Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age

Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age offers a stunning new look at late—nineteenth—century American art, and demonstrates the profound role humor played in determining the course of culture in the Gilded Age. By showing how complex humorous strategies such as deadpan and burlesque operate in a range of media—from painting and sculpture to chromolithography and architectural schemes—Greenhill examines how ambitious artists like Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint—Gaudens rethoug...