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":"Illuminating the Shadows of “Liberty”: George Washington and Blackness in American Art","authors":"Mia L. Bagneris","doi":"10.1086/717644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717644","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":"49492162","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}
A spirit of dissent animated the American Pre-Raphaelites, a movement comprising abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. In contrast to their more prominent colleagues, the artists now known as the Hudson River School, the American Pre-Raphaelites established themselves as eloquent critics of slavery and antebellum American society. The group united their political and aesthetic commitments by engaging selected pictorial strategies of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and embracing a radical empiricism. In landscapes, nature studies, and still lifes of modest dimensions, the American Pre-Raphaelites refused compositional conventions that endorsed rank, class, power, and possession by elevating the humble while eschewing the monumental. Through an examination of Thomas Charles Farrer’s View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital (1865, Smith College Museum of Art), this article argues that the American Pre-Raphaelites advanced what they viewed as an ethical style of landscape painting—one that assertively announced their abolitionism.
{"title":"A Dissenting Realism","authors":"Sophie Lynford","doi":"10.1086/717648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717648","url":null,"abstract":"A spirit of dissent animated the American Pre-Raphaelites, a movement comprising abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. In contrast to their more prominent colleagues, the artists now known as the Hudson River School, the American Pre-Raphaelites established themselves as eloquent critics of slavery and antebellum American society. The group united their political and aesthetic commitments by engaging selected pictorial strategies of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and embracing a radical empiricism. In landscapes, nature studies, and still lifes of modest dimensions, the American Pre-Raphaelites refused compositional conventions that endorsed rank, class, power, and possession by elevating the humble while eschewing the monumental. Through an examination of Thomas Charles Farrer’s View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital (1865, Smith College Museum of Art), this article argues that the American Pre-Raphaelites advanced what they viewed as an ethical style of landscape painting—one that assertively announced their abolitionism.","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":"46125940","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 uncovers the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century media genre of the “tactile image,” pictures designed to engage hand and eye in tandem. In 1787, a lift-the-flap engraving known as the Metamorphosis was published in Philadelphia, and it quickly multiplied in print and manuscript form. Designed by schoolteacher Benjamin Sands, the flap book’s focused choreography of vision and touch both emerged from and contributed to a period discourse of hands-on pedagogy. Reconstructing the Metamorphosis’s collisions with practices ranging from sampler embroidery to trompe l’oeil painting, I contend that the tactile image makes visible an early national conceptual framework of sensory observation and discernment that reached far beyond the classroom. Ultimately, I propose that the case of the Metamorphosis offers a new analytical lens for considering the interaction of material culture and fine art.
{"title":"Unfolding Metamorphosis, or the Early American Tactile Image","authors":"Juliet S. Sperling","doi":"10.1086/717650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717650","url":null,"abstract":"This article uncovers the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century media genre of the “tactile image,” pictures designed to engage hand and eye in tandem. In 1787, a lift-the-flap engraving known as the Metamorphosis was published in Philadelphia, and it quickly multiplied in print and manuscript form. Designed by schoolteacher Benjamin Sands, the flap book’s focused choreography of vision and touch both emerged from and contributed to a period discourse of hands-on pedagogy. Reconstructing the Metamorphosis’s collisions with practices ranging from sampler embroidery to trompe l’oeil painting, I contend that the tactile image makes visible an early national conceptual framework of sensory observation and discernment that reached far beyond the classroom. Ultimately, I propose that the case of the Metamorphosis offers a new analytical lens for considering the interaction of material culture and fine art.","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":"43271484","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}
Admirers of John Ruskin founded the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, a short-lived but influential art and political reform movement active from 1863 to 1865. With a stated mission promulgated by a house organ called the New Path, the group’s artists, architects and critics claimed to constitute an art movement. They were bound by formal membership, and all espoused dedication to Ruskin’s medievalism and credo of “truth to nature.” This commitment earned the artists recognition as American Pre-Raphaelites. Their paintings were touted by the New Path as vibrant agents of reform yet were also negatively critiqued for rejecting post-Renaissance illusionism, embracing instead seemingly retrogressive models found in the early Italian paintings. Two collections of early Italian paintings were also on view in New York during the 1860s. These received largely negative popular reception, a response extended to the paintings of the American Pre-Raphaelites. Ironically, these collections introduced American audiences to the early history of Western European painting, ultimately introducing the discipline of art history in the United States.
{"title":"“The Thirteenth Century Men”: Looking to the Past to Critique the Present","authors":"Linda S. Ferber","doi":"10.1086/717647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717647","url":null,"abstract":"Admirers of John Ruskin founded the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, a short-lived but influential art and political reform movement active from 1863 to 1865. With a stated mission promulgated by a house organ called the New Path, the group’s artists, architects and critics claimed to constitute an art movement. They were bound by formal membership, and all espoused dedication to Ruskin’s medievalism and credo of “truth to nature.” This commitment earned the artists recognition as American Pre-Raphaelites. Their paintings were touted by the New Path as vibrant agents of reform yet were also negatively critiqued for rejecting post-Renaissance illusionism, embracing instead seemingly retrogressive models found in the early Italian paintings. Two collections of early Italian paintings were also on view in New York during the 1860s. These received largely negative popular reception, a response extended to the paintings of the American Pre-Raphaelites. Ironically, these collections introduced American audiences to the early history of Western European painting, ultimately introducing the discipline of art history in the United States.","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":"44696235","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}
Italian “image peddlers” sold small plaster sculptural reproductions door to door in the United States during the nineteenth century. Representations of these street vendors illuminate the histories of the art reproductions market, emigration of the Italian Catholic artisans who produced and sold classical and Renaissance figurines, and the Protestant middle-class consumers who purchased them. Using print images from abecedaries (alphabet books) and children’s geographies, this article reveals how an idealized view of the fine arts among the public overrode long-held antipathy toward Catholic imagery and the Italian peddlers themselves. Furthermore, it identifies the central figure of Francis W. Edmonds’s 1844 painting the Image Pedlar as an Italian image peddler. His identity has been overlooked because of the secular inventory on his tray and lack of reference to ethnicity in the painting’s title. These factors allowed viewers to appreciate Edmonds’s subject of an American family enjoying a variety of arts without being discomforted by their own anti-Catholic and anti-Italian biases.
{"title":"“I” is for “Italian”","authors":"P. Johnston","doi":"10.1086/715825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715825","url":null,"abstract":"Italian “image peddlers” sold small plaster sculptural reproductions door to door in the United States during the nineteenth century. Representations of these street vendors illuminate the histories of the art reproductions market, emigration of the Italian Catholic artisans who produced and sold classical and Renaissance figurines, and the Protestant middle-class consumers who purchased them. Using print images from abecedaries (alphabet books) and children’s geographies, this article reveals how an idealized view of the fine arts among the public overrode long-held antipathy toward Catholic imagery and the Italian peddlers themselves. Furthermore, it identifies the central figure of Francis W. Edmonds’s 1844 painting the Image Pedlar as an Italian image peddler. His identity has been overlooked because of the secular inventory on his tray and lack of reference to ethnicity in the painting’s title. These factors allowed viewers to appreciate Edmonds’s subject of an American family enjoying a variety of arts without being discomforted by their own anti-Catholic and anti-Italian biases.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41308099","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}
Liza Lou’s Kitchen (1991–96) is a work that is about domestic labor, specifically the maintenance work that happens in kitchens, and it is also about making the artist’s own labor manifest. To create this 168-square-foot installation, Lou constructed a replica kitchen and covered every surface with beads, each placed with tweezers and glue. This essay articulates how Lou’s experimental method of beadwork embeds themes of labor and time in relation to the politics of domesticity. Kitchen shares in the 1990s trends in feminist art that investigated historical conditions of labor through nontraditional artistic processes. It also employs then-familiar imagery of twentieth-century advertising, brand labels, and other visual culture to comment on the role of “housewife.” But rather than simply issuing a straight-forward critique, Kitchen reimagines the role of care—the value of attention and maintenance—through its decorative overabundance.
{"title":"Artistic Process and Domestic Labor in Liza Lou’s Kitchen","authors":"Elyse Speaks","doi":"10.1086/715827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715827","url":null,"abstract":"Liza Lou’s Kitchen (1991–96) is a work that is about domestic labor, specifically the maintenance work that happens in kitchens, and it is also about making the artist’s own labor manifest. To create this 168-square-foot installation, Lou constructed a replica kitchen and covered every surface with beads, each placed with tweezers and glue. This essay articulates how Lou’s experimental method of beadwork embeds themes of labor and time in relation to the politics of domesticity. Kitchen shares in the 1990s trends in feminist art that investigated historical conditions of labor through nontraditional artistic processes. It also employs then-familiar imagery of twentieth-century advertising, brand labels, and other visual culture to comment on the role of “housewife.” But rather than simply issuing a straight-forward critique, Kitchen reimagines the role of care—the value of attention and maintenance—through its decorative overabundance.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43055706","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}
When the Polaroid Corporation launched the now-iconic SX-70 system in 1972, it represented a series of technological breakthroughs. The color film developed automatically, and the collapsible camera was the size of a paperback. Polaroid marketed the product to consumers for everyday use, but the artist Lucas Samaras deployed it to more subversive ends. He pressed and gouged the film’s viscous emulsion, causing his pictured body to ripple, undulate, and appear to float within a sea of chemicals. This essay reconsiders Samaras’s “psychedelic emulsive-bodies” through the methods of new materialism, which emphasizes the distributed agency of both human and nonhuman actors. Such an analysis allows us to make sense of Samaras’s unique practice in both formal and historical terms. The relationship between body and chemical apparent in his series of Photo-Transformations echos the era’s countercultural politics of psychedelia, wherein an emancipatory politics can be found in an unlikely place: the corrupted emulsions of Polaroid’s mass-marketed picture technology.
{"title":"Floating on a Chemical Sea","authors":"S. D. Ewing","doi":"10.1086/715824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715824","url":null,"abstract":"When the Polaroid Corporation launched the now-iconic SX-70 system in 1972, it represented a series of technological breakthroughs. The color film developed automatically, and the collapsible camera was the size of a paperback. Polaroid marketed the product to consumers for everyday use, but the artist Lucas Samaras deployed it to more subversive ends. He pressed and gouged the film’s viscous emulsion, causing his pictured body to ripple, undulate, and appear to float within a sea of chemicals. This essay reconsiders Samaras’s “psychedelic emulsive-bodies” through the methods of new materialism, which emphasizes the distributed agency of both human and nonhuman actors. Such an analysis allows us to make sense of Samaras’s unique practice in both formal and historical terms. The relationship between body and chemical apparent in his series of Photo-Transformations echos the era’s countercultural politics of psychedelia, wherein an emancipatory politics can be found in an unlikely place: the corrupted emulsions of Polaroid’s mass-marketed picture technology.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48483577","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}
After the death of their young daughter in 1841, the Griffith family of northern Maryland commissioned artist Sarah Miriam Peale to paint her portrait. Peale, academically trained and a member of a famous artistic family, was renowned for her paintings of the American elite. Peale’s portrait of Mary “Molly” Griffith—along with a diary kept by the girl’s mother, mourning jewelry, family papers, and a gravesite—makes the Griffith’s grief tangible and highly visible, even today. However, these materials also reveal the experiences of people enslaved by the Griffiths that have been overlooked, including a bondswoman named Caroline whose own story is inextricably intertwined with that of Molly’s. By examining these artifacts collectively and alongside the context of slavery, this article illustrates the complex relationship between labor, loss, and the material culture of mourning.
{"title":"The In/Visibility of Mourning","authors":"Christina Michelon","doi":"10.1086/715826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715826","url":null,"abstract":"After the death of their young daughter in 1841, the Griffith family of northern Maryland commissioned artist Sarah Miriam Peale to paint her portrait. Peale, academically trained and a member of a famous artistic family, was renowned for her paintings of the American elite. Peale’s portrait of Mary “Molly” Griffith—along with a diary kept by the girl’s mother, mourning jewelry, family papers, and a gravesite—makes the Griffith’s grief tangible and highly visible, even today. However, these materials also reveal the experiences of people enslaved by the Griffiths that have been overlooked, including a bondswoman named Caroline whose own story is inextricably intertwined with that of Molly’s. By examining these artifacts collectively and alongside the context of slavery, this article illustrates the complex relationship between labor, loss, and the material culture of mourning.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60723984","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}
A cover of the Black Panther newspaper depicting American Indian Movement leaders at Wounded Knee features Oglala elder Frank Fools Crow holding a ceremonial pipe in his uplifted fist, a gesture that resembles the Black Panther salute. The 1974 cover layers the iconographic programs of Native and Black social justice movements; it is a graphic statement of intersectional political resistance. Moreover, the paper’s coverage of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation and subsequent trials makes a radical visual argument for the ideological continuity of Red Power and Black Power. This essay proposes that the newspaper’s visual director, Emory Douglas, developed an intersectional liberation aesthetics that transformed the critique of structural oppression into a sustained call for radical revolution. Reporting in the Black Panther consistently addressed “all oppressed people,” a perspective that remains relevant for activists today.
{"title":"Red Power in the Black Panther","authors":"L. Siddons","doi":"10.1086/715823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715823","url":null,"abstract":"A cover of the Black Panther newspaper depicting American Indian Movement leaders at Wounded Knee features Oglala elder Frank Fools Crow holding a ceremonial pipe in his uplifted fist, a gesture that resembles the Black Panther salute. The 1974 cover layers the iconographic programs of Native and Black social justice movements; it is a graphic statement of intersectional political resistance. Moreover, the paper’s coverage of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation and subsequent trials makes a radical visual argument for the ideological continuity of Red Power and Black Power. This essay proposes that the newspaper’s visual director, Emory Douglas, developed an intersectional liberation aesthetics that transformed the critique of structural oppression into a sustained call for radical revolution. Reporting in the Black Panther consistently addressed “all oppressed people,” a perspective that remains relevant for activists today.","PeriodicalId":43434,"journal":{"name":"American Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42803251","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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