This essay considers the first known portrait of George Washington, painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1772, as a portrait of “Hanadagá•yas,” the Haudenosaunee name for Washington meaning “Town Destroyer.” The painting references coveted Indigenous land and represents Washington in his militia uniform from the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), an imperial conflict for North American territory. George Washington later inspired narratives about national expansion and became entangled in the myth of the Lost Cause when it was donated to Washington and Lee University. A history of the painting that foregrounds the acts of dispossession perpetrated by Washington and American educational establishments reveals how art and fiction operate in tandem with institutions to preserve violent myths of empire.
{"title":"The Portrait of Hanadagá•yas; or, George Washington Reconsidered","authors":"J. Boldt","doi":"10.1086/720910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720910","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the first known portrait of George Washington, painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1772, as a portrait of “Hanadagá•yas,” the Haudenosaunee name for Washington meaning “Town Destroyer.” The painting references coveted Indigenous land and represents Washington in his militia uniform from the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), an imperial conflict for North American territory. George Washington later inspired narratives about national expansion and became entangled in the myth of the Lost Cause when it was donated to Washington and Lee University. A history of the painting that foregrounds the acts of dispossession perpetrated by Washington and American educational establishments reveals how art and fiction operate in tandem with institutions to preserve violent myths of empire.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43571898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay analyzes the nationalization of modernism in the United States through the art of Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, and Larry Rivers. Modernism became the official high culture of the United States—and, by extension, “the West”—during the 1950s and 1960s. Rivers and Mathieu sought to place modernist painting in touch with history painting and the national past, without sacrificing contemporaneity. The contradictions implied by this approach were part of the point. In the catalog to the exhibition 12 Americans (1956), Rivers is described in the introduction as a “reactionary,” while a few pages later he calls himself a “revolutionary.” Mathieu—a Don Quixote figure, a pseudo-aristocratic oddity, a self-anointed knight with one foot in the past and one in the future—lived such contradictions. Though often considered eccentric, these painters help us understand the development of postwar abstraction. Newman’s work in the 1950s reveals that he, too, was grappling with an attempt to place painting in touch with the national past.
{"title":"Abstract Nationalisms","authors":"Saul Nelson","doi":"10.1086/719439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719439","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes the nationalization of modernism in the United States through the art of Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, and Larry Rivers. Modernism became the official high culture of the United States—and, by extension, “the West”—during the 1950s and 1960s. Rivers and Mathieu sought to place modernist painting in touch with history painting and the national past, without sacrificing contemporaneity. The contradictions implied by this approach were part of the point. In the catalog to the exhibition 12 Americans (1956), Rivers is described in the introduction as a “reactionary,” while a few pages later he calls himself a “revolutionary.” Mathieu—a Don Quixote figure, a pseudo-aristocratic oddity, a self-anointed knight with one foot in the past and one in the future—lived such contradictions. Though often considered eccentric, these painters help us understand the development of postwar abstraction. Newman’s work in the 1950s reveals that he, too, was grappling with an attempt to place painting in touch with the national past.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44308619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay explores the relationship between the Utah artist George Martin Ottinger’s Mesoamerican history paintings and Mormon beliefs and missionary efforts in northern Mexico. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) did not share prevailing nineteenth-century U.S. attitudes toward pre-Columbian peoples. While most U.S. artists and writers emphasized Aztec warfare and rituals of human sacrifice, Ottinger depicted Mesoamerican society as inherently peaceful and refined. Analyzing his paintings in relation to U.S. legal prosecution of LDS polygamous practice and contemporaneous Mormon settlement in Sonora and Chihuahua, I posit that Ottinger held a contradictory conception of Indigenous populations, simultaneously proclaiming LDS group affinity with a noble pre-Hispanic past and perpetuating disparaging settler-colonial tropes in his depictions of gender and race. His paintings operate in the cultural periphery of Mexico and the United States, yet in dialogue with the nationalist discourses of both countries to offer mainstream audiences a nonthreatening introduction to LDS scripture as well as a racial justification for Mormon spiritual and territorial expansion.
{"title":"Poster Children of the Sun","authors":"Breanne Robertson","doi":"10.1086/719437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719437","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the relationship between the Utah artist George Martin Ottinger’s Mesoamerican history paintings and Mormon beliefs and missionary efforts in northern Mexico. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) did not share prevailing nineteenth-century U.S. attitudes toward pre-Columbian peoples. While most U.S. artists and writers emphasized Aztec warfare and rituals of human sacrifice, Ottinger depicted Mesoamerican society as inherently peaceful and refined. Analyzing his paintings in relation to U.S. legal prosecution of LDS polygamous practice and contemporaneous Mormon settlement in Sonora and Chihuahua, I posit that Ottinger held a contradictory conception of Indigenous populations, simultaneously proclaiming LDS group affinity with a noble pre-Hispanic past and perpetuating disparaging settler-colonial tropes in his depictions of gender and race. His paintings operate in the cultural periphery of Mexico and the United States, yet in dialogue with the nationalist discourses of both countries to offer mainstream audiences a nonthreatening introduction to LDS scripture as well as a racial justification for Mormon spiritual and territorial expansion.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48626021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines a large-scale installation by multimedia artist Bruce Nauman, commissioned for the University of New Mexico campus during the mid-1980s. While his Center of the Universe (1988) is largely overlooked by critics and scholars, new archival research indicates that it was central to Nauman’s practice in the years after his relocation from Los Angeles to the environs of Santa Fe in 1979. The subsequent controversy surrounding the work and its ambivalent connection to the regional landscape also locates Nauman at the intersection of debates around public art, Postminimal earthworks, and a long history of incursion into the Southwest by artists from the East and West Coasts. Ultimately, this article contributes to a larger reappraisal of celebrated twentieth-century avant-gardists by highlighting the ways in which Nauman and his contemporaries relied on Indigenous cultural forms and settler-colonialist expropriations to advance an “expanding field” of late modernist art.
{"title":"Whose Expanded Field?","authors":"B. Nauman, W. I. Bourland, Whose Expanded Field","doi":"10.1086/719438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719438","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines a large-scale installation by multimedia artist Bruce Nauman, commissioned for the University of New Mexico campus during the mid-1980s. While his Center of the Universe (1988) is largely overlooked by critics and scholars, new archival research indicates that it was central to Nauman’s practice in the years after his relocation from Los Angeles to the environs of Santa Fe in 1979. The subsequent controversy surrounding the work and its ambivalent connection to the regional landscape also locates Nauman at the intersection of debates around public art, Postminimal earthworks, and a long history of incursion into the Southwest by artists from the East and West Coasts. Ultimately, this article contributes to a larger reappraisal of celebrated twentieth-century avant-gardists by highlighting the ways in which Nauman and his contemporaries relied on Indigenous cultural forms and settler-colonialist expropriations to advance an “expanding field” of late modernist art.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46785522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Paul Cadmus’s small and lurid series The Seven Deadly Sins (1945–49, Metropolitan Museum of Art) seems an odd choice for an artist who had repudiated his Roman Catholic upbringing and whose sexuality fell outside the norms of institutionalized morality. An episode within Cadmus’s broader vacillations between satire and idealization, this article argues for their interdependence. Reading the reception of the series by his own network, I analyze their tangled responses to his visualization of sin. By mixing high and low references, stretching the boundaries of genre, and bending gender alignments, Cadmus “camps” his subject, and his satirical treatment disrupts its moral content. Framing the series in relation to What I Believe (1947–48), the artist’s projection of an idealized queer world, the essay explores the work in terms of an unresolved tension between a “homosexual Zion” and a vision of shared and universal values of tolerance and acceptance.
{"title":"Sinners All","authors":"Angela Miller","doi":"10.1086/719441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719441","url":null,"abstract":"Paul Cadmus’s small and lurid series The Seven Deadly Sins (1945–49, Metropolitan Museum of Art) seems an odd choice for an artist who had repudiated his Roman Catholic upbringing and whose sexuality fell outside the norms of institutionalized morality. An episode within Cadmus’s broader vacillations between satire and idealization, this article argues for their interdependence. Reading the reception of the series by his own network, I analyze their tangled responses to his visualization of sin. By mixing high and low references, stretching the boundaries of genre, and bending gender alignments, Cadmus “camps” his subject, and his satirical treatment disrupts its moral content. Framing the series in relation to What I Believe (1947–48), the artist’s projection of an idealized queer world, the essay explores the work in terms of an unresolved tension between a “homosexual Zion” and a vision of shared and universal values of tolerance and acceptance.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48893985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines Christopher D’Arcangelo’s so-called functional constructions, renovations he made to loft spaces in Manhattan, particularly around SoHo, in 1978 for friends in the art world. Upon completion, D’Arcangelo invited others to view the renovated space, along with the contract documents stipulating the costs of labor and materials, as his own artwork. By adapting industrial spaces into places for art and living, D’Arcangelo realized the utopian aspiration of the avant-garde to fuse art and life, only belatedly. Instead, the works gesture to a new conception of value premised not on the artwork’s commodity status or aesthetic autonomy but on its speculative capacity within a gentrifying postindustrial city. They thus occupy an overlooked historical space between the critical interrogation of modernist institutions and categories associated with art of the 1960s, and the subsumption of art by neoliberal capitalism.
{"title":"Christopher D’Arcangelo Speculates","authors":"S. Siegelbaum","doi":"10.1086/719440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719440","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Christopher D’Arcangelo’s so-called functional constructions, renovations he made to loft spaces in Manhattan, particularly around SoHo, in 1978 for friends in the art world. Upon completion, D’Arcangelo invited others to view the renovated space, along with the contract documents stipulating the costs of labor and materials, as his own artwork. By adapting industrial spaces into places for art and living, D’Arcangelo realized the utopian aspiration of the avant-garde to fuse art and life, only belatedly. Instead, the works gesture to a new conception of value premised not on the artwork’s commodity status or aesthetic autonomy but on its speculative capacity within a gentrifying postindustrial city. They thus occupy an overlooked historical space between the critical interrogation of modernist institutions and categories associated with art of the 1960s, and the subsumption of art by neoliberal capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49102845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Artists who defected from Communist Cuba not only defined the image of creative freedom in washes of color, but some were also responsible for fostering a visual vocabulary for the AIDS crisis at the end of the twentieth century. However, it was Untitled (White Crucifix) (1986), an assemblage by Miami-based artist Humberto Dionisio, that departed from Cuban legibility in polychrome with a turn toward whiteness. By taking up Dionisio’s artwork, this article advances a queer of color(ing) analysis, which combines José Esteban Muñoz’s “brown commons” project with a discussion of whiteness’s muted gradient, or what this article terms “feeling off-white.” Linking Dionisio’s work to a transnational cultural language of religion, avian metaphors, and sickness, this article contends that the artist innovates AIDS visuality by seeing a pandemic from the vantage point of a sexual exile in a world bereft of color.
{"title":"How to Have Color in a Pandemic","authors":"Robb Hernández","doi":"10.1086/717651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717651","url":null,"abstract":"Artists who defected from Communist Cuba not only defined the image of creative freedom in washes of color, but some were also responsible for fostering a visual vocabulary for the AIDS crisis at the end of the twentieth century. However, it was Untitled (White Crucifix) (1986), an assemblage by Miami-based artist Humberto Dionisio, that departed from Cuban legibility in polychrome with a turn toward whiteness. By taking up Dionisio’s artwork, this article advances a queer of color(ing) analysis, which combines José Esteban Muñoz’s “brown commons” project with a discussion of whiteness’s muted gradient, or what this article terms “feeling off-white.” Linking Dionisio’s work to a transnational cultural language of religion, avian metaphors, and sickness, this article contends that the artist innovates AIDS visuality by seeing a pandemic from the vantage point of a sexual exile in a world bereft of color.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48698203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris’s essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Jennifer Van Horn’s analysis is cartographic in focus, situating the painting in relation to geographic debates about slavery and the racialized contest over mobility in light of the relocation of the enslaved person depicted, and in relation to a second version of the image displayed at Henry Clay’s Kentucky plantation. Jennifer Germann uncovers the hidden history of the painting’s London creation to explore Savage’s choice of the enslaved attendant portrait format, and his selection of free Black model John Riley, amidst the uncertainty surrounding the portrayal of Black figures in the 1780s and 1790s. She elucidates how disremembering has obscured John Riley as well as historical Black subjects in American art more broadly.
这是一幅由三部分组成的作品：爱德华·萨维奇的《华盛顿家族》（1789-96）。Mia L.Bagneris的文章将这幅画与乔治·华盛顿从18世纪到现在的其他非洲流散主题的图像放在一起，以阐明这位开国元勋的标志性形象——作为国家自身价值观的象征——过去和现在都与白人至上主义和反黑人密不可分。詹妮弗·范·霍恩（Jennifer Van Horn）的分析以制图为重点，将这幅画与关于奴隶制的地理辩论以及鉴于所描绘的被奴役者的重新安置而对流动性的种族化竞争联系起来，并与亨利·克莱（Henry Clay）在肯塔基州种植园展示的第二个版本的图像联系起来。詹妮弗·杰曼（Jennifer Germann）揭示了这幅画在伦敦创作的隐藏历史，探讨了萨维奇在1780年代和1790年代黑人人物刻画的不确定性中，对奴隶随从肖像格式的选择，以及对自由黑人模特约翰·莱利的选择。她阐述了对约翰·莱利以及美国艺术中更广泛的黑人历史主题的怀念是如何模糊的。
{"title":"Remapping Resistance","authors":"J. Van Horn","doi":"10.1086/717645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717645","url":null,"abstract":"This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris’s essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Jennifer Van Horn’s analysis is cartographic in focus, situating the painting in relation to geographic debates about slavery and the racialized contest over mobility in light of the relocation of the enslaved person depicted, and in relation to a second version of the image displayed at Henry Clay’s Kentucky plantation. Jennifer Germann uncovers the hidden history of the painting’s London creation to explore Savage’s choice of the enslaved attendant portrait format, and his selection of free Black model John Riley, amidst the uncertainty surrounding the portrayal of Black figures in the 1780s and 1790s. She elucidates how disremembering has obscured John Riley as well as historical Black subjects in American art more broadly.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42438632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris’s essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Jennifer Van Horn’s analysis is cartographic in focus, situating the painting in relation to geographic debates about slavery and the racialized contest over mobility in light of the relocation of the enslaved person depicted, and in relation to a second version of the image displayed at Henry Clay’s Kentucky plantation. Jennifer Germann uncovers the hidden history of the painting’s London creation to explore Savage’s choice of the enslaved attendant portrait format, and his selection of free Black model John Riley, amidst the uncertainty surrounding the portrayal of Black figures in the 1780s and 1790s. She elucidates how disremembering has obscured John Riley as well as historical Black subjects in American art more broadly.
这是一幅由三部分组成的作品：爱德华·萨维奇的《华盛顿家族》（1789-96）。Mia L.Bagneris的文章将这幅画与乔治·华盛顿从18世纪到现在的其他非洲流散主题的图像放在一起，以阐明这位开国元勋的标志性形象——作为国家自身价值观的象征——过去和现在都与白人至上主义和反黑人密不可分。詹妮弗·范·霍恩（Jennifer Van Horn）的分析以制图为重点，将这幅画与关于奴隶制的地理辩论以及鉴于所描绘的被奴役者的重新安置而对流动性的种族化竞争联系起来，并与亨利·克莱（Henry Clay）在肯塔基州种植园展示的第二个版本的图像联系起来。詹妮弗·杰曼（Jennifer Germann）揭示了这幅画在伦敦创作的隐藏历史，探讨了萨维奇在1780年代和1790年代黑人人物刻画的不确定性中，对奴隶随从肖像格式的选择，以及对自由黑人模特约翰·莱利的选择。她阐述了对约翰·莱利以及美国艺术中更广泛的黑人历史主题的怀念是如何模糊的。
{"title":"“The Requisite Local Coloring”","authors":"J. Germann","doi":"10.1086/717646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717646","url":null,"abstract":"This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris’s essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Jennifer Van Horn’s analysis is cartographic in focus, situating the painting in relation to geographic debates about slavery and the racialized contest over mobility in light of the relocation of the enslaved person depicted, and in relation to a second version of the image displayed at Henry Clay’s Kentucky plantation. Jennifer Germann uncovers the hidden history of the painting’s London creation to explore Savage’s choice of the enslaved attendant portrait format, and his selection of free Black model John Riley, amidst the uncertainty surrounding the portrayal of Black figures in the 1780s and 1790s. She elucidates how disremembering has obscured John Riley as well as historical Black subjects in American art more broadly.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42807718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By 1863, new beliefs about the relationship between individual consciousness and the objects of its knowing was dividing American culture, including the art world, into three distinct groups. Mainstream artists and the Pre-Raphaelites both sought to create truthful representations. Mainstream artists like Frederic Church were indirect Realists who assumed that they could know the truth of things in the world as they existed in themselves apart from the perceiver’s apprehension of them. The Pre-Raphaelites were direct Realists who argued that mainstream methods were tainted by subjectivity. Anti-modern conservatives, the Pre-Raphaelites insisted that to create truthful representations artists needed to empty themselves of self, which could be accomplished only with the aid of something like divine grace. Opposed to both these groups was an emergent faction that included artists such as John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Gifford, and Winslow Homer. These artists accepted the inescapability of subjectivity, abandoned the ideal of truth in art, and embraced the idea that works of art should be valued primarily as expressions of the artist’s unique experience.
{"title":"Radically Anti-Modern","authors":"K. Myers","doi":"10.1086/717649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717649","url":null,"abstract":"By 1863, new beliefs about the relationship between individual consciousness and the objects of its knowing was dividing American culture, including the art world, into three distinct groups. Mainstream artists and the Pre-Raphaelites both sought to create truthful representations. Mainstream artists like Frederic Church were indirect Realists who assumed that they could know the truth of things in the world as they existed in themselves apart from the perceiver’s apprehension of them. The Pre-Raphaelites were direct Realists who argued that mainstream methods were tainted by subjectivity. Anti-modern conservatives, the Pre-Raphaelites insisted that to create truthful representations artists needed to empty themselves of self, which could be accomplished only with the aid of something like divine grace. Opposed to both these groups was an emergent faction that included artists such as John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Gifford, and Winslow Homer. These artists accepted the inescapability of subjectivity, abandoned the ideal of truth in art, and embraced the idea that works of art should be valued primarily as expressions of the artist’s unique experience.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44943554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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