Edwin Rein Harvey

Forwarding a broad understanding of artistic responses to modernity and of moments of artistic and cultural interplay between fraught pairs of terms such as “modern” and “traditional,” “place” and “space,” and “globalism” and “regionalism,” this project gathers and interweaves two loose historical threads: the concept of place and the alternately-maligned-and-celebrated work of the American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). Working outward from visual analysis of Wyeth's works, it investigates the art-historical (and also cultural, intellectual, and social) conditions that both contributed to and resulted from a renewal of interest in the concept of place among artists and thinkers in the United States and Europe in the twentieth century. At its most concrete, this project offers descriptions and historical explications of convergences and divergences between painting and place—as well as precise, local/contextual definitions of the latter—in Wyeth's artistic gains and willing losses.