Juliet Sperling

Images with movable parts—layered lift-the-flap anatomy books, spinning paper volvelles, lithographs with hidden panels, and playfully folded trade cards—began to appear in the United States by 1820. These metamorphic objects, which sprang into animated motion by the touch of a hand, reached wide audiences as products of an emerging mass visual culture. Though diverse in subject matter, metamorphic objects commonly sought solutions to questions that also preoccupied painters and photographers: how to represent complex categories of movement, time, and volume within the confines of a flat, static surface. This dissertation explores how metamorphic images changed the way Americans encountered flat images, primarily painting, over the course of the nineteenth century.

My study offers a new framework for understanding the conditions surrounding the emergence of cinema and early modernism. Through three thematic case studies, I contextualize larger questions of visuality in specific moments of interaction between mass cultural and fine art objects. My first chapter presents a re-reading of Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea through the lens of practices of covering, uncovering, and dissecting bodies in early harlequinades and later dissected plate anatomy books. In the second chapter, I analyze how Civil War-era audiences, trained by folded and splitview political ephemera to seek dual messages within a single surface, applied these expectations to depictions of postbellum Southern space (specifically, Winslow Homer’s Near Andersonville and Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South). The final case study considers how late nineteenth-century anxieties about looking through transparent surfaces register in Homer’s late marine paintings as well as in new mass-produced popup and transparent metamorphics. By tracing instances of correspondence between moving images and fine art during three key moments in the nineteenth century, I argue that by the appearance of cinema in 1895, audiences were trained to expect the unexpected from flat surfaces.