Outside In: Professor Julia B. Rosenbaum on Space, Light, and the Artful Interior at Frederic Church’s Olana

Julia B. Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history, explores Frederic Church’s Olana for the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. In the late 1860s, following his success as a landscape painter, Church turned to architectural and interior design. He constructed a house at the center of Olana, his 250-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley, that manipulated space and daylight as artistic materials. With house building, Church moved into an immersive, three-dimensional format, producing some of his most experimental work. Rosenbaum’s study treats his first-floor interiors as a deliberate composition, of a piece with his two-dimensional oeuvre, and specifically argues for Church’s design as an aesthetic culmination of his longstanding interest—across media—in issues of perception and proprioception. Julia B. Rosenbaum is a professor of art history and visual culture and chair of the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College.
 

Post Date: 07-19-2021