About this Book

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 mediaÑfrom painting and sculpture to chromolithography and architectural schemesÑGreenhill examines how ambitious artists like Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint-Gaudens rethought the place of humor in their work and devised strategies to both conform to and slyly undermine developing senses of ÒseriousÓ culture. Exhibiting an awareness of the emerging requirements of serious art but maintaining an investment in humor, they played it straight.