Teaching American Art History in Kyoto and Brussels

Abstract

proposes that the portrait paintings of the Gilded Age formed the new American elite’s equivalent to the landscape painting sponsored by the old elite. Unlike developments in Europe, with its succession of styles such as realism, impressionism, and expressionism, my hypothesis for our trilogy posits that American art developed along themes related to socially relevant lines. After landscapes and portraits, the Gilded Age was followed by modernism and the virulently strained relationship between city and country life during this period. Like such patrons as Daniel Wadsworth and Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, who created the first public museum in the United States (the Wadsworth Atheneum) and filled it with contemporary American art of the period, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, when founding her museum in 1931, dedicated herself to American modernism, which initially did not have an especially large lobby at the Museum of Modern Art, established three years before. Whitney was a scion of one of the wealthiest families of the Gilded Age, and her portrait by Robert Henri in the exhibition Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time will demonstrate the connection between the second and third parts of the trilogy. Barbara Haskell, a renowned curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is preparing this exhibition, scheduled for the summer of 2009, for which the Whitney will make seventy-two works from its collection available as loans. This final project in the series was announced at a panel discussion with the three guest curators in November 2007 in New York. Our hope is that when these three shows are completed, German audiences will have gained a new knowledge of and affection for American art from this once-blank era, finding it a rich source for future connections and study. Hamburg will have had an important role in the history of a new reception, discovery, and interpretation of American art in Europe.