Open Access
Subscription Access
Open Access
Subscription Access
Facsimile and Originality: Changing Views of Classical Casts in Arts Education and Art History
Subscribe/Renew Journal
The use of plaster casts of Classical sculptures as models for the edification of art students is attested to as early as the Academy of Design in Florence. In the early United States, plaster cast collections of art and design schools constituted not only educational assets for artists-in-training, but important collections of plastic arts in America's burgeoning cities. This paper follows the trajectory of the plaster cast collection at one such institution: the Maryland Institute College of Art, formerly the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanical Arts. One of America's oldest colleges of art and design, the status of plaster casts here is demonstrative of changes in arts education in the US: from favored models to increasingly ignored remnants of defunct teaching methods and styles, to decaying artifacts of the college's past in need of care and preservation. Ideas of cast and "copy" are examined in light of critical theory, beginning with modernist notions of originality and "aura," and postmodern concepts surrounding authenticity and "migration."
Keywords
Art Education, Arts Pedagogy, Art History, History of Taste, History of Arts Institutions, Institutional Critique.
Subscription
Login to verify subscription
User
Font Size
Information
- Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer. 2007. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94–136. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
- Appadurai, A. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Benjamin, W. 1968. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations, 217–51. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Black, C.F. c. 1975. Unfinished and unpublished typescript draft on the history of the Maryland Institute, in the collection of the Decker Library of the Maryland Institute College of Art.
- Bode, C. 1956. The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Cowdrey, M.B. 1953. American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-Union. Vol. 1. New York: New-York Historical Society.
- Cummings, T.S. 1865. Historical Annals of the National Academy of Design. Philadelphia: G.W. Childs.
- Dinsmoor, W.B. 1944. "Early American Studies of Mediterranean Archaeology." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 83: 70–104.
- Dunlap, W. 1834. A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. Vol. I. New York: George P. Scott and Co.
- Foote, H.W. 1935. "Mr. Smibert Shows His Pictures, March 1730." The New England Quarterly. 8/1:14–28.
- Foote, H.W. 1969. John Smibert, Painter. Cambridge (MA): Kennedy Gallery.
- Frost, D.L. 2010. Making History/Making Art: MICA. Baltimore: Maryland Institute College of Art.
- Galindo, C. and Galindo, M. 2002. Mexico City Historic Center. Mexico City: Ediciones Nueva Guia S.A. de C.V.
- Haskell, F. and Penny, N. 1981. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
- Headley, J.A. 1992. "Public Art and Private Collector: William T. Walters and the Peabody Institute Art Gallery." Archives of American Art Journal. 32/1: 2–10.
- Historical Timeline of the Maryland Institute College of Art (http://webprod.mica.edu/About_MICA/Facts_and_History/Historical_Timeline).
- The International Association for the Conservation and the Promotion of Plaster Cast Collections (http://www.plastercastcollection.org/en/database.php?d=lire&id=172).
- Johnston, W.R. 1999. William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Latour, B. and Lowe, A. 2010. "The Migration of the Aura, or How to Explore the Original through Facsimiles." Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, edited by T. Bartscherer and R. Coover, 275–98. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- McNutt, J.K. 1990. "Plaster Casts after Antique Sculpture: Their Role in the Elevation of Public Taste and in American Art Instruction." Studies in Art Education. 31/3: 158–67.
- MICA Preserves Statues in Main Building Court, Maryland Institute College of Art (http://www.mica.edu/x11069.xml).
- The Peabody Art Collection: A Treasure for Maryland (http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/speccol/sc4600/sc4680/html/intro_peabody.html.
- The Peabody Gallery of Art: A History (http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/stagser/s1259/143/ghexhibit/onlinehistory.html).
- Pevsner, N. 1940. Academies of Art, Past and Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Schaaf, E. 1984. "Baltimore's Peabody Art Gallery." Archives of American Art Journal. 24/4: 9–14.
- Schuler School of Fine Arts (http://www.schulerschool.com/index.php).
- Searing, H. 1982. New American Art Museums. New York and Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Sinclair, B. 1974. Philadelphia's Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
- Tamen, M. 2001. Friends of Interpretable Objects. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
- Trollope, F. 1839. Domestic Manners of the Americans. Vol. 2. London: Whitaker, Treacher, and Co.
- Various authors. 1868. The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder's Letters and the Papers Relating to Its Dedication and Its History, up to the 1st January, 1868. Baltimore: Peabody Institute.
Abstract Views: 159
PDF Views: 0