American Art History Research Articles

History of South American colonial art and architecture: Spanish South America and Brazil

History of South American colonial art and architecture: Spanish South America and Brazil

The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers

Using letters and diaries, this book describes the day-to-day experiences of American artists thrust into the unusual world of the Paris atelier. It is illustrated with works by Alexandre Cabanel, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins. The virtuosity and beauty of French and American academic painting are spotlighted by the author, who aims to challenge the chauvinism in American art history by revealing the extent of French influence on the American painters who sought training in Paris.

Introduction: New Vistas in Art, Culture, and Ethnicity

Last semester at Arizona State University in the School of Art, I offered a course in multicultural issues in art. It is important to note that the state of Arizona is under national scrutiny because of the negative publicity it has received in the past few years on the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday and other concerns about racial and cultural issues. I am not going to claim that Arizona does not have a lion's share of problems in this area; what I will claim is that most of my students are middle class, white, receptive, and sensitive to ethnic studies. It is typical that I only have a few students of color each semester. During the semester I introduced several new vistas to my students. One new vista which is historic and known to many people is the Harlem Renaissance. Only one young Hispanic student in the class had ever heard of the Harlem Renaissance. Nineteen-nineteen to 1929 was the period of which Langston Hughes wrote “Harlem was in vogue.” Black painters and sculptors joined poets, novelists, dramatists, and musicians in an artistic outpouring that established Harlem as the international capital of black culture. These Arizona students became very familiar with the works of Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Palmer Hayden, Romare Bearden, James Van Der Zee, Meta Warrick Fuller, and others. The students repeatedly asked: “Why have survey courses of American art history omitted these artists?” The answer to that question is complex and would take up too much space to answer here, but I realized as I taught the course that most of the materials were new for all the students in the class. The new vistas introduced became classroom activities that involved cognitive acts of acquisition and organization of knowledge that our present generation of students must be introduced to. I am certain many of these students in later years will discover, rediscover, and reanalyze [re-analyze] this information as they enter the workforce and assume positions of responsibility.

Messages in mosaic: the royal programmes of Norman Sicily (1130-1187)

analysis of the meaning of the mosaics is masterly - a stimulating book, full of challenging and convincing ideas, very well documented, lavishly illustrated, and beautifully produced. - Burlington Magazine. The twelfth-century mosaics made for the Norman kings of Sicily at Cefalu, Palermo and Monreale were unique in scale and magnificence, as well as arrangement. This book examines their meaning with over 120 illustrations, including dozens of hitherto unavailable general views plus ground plans, elevations and details especially made for this volume. The text focuses on the significance of the unconventional arrangement of the imagery, and the programmes with their many-layered meanings emerge as comprehensive, beautifully co-ordinated schemes which were original Norman inventions rather than provincial derivatives of Rome and Byzantium as they have sometimes been interpreted. Eve Borsook is an American art historian; she lives in Florence, and has just completed a new edition of her Companion Guide to Florence.

The athletic heritage in Hellenic museums

There is something touching about the flickering films of athletes wearing baggy shorts competing in early events of the modern Olympic games. A much deeper response is elicited by portrayals of contestants in the original competitions in Ancient Greece, reviewed here by an American art historian whose work has been published in Archaeologia, Connaissance des Arts, L'Estampille, Plaisir de France, Die Kunst und das Schone Heim and the International Herald Tribune.

Fine Fitnesses: Dickinson, Higginson, and Literary Luminism

As American Studies extends its interdisciplinary mandate to the pictorial arts, a manifest destiny that might be seen by some as but a new form of cultural imperialism, it behooves us to stop this juggernaut for a moment and consider the increasingly important question of historicism. An historicism strictly applied can provide us with a rubric rooted in fact rather than in speculation, chastening a self-reflexive presentism with documentary and contextual integrity. Nowhere is this discipline of the interdisciplinary more needed than in considering the application of a problematical term like “Luminism,” itself an ex-post-facto construct of American art history that, like a typical Baby Boomer, was born in the mid-fifties, came of age in the seventies, and now is an establishment figure of the late eighties. First conceived by John I.H. Baur, Luminism was nurtured by Barbara Novak in her magisterial American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, and all but beatified in the post-Bicentennial extravaganza of John Wilmerding's American Light exhibit at the National Gallery. With the acceptance of Luminism as a viable aesthetic category, American Romantic painting itself, so long international Modernism's stepchild and poor relation, came of age and was invested with the Toga Virilis of academic respectability. In looking backwards, Americanists once anxious about vindicating their attraction to a supposedly secondhand and second-rate pictorial tradition could proudly point out that the nation had always possessed a legitimate school of artists who responded in a unified yet creative way to the idiomatic qualities of the American scene.

Biography as Dramatic Monologue: Henry James, W. W. Story, and the Alternative Vision

T HE only major work by Henry James that has not been reprinted is his biography of an American sculptor, William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries and Recollections (1903). Neither a critical nor a financial failure when it first appeared, the book has since been dismissed by even the most ardent Jacobites as a regrettable expenditure of the Master's talent on a longforgotten figure in the history of nineteeth-century American art. The interest the biography is able to generate centers on its skill in developing a trifling subject into a work of art. Story himself, as James took pains to make clear, was merely the point of origin for a Jamesian expansion of consciousness which spreads far from its nominal center to encompass a generation of American expatriates in Italy. William Wetmore Story, the son of Justice Joseph Story of the United States Supreme Court, was, like his father, a brilliant scholar of the law, and he published a number of important works which went through several editions. When Justice Story died in 1846, his son wrote his biography. Since the younger Story had already tried his hand at sculpture, as well as other arts, he was also commissioned to design a memorial statue of Justice Story, completed in 1855, for Mount Auburn Cemetery. He first visited Rome in 1848, studied sculpture, and returned to Boston in 1851. After two more trips to Rome, he settled there permanently in 1856. Following a long and successful career as a sculptor, poet, and essayist, he died in Italy in 1895.

The Railway Station: A Social History by Jeffrey Richards, John M. Mackenzie

464 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE only when the strength of the American worker came to symbolize the strength of the nation. The remainder of Dabakis’s article addresses representations in the 1920s of unskilled laborers, principally women, blacks, and recent immigrants who had neither union nor political representation. These workers could not be symbols of national power or strength and were therefore the subject of few artistic representations. Saul Baizerman’s series of bronze statuettes acknowledging and memorializing the con­ tributions of unskilled labor and his vision of a “new workers’ society” are rare exceptions. These miniatures were produced as models for a monumental sculpture project never executed. Abstracted to their simplest geometric forms, these faceless figures could only symbolize the worker community and commemorate their collective efforts. In her introduction, Fahlman acknowledges the lack of any Amer­ ican equivalent to Francis D. Klingender’s Art and the Industrial Rev­ olution (1947). The articles in this IA volume add specifics on the relationship between art and American industry but do not provide the historical overview found in Klingender’s book. Although infor­ mative in discussing the way art served to advance industry, there is little here concerning where these works and their artists are situated within the broader context of American art history. With the exception of Pennell, they are outside the mainstream of American art. Without diminishing their documentary or historical importance, it is safe to say that they are not important as works of art. Commercial art pro­ duced as advertisements for developing industrial cities or for the westward advancement of the railroad is treated equally with “high” art without regard to issues of connoisseurship. Except for Wright’s article, there is little discussion of patronage or why, and for whom, these images were produced. It is not enough to discuss what representations of industry and technology were produced; some pertinent artistic issues need to be raised as well. While IA in Art is certainly a valuable contribution, future considerations of this subject should include discussion of the aesthetic, as well as historical, significance of the art represented. D. Scott Atkinson Mr. Atkinson is curator of collections at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago. Previously he was curator at the Queens Museum and assistant curator of collections at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He was curator of the show' “The New Society of American Artists in Paris, 1908—1912.” The Railway Station: A Social History. By Jeffrey Richards and John M. Mackenzie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. xix + 440; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $22.50. One of the most characteristic physical features of the industrial and technological revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 465 railway station (or railroad passenger depot, to use the American terminology) served many functions. There is a prolific literature on railway stations as structures, as characteristic architectural landmarks, and as part of the local, regional, national, and international trans­ portation infrastructure. This book treats all these aspects, but the emphasis is on the station as a reflection of the society that created it and that, in many regions of the world, still regards it as a symbol of its aspirations and a focus of its activities. In some ways, the station was the Industrial Revolution’s counterpart of the medieval cathedral and central urban square. Although they include much description of station architecture, with emphasis on styles as reflections of the locales’ cultures, Jeffrey Richards and John Mackenzie emphasize the multitude of roles per­ formed by railway stations in their respective societies and economic systems. Historical events often have taken place within and around the stations; many are mentioned and briefly discussed. The strategic roles of stations in wartime constitute two chapters. Ofequal or greater significance are the discussions of railway stations as stages for the human dramas enacted around arrivals and departures: the emo­ tional, social, economic, and political associations at and around the stations. Regional and societal differences are brought out throughout the book. The authors show how these differences are evidenced in station designs, spatial arrangements, and facilities. Especially signif­ icant is the chapter on “Class, Race...

II: Abstract Expressionism: “New and Improved”

The emergence of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School in the postwar period and the subsequent ascendancy of American art and culture have been both a painful and an exhilarating rite of passage. In their wake an entire American art establishment has emerged. There were few American artists, critics, or modernist art historians of the 1950s and early 1960s who did not cut their teeth on Abstract Expressionism.

La Farge and Remington

John La Farge and Frederic Remington: The Masterworks are exhibitions of such very different late-nineteenth-century American artists that they would seem to call for separate assessment. One exhibition focuses on the intellectual, aristocratic, European-oriented La Farge, who worked on traditional themes in the mediums of oil, watercolor, illustration, murals, and stained glass; the other examines the practical, expansive, “American”-oriented Remington, who made his subject the American West in the mediums of oil, sculpture, illustration, and language. Yet these artists present similar problems in the historiography of American art. Partly because of their diversity, but even more because of the nature of their subject matter, the meaning of their achievement in the larger flow of American art history has been problematic. This review will focus not on specific choices of works in the exhibitions or even on the decisions to hold the exhibitions in the first place—there is no doubt that these artists are worthy of attention, and they are well treated by the curators' selections—but on the interpretative strategies of the exhibition organizers.

The State of Research in Northern European Art of the Renaissance Era

For American art history, Erwin Panofsky's Early Neth-erlandish Painting (1953) ushered in the period of serious scholarly study of Northern art of the Renaissance era. In this book, appearing a decade after his essential mono-graph, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, was published (1943), Panofsky established the transalpine world of Ger-man and Netherlandish art as a legitimate field of study.

The Persistence of Vision: Current Issues in Native American Art and Art History

The Persistence of Vision: Current Issues in Native American Art and Art History

Panofsky's Concept of "Iconology" and the Problem of Interpretation in the History of Art

R_ ATHER THAN ATTEMPT to define and discuss the variety of peculiar problems that confront the contemporary interpreter of the visual arts of the past, these remarks are intended as a consideration of the interpretive system devised by Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky's contribution to art historical theory has recently attracted considerable attention. His work has been the subject of a new book, a symposium at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and a session at the 1985 College Art Association annual meeting in Los Angeles. 1 What prompts this renewed interest in Panofsky's contribution to art historical studies? While it is hard to find a conclusive answer to this question, there seem to be a number of factors involved. First, American art history has become increasingly self-conscious about the theoretical assumptions underlying its scholarly productions. In the context of the radical and far-reaching theoretical transformations that swept anthropology, history, and literary studies in the 1960s and 70s, art history seemed attached to eternal verities. There has been very little discussion of theoretical issues and those attempts that were made to raise them often appeared isolated and tangential to the main concerns of the profession.2 However, it was perhaps the adaptation of philosophical and linguistic theories by literary critics that ultimately proved most influential. Criticism has always played a prominent role in art historical interpretation so that the development of critical theories inspired by the model of literary studies was not an entirely unexpected development.3 The application of critical strategies to the interpretation of the visual arts of the past, that is, the identification of significant intrinsic formal qualities in the works of art under discussion as the basis for interpretation, has necessarily * This paper has benefited greatly from conversations and debates with David Summers which helped clarify my ideas on a number of different issues. I am particularly indebted to Joan Hart for having shared her paper on Panofsky's relation to hermeneutic theory with me prior to its publication. In addition I am grateful for careful readings and suggestions by Paul Barolsky, Herbert Kessler, Donald Posner, Holly Wright, Peter Parshall, and Suzanne Guerlac. I must, however, accept full responsibility for the views articulated here.

Adolf Wolff: “Poet, Sculptor and Revolutionist, but Mostly Revolutionist”

Adolf Wolff (1883–1944), today a neglected figure in the history of American art, is here remembered both for his highly innovative sculpture and for his anarchist and socialist beliefs, concerns that served to inspire the full course of his artistic career. Pupil of Robert Henri and George Bellows, friend of Man Ray and Max Weber, comrade of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, he combined radical politics with radical art during the heyday of the New York avant-garde, between 1912 and 1920.

Histories of American Art: The Changing Quest

The history of American art history, now more than one hundred and fifty years old, is in many ways a history of its historians. From the early artists and cultivated men of letters, to critics and artist-writers, then to curators, and, finally, to professors—each succeeding historian has reordered the accounts of earlier historians according to his or her own assumptions about art. What are those assumptions? What were our predecessors looking for in American art? And how does the work of our generation appear in this long view?

Black Art, Folk Art, and Social Control

Previous articleNext article No AccessBlack Art, Folk Art, and Social ControlEugene W. MetcalfEugene W. Metcalf Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 18, Number 4Winter, 1983 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/496153 Views: 83Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1983 The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur MuseumPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Karin E. Peterson, Leisa Rundquist Valorizing Gee's Bend Quilts, (Aug 2020): 435–457.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118768730.ch23John Ott Battle Station MoMA: Jacob Lawrence and the Desegregation of the Armed Forces and the Art World, American Art 29, no.33 (Dec 2015): 58–89.https://doi.org/10.1086/684920John Ott Patrons, Collectors, and Markets, (Jan 2015): 525–543.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118542644.ch30Mary Ann Calo “Seeing” the Harlem Renaissance: Observations on the Position of Visual Art in Harlem Renaissance Studies, Prospects 27 (Jul 2009): 427–445.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300001277

West, Copley, and Eighteenth-Century American Provincialism

It is a common notion that American painting in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was derivative and provincial. It was an artistic period marked by failure and frustration during which the promising artist, usually after a study tour in Europe, was met with indifference or misunderstanding. He either just managed to scrape a living, often by having to compromise his talents in search of an audience, or was forced to abandon painting altogether and turn to other pursuits. The only successful American painters, in this view, were those who became established in Europe; and they somehow no longer seem to be American. The best of the group were Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, whose European careers have been consistently misunderstood, until very recently, through geographical and historical myopia. European art historians have given them short shrift because they were, after all, provincial painters with the good fortune to practise in a European capital. American art historians have neglected their European work because (from the American point of view) it was English art they practised.

Painting in Seventeenth-Century Naples

While two major exhibitions of seventeenth-century paintings were ending their American tours, Washington was preparing for another exceptional Baroque event. Painting in Naples from Caravaggio to Giordano, at the National Gallery of Art (February 13–May 1, 1983), like the exhibitions of seventeenth-century French paintings seen earlier in New York and Chicago and seventeenth-century Spanish paintings on view in Princeton and Detroit, presented artists whose works are rarely encountered in American museums or studied by American art historians. The Washington exhibition, the largest anthology of seventeenth-century Neapolitan paintings ever seen outside Naples itself, made one realize that here is yet another area of Baroque art history that is as rich as it has been neglected.

IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology. Vol. 8, no. 1. (review)

460 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the midst of gardens seem oppressive. Brian Horrigan suggests that Americans denied that designers owned the future when they rejected mass-produced Dymaxion houses in favor of traditional homes filled with appliances. And in the volume’s best essay, Jeffrey Meikle dem­ onstrates that massive promotion did not persuade consumers that plastic was a miracle rather than a shoddy substitute for other materials. While none of the contributors carries hindsight to the point of patronizing prophets of the past, only a few recognize the essential theatricality of so much of the exuberant rhetoric. It is worth noting, for example, that those responsible for packaging the spectacular futuramas and “democracities” of the world’s fairs of the 1930s had first designed for the stage. Moreover, an insufficient sense of humor encourages Corn to warm up the academic chestnut that holds that faith in technology is an opiate of the masses. Evangelism doubtless animates many projections, but you miss the point of a Disney World if you miss its sincerely vulgar, therefore intensely human, affection for technology, and you certainly miss the fun. Minor solemnities aside, this book is fun. The essays are well edited, well researched, and well written, as engrossing as they are informative. Joseph W. Slade Dr. Slade is director of the Communications Center and chairman of the Depart­ ment of Media Arts at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University. He is editor of The Markham Review, an interdisciplinary journal of American culture, the author of Thomas Pynchon (1974), and coeditor of Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays in Science, Technology, and Literature. He is currently writing a study of the Maxim family of inventors. IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology. Vol. 12, no. 2: IA in Art. Edited by Betsy Fahlman. Washington, D.C.: Society for Industrial Archeology (NMAH, Room 5020, Smithsonian Institu­ tion 20560), 1986. Pp. iii + 76; illustrations, notes. $10.00/single copy (paper). This is a special issue of the periodical published by the Society for Industrial Archeology. In her guest editorial, Betsy Fahlman states that a full understanding of the birth and development of American industry requires that we look beyond the historical and archaeological sources to examine how and why artists depicted technology and industry. These images not only enhance American art history, Fahl­ man explains, but are also invaluable for historians and curators re­ constructing (say) a mill or speculating on how a specific task was performed. Helena E. Wright’s “The Image Makers: The Role of the Graphic Arts in Industrialization” and Jadviga M. da Costa Nunes’s “The In­ dustrial Landscape in America, 1800—1840: Ideology into Art” ex­ plore the relationship between patron and artist in implementing the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 461 transition from an agrarian to a manufacturing and industrial econ­ omy. Wright discusses the employment of prints to gain acceptance for the burgeoning manufacturing cities of Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts. To promote these cities for both potential investors and a public apprehensive about the growth and development of manufacturing centers, the artists depicted them in a nonthreatening way, as straightforward topographic renderings. Likewise, in order to present railroads in the best possible light, railroad corporations com­ missioned artists to produce prints featuring the lovely surroundings of their routes (see fig. 1), and locomotives encompassed by the spec­ tacular scenery of the American West. Nunes examines how some artists attempted to merge the agrarian, preindustrial tradition with the new industrial landscape by borrowing elements from the picturesque tradition, putting lakes, figures, or animals in the foreground, and a mill in the middle ground. Charles Willson Peale’s Pleasure Party by a Mill (ca. 1793) exemplifies this mode of representation, termed “the machine in the garden” aesthetic by Leo Marx. All but one of the images Nunes discusses represent in­ dustry and the new industrial cities as orderly and free of smoke, grime, and poverty. The exception is Russell Smith’s Pittsburgh Fifty Years Ago from the Salt Works on Saw Mill Run (1884), which features a cloud of black smoke rising from the disheveled mill at foreground. Nunes correctly Fig. 1.—An 1857 lithograph by Rau & Son, Dresden...

American Art History

Joshua C. Taylor. The Fine Arts in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. 264 + xvi pp. Abraham A. Davidson. The Eccentrics and other American Visionary Painters. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978. 202 + xxii pp. Ben Merchant Vorpahl. Frederick Remington and the West. Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1978.294 + xviii pp. These three books provide an interesting overview of the state of current American art history. They demonstrate new methodologies as well as new areas of study and attest to the vivacity of the discipline. In methodology, narrow stylistic analysis, hardly old within the development of this young study, is being severly challenged by structuralist and phenomonological theories. As these books suggest, strict formal analysis seems to be on the wane. In scope these volumes range from survey, through thematic study, to monograph. They are worthy of attention both for what they include and for what they omit.