Jeffrey Richmond-Moll

This dissertation considers how American artists navigated early twentieth-century experiences of mobility and displacement by turning to religious subjects. Their works located a spiritualized sense of place in an evermore dislocated world and thus invite scholars to revise theories that modernization’s forces have been unilaterally secularizing. Four chapters trace how the modern American search for roots unfolded en route and became entangled with spaces, experiences, and materials of spiritual belief. While the relationship between roots and routes is a defining feature of scholarship on post–Cold War globalization, this project argues for the relevance of such models at an earlier moment and does so by returning religion to the picture. My objects of study range from the canonical to the unstudied: stereographs of Palestine in Northeastern parlors; Marsden Hartley’s still lifes of Southwestern Catholic devotional objects; John Singer Sargent’s and Henry Ossawa Tanner’s transatlantic paintings in Europe; Violet Oakley’s altarpieces on American battleships in the Pacific; and John Steuart Curry’s scenes of dynamic spirituality in the migratory Midwest. By engaging transculturally with mobility and spirituality, I show how differently positioned individuals—racial or ethnic, mainstream or marginalized— experienced modernity’s unmooring effects in distinct ways, and sought, in response, a means of anchorage.