The religious art of benziger brothers

American Art

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 59-79

  Zalesch, Saul ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449110144     PISSN: 10739300     EISSN: 15496503     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/424341     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. See Saul E. Zalesch, "What the Four Million Bought: Cheap Oil Paintings of the 1880s," American Quarterly 48 (March 1996): 77-109. Interest in popular religious art is growing quickly, as reflected in works such as: David Morgan, ed., Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)
2. Robert L. Gambone, Art and Popular Religion in Evangelical America, 1915-1940 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); chapter six of David Halle's Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
3. and articles by Sally M. Promey, David Morgan, Annette Scott, and others in Art Journal 57 (spring 1998). To see some of these "high-art-media" objects in situ, consult Marilyn J. Chiat's, America's Religious Architecture: Sacred Places for Every Community (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997)
4. See also Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
5. see Karl J. Benziger, Geschichte der Familie Benziger von Einsiedeln, Schweiz (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1923)
6. Marieli Benziger, August Benziger, Portrait Painter (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1958)
7. and The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), s. v. "Benziger Brothers." In a letter to the author, dated 3 July 1996, James Comisky, Publisher, Benziger Publishing Co., Mission Hills, Calif., noted the sale of Benziger to MacMillan
8. For more on santos, see Mitchell A. Wilder, Santos: The Religious Folk Art of New Mexico (Colorado Springs: Taylor Museum, 1943; reissued New York: Hacker Art Books, 1976). Recently, interest has focused on the creative reuse of religious symbols
9. See James R. Curtis, "Miami's Little Havana: Yard Shrines, Cult Religion and Landscape," in Ray B. Browne, ed., Rituals and Ceremonies in Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980). On the regionalization of sacred imagery, see Helena Waddy Lepovitz, Images of Faith: Expressionism, Catholic Folk Art, and the Industrial Revolution (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991)
10. James Cardinal Gibbons, The Faith of Our Fathers (1876; reprint, Rockford, I11.: Tan Books, 1980), pp. 169, 171
11. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 36
12. On Catholicism's quarrel with Italy, see Richard M. Linkh, American Catholicism and European Immigrants (1900-1924) (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1975), p. 41
13. Italian rituals were deemed more superstitious than orthodox because Italian children were thought to be ignorant of basic Catholic doctrine. See Linkh, American Catholicism, pp. 40-44
14. Descriptions of the furnishings of new churches reveal altars and chapels dedicated to Saint Joseph. See John Gilmary Shea, ed., The Catholic Church of New York City, 2 vols. (New York: Lawrence G. Goulding, 1878)
15. The Immaculate Conception was officially defined by Pope Pius IX on 8 December 1854. See Albert J. Nevins, ed., Mary knoll Catholic Dictionary (NY: Dimension Books, 1965), p. 286
16. See Timothy Walch, Catholicism in America: A Social History (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger, 1989), pp. 52-53
17. quot;Sketchings," The Crayon 2 (17 October 1855): 248-49
18. See Cachal-Froc, La Statuaire et Le Mobilier d'Églises (Montrouge, France: Paul Schmidt, 1895). Froc-Robert's enormous success in the United States may have resulted in part from the strong Francophilia of American Catholicism. French educators firmly controlled religious and educational institutions. See Henry Blumenthal, American and French Culture, 1800-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), pp. 149-50
19. Among Froc-Robert's displays in Philadelphia was an Assumption group purchased for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Lebanon, Pa., where it survives today. This piece and numerous other nineteenth-century statues and reliefs are reproduced in Rev. Msgr. George W. Rost, A Century More or Less of the Religious Art Treasures and Furnishings of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church (Lebanon, Pa.: 1980). According to one witness, the Froc-Robert pieces in Lebanon when drenched by a flood showed the characteristics of heavy papier-mâché. John Foster, telephone conversation with author, spring, 1996
20. See David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) p. 18. Why people buy abstract art is addressed in chapter four of David Halle's Inside Culture. For the lighter side of this question
21. see Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975)