Western Visual Culture Studies Of The Early Twentieth Century

The object of the thesis is the visual culture in Germany in the period of the Weimar Republic,1918.11-1933.1. It reviews the unique social history of the period by tracking down the cultural meaning of gender, class, social psychology and ideology and so on kept in the visual images. As an untraditional method for studying art history, its aim is to bring the historical view and case study of culture study together from the study of art history and other correlation disciplines by expanding the field which requires not only to pay attention to the High art, but mass culture such as advertising, photograph, film, television, and so on and transforming the focus from the object to the subject. The thesis consists of two sections on the foundation, the first is the introduction which draws the outline of the visual culture study and, the relation with the art history and the theory groundwork of the study in Germany; the second searches the Weimar society by film, photograph, Berlin Dada, New Building in Weimar and the New Woman in advertising. The author pays attention not to try a new method of interpreting visual images, but to recover the particular Weimar history by gazing through diverse sides of the society.