they were made to seem to British tourists like observations through Isaac Newton's eyes--cut from a mechanically homogenous world. Canaletto's paintings, executed through the lens of a camera obscura, "captured" moments of space and time by analogizing the artistic act of "taking views" to the scientific act of "taking samples." Chapter 2 follows Canaletto to London, where the artist creates the first view paintings of an endless built world. The chapter shows how these massive cityscapes evoke a cultural sublime before the advent of sublime paintings of nature. These paintings anticipate the form and scale of Andreas Gursky's digital photographs of globalization by more than two centuries and also presage modern skepticism of Enlightenment humanism: how, they ask, can a human observer see himself as part of universal, deterministic system? Chapter 3 shows how Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies of industrial buildings photographically answered that question when they were adopted into the conceptual art world of the late 1960s and 1970s. The chapter reveals that the Bechers' pictorial formula helped viewers experience their own faculties being as mechanically determined as those of the industrial buildings--just as structuralism and computational cognitive science were then predicting. Finally, in Chapter 4, I demonstrate how Andreas Gursky turned the intangible concept of "globalization" into a photographic experience through digital imaging technology. Gursky arrived at a "photographic world picture" by seeming to have taken a photograph of a systematic fallout to our individual intentions, spread over an indefinite landscape. In doing so, he discovered what Canaletto was looking for in London--a place in the built landscape from which global logic could be observed. The four chapters of this dissertation show how photography gave visual form to notions of universal structural order.