Existing comment:
The Real and the Ideal in the Gilded Age:
As the United States emerged, battered yet intact, from the Civil War (1861-1865), it commenced the greatest territorial, economic, and population expansion in the nation's history. Internally, this growth was fueled by the natural resources of the West and by the industrial factories of the East. Externally, an interest in world cultures (and their objects) arose in the context of imperial political expansion, global tourism, world's fairs, and new museums. The decades following the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 are often described as the American Renaissance, a period -- like the 15th-century Italian Renaissance -- epitomized by a revival of art and architecture, much of it funded by newly wealthy capitalists.
The era also was known as the Gilded Age, a term coined in 1873 by the writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to capture the extraordinary material success -- and excess -- of the time. However, the term gilded also evoked the darker foundations of this society, which were characterized by growing tension between agrarian rural and industrial urban life, between immigrant union members and capitalist robber barons, and between the poor and the privileged.
Technological innovations such as electric lights, telephones, typewriters, indoor plumbing, washing machines, and automobiles transformed both work and home environments and radically redefined male and female gender roles. Ironically, as American women demanded new civil and social rights that transcended their traditional domestic roles as wives and mothers, artists depicted women in these same conventional roles, or as erotic or exotic objects of desire. Similarly, as American men increasingly worked in factories and offices, images of strong and virile men as warriors, hunters, or sportsmen multiplied in art. This tension between the real and the ideal mirrored the sense of dislocation experienced by many Americans as they entered the modern era. |