Charles Willson Peale's Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum

Abstract

The relationship of any single work of art to its culture is always problematic. As the act of an individual artist faced with the task of creating something on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas with line, shape, and space, with form and color, a painting belongs to the biography of the artist and to the history and criticism of art, a possible subdivision of which is the history and criticism of the art of a particular culture. Cultural critics and historians of a more comprehensive sort will examine a work for the ways in which it “reflects,” “illustrates,” or “expresses” shared experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the culture, directly or in some mediated fashion. If art historians tend at times to underestimate the interrelation between a painting and other forms of cultural expression in their preoccupation with the specialness of the medium, its tradition and methodology, the cultural critics often run the risk of ignoring or flattening out the special language of pictorial expression in their avid search for interconnections. At one extreme, they seem to posit some hypostatized notion of a “culture” in which individual acts seem almost to be assumed as automatic illustrations rather than formative shapes. To fashion a more adequate critical approach requires thus that we draw upon the strengths of both approaches while avoiding their pitfalls.