DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/6XYV-VP20
Defense Date
2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Art History
First Advisor
Dr. Catherine Roach
Abstract
Through his art, Edward Virginius Valentine (1838–1930) helped shape the myth of the Lost Cause. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Valentine studied in Europe before returning to a city devastated by the Civil War in the spring of 1865. From that point on, he became the unofficial sculptor to the defeated Confederacy, largely creating racist caricatures of African Americans or portraits of those the Confederacy identified as its heroes, like his most well-known work, the Recumbent Lee. Valentine’s studio and the early Valentine Museum (of which Edward was the first president) presented the world as its founder and his family understood it, or, more accurately, as they wished it to be: a world predicated upon white supremacy, scientific racism, and nostalgia for the Antebellum South. Both sites have received relatively little scholarly attention. Preserving, displaying, contextualizing, and, most importantly, critiquing the objects created by Valentine and housed in the studio and museum, shows how art objects and display spaces aided in the construction of Reconstruction-era ideology.
This dissertation traces the display history of Valentine’s plaster creations in both venues–the studio and the museum–between 1865 and 2003 to demonstrate how juxtapositions created meaning as Edward Valentine’s portraits of Confederate heroes and his racist caricatures were on view together in both his studio and the Valentine Museum. It reveals how the versatile and affordable medium of plaster acted to preserve the power of the South’s white elite, by replicating imagery, and all its attendant ideologies, from the implicitly to explicitly racist. To focus on plaster is to ask specific questions about the use of this medium, what about this material and its materiality makes it unique. It is a medium that plays with the boundaries of permanence, of color, of originality, of economic worth and artistic merit. Plaster’s whiteness and supposed inferiority to other media, like marble or bronze, complicates the problem of racial representation sculpturally and deepens this analysis. It was my interest in plaster as a medium that led me to the work of Edward Valentine and the early Valentine museum, raising questions like: When displayed in the studio, are works created in this medium perceived differently than those in marble or bronze? Why and how did Edward Valentine use this material? Why did the Valentine Museum collect plaster casts after canonical art objects? How did its visitors receive these objects? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what can these plaster objects and their subject matter, in both the studio and the museum, tell us about the wider sociopolitical landscape of Richmond, VA, and even the United States? These are the main questions my dissertation seeks to answer.
I have conducted extensive primary research in the Valentine Museum Archives, consulting previously unstudied archival sources, particularly period photographs. I also draw upon current scholarship in art history and museum studies that critically examines how the medium of an artwork carries racial implications, how sculptors materially engaged with national discourses of race, gender, and empire, how museums are part of these same discourses, and how to decolonize these spaces. In doing so, I offer a new perspective on the history of nineteenth-century United States sculpture and nineteenth- and twentieth-century museum histories, revealing how the placement of plaster objects in a range of public spaces aided in the creation, dissemination, and perpetuation of racialized worldviews.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
12-13-2023