The Promise and Perils of Context

Abstract

Jules David Prown The past few decades have witnessed a major shift in the study of American art. If one had to choose a single word to characterize the change, it would be contextualization. The focus has shifted from works of art and the artists who made them-often monographic studies based on primary materials establishing chronology, authorship, paths of formal and iconographic influence, exhibition records, provenance, biographies, etc.-to the social and cultural context in which the objects were produced. Art has become less the object of study than the means of study.1 To borrow from M. H. Abrams, a work of art is examined not so much as a mirror reflecting its time as a lamp illuminating it.2 This development has roots in the social history of art, a Marxist mode that has long stressed the means and conditions of artistic production. But the application of social history to the study of American art by scholars such as Patricia Hills and Alan Wallach has been only one aspect of the recent shift. The proliferation of a variety of cultural studies-popular culture, material culture, visual culture, folklore and folklife-also reveals a shift in attention toward context. A number of influential scholars pursuing cultural art history, including Roger Stein, Elizabeth Johns, Bryan Wolf, and David Lubin, have come to their study not from traditional art history backgrounds, but from other disciplines, especially literature. And many younger Americanists teaching in art history departments arrive there by way of American Studies. Although trained art historians continue to play a central role in the study of American art, their scope has expanded to include a larger vision of American social and cultural history as the subject of their investigations. In terms of publication, the single magisterial volume on American art has become less common. Much of the best recent scholarship has appeared in the form of exhibition catalogues, volumes of collected essays or serial essays by a single author, and in journals, not only those devoted to American art like this one, but in American Studies journals, such as American Quarterly, Prospects, and the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as those with a cultural or decorative arts orientation (Winterthur Portfolio, American Furniture). Efforts to produce a single textbook on American art have not been as successful, with scholarship compromised by the daunting challenge of providing comprehensive coverage of an ever-expanding field. In the classroom, the result has been an increasing reliance on course packets of photocopied readings, a procedure that achieves flexibility and relevance but poses problems of logistics, copyright, and illustration quality. Better results can be achieved through digital technology, which is increasingly easy to use.