A Companion to American Art

John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, Jason D. LaFountain, Dana Arnold, John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, Jason D. LaFountain

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118542491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A Companion to American Art presents 35 newly-commissioned essays by leadingscholars that explore the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history.

• Features contributions from a balance of established and emerging scholars, art and architectural historians, and other specialists
• Includes several paired essays to emphasize dialogue and debate between scholars on important contemporary issues in American art history
• Examines topics such as the methodological stakes in the writing of American art history, changing ideas about what constitutes "Americanness, " and the relationship of art to public culture
• Offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution and current state of the field of American art history and suggests future directions of scholarship

Part I
Writing American Art History

Dialogue

1
A Conversation Missed
Toward a Historical Understanding of the Americanist/Modernist Divide

Joshua Shannon and Jason Weems

It has now been some time since “Mind the Gap,” a 2004 conference at Stanford University that sought “to challenge the divide between modernist and Americanist art history.”¹ A central goal of the event was to trouble the conventional notion that US art made before 1945 is above all American (and the fit subject of “Americanist” art historians), while art made later is better understood under the international rubric of modernism (and studied only by scholars trained in that tradition). Papers delivered at the conference, therefore, demonstrated continuities in American art across the twentieth century and drew attention to both avant-garde and visual-culture material.

The frontier separating the two fields was hardly a transient problem. Before the Stanford conference, it had already been worrying art historians (or at least Americanists) for some time, and it has continued to do so.² Over the past couple of decades, though, the concern has been growing, with some scholars seeing the distinctions between Americanist and modernist approaches as increasingly problematic, even damaging to proper scholarship. While a major historiographical essay of 1988 called attention to American art’s 1945 endpoint without argument or justification, a similar essay published fifteen years later explicitly asked whether such a cut-off might reinscribe false notions of American insularity before World War II.³ Despite such writing and the symposia explicitly dedicated to the topic, our survey of the scholarship suggests that the separation between Americanists and modernists remains quite real: for one thing, the two groups very rarely cite one another.⁴

But the separation between the fields is not just one of dates or topics, or even of venues of publication. Far more significantly, it seems to us that Americanist and modernist bodies of work still have remarkably distinctive characteristics, even on the occasions when they treat the same material. This chapter, then, asks why this division has been so persistent, and it identifies several historical differences of method and style that, unless negotiated, will leave these subdisciplines substantively out of contact with one another.

We should caution from the outset that our chapter, which treats only art history in the English language, necessarily relies on generalization. Several scholars work across the lines we describe here, which are meant to delimit mainstreams of Americanist and modernist art histories, respectively. These mainstreams, in our view, have clustered in recent decades especially around the journal American Art and the University of California Press (in the case of Americanists) and around October and the MIT Press (for their modernist counterparts). Our point is not that the divide is hermetic and total—it quite clearly is not—but rather that it is real, and, for reasons we hope to show, abiding.⁵ The first part of the chapter sketches some major areas of difference between the fields; the second half offers a case study comparing their approaches to Jackson Pollock, one of the very few artists heavily studied in both fields.

Areas of Difference

Form (and Voice)

Americanists and modernists are perhaps nowhere more different from one another than in their habitual approaches to form. In addressing artworks, Americanists very often take the things and people represented, together with their social context, as the central focus. And while Americanist art history does of course consider the means by which those things are represented, it rarely demands that its artworks embody radical innovation in their form of representation. Indeed, the treatment of a given topic generally opens, above all, onto a larger cultural history of that topic. Distinctions of innovation or quality are relatively unimportant, and the boundaries between art objects and other things, including popular culture images, are relatively freely crossed.

Among modernists, by contrast, form is almost always central. This is no accident: modernist art was defined from the start by formal innovation—by the weirdness of avant-garde depiction. And it was this weirdness—the various opacities of representation, we might say—that became the central subject of modernist scholarship. Above all, art was interesting insofar as it demonstrated problems, failures, or inadequacies of representation. Add to this the fact that abstract art (central to modernism as it never could be to the long historical field called American art) seemed more or less to preclude any talk of what is depicted. In the last few decades, many modernists have wanted to see a link between radicality of form and radicality of politics. In this mode of scholarship, the new possibilities of thought opened by avant-garde art are far more important than any local or historically specific objects or topics that might be represented, or any ideas that mass culture might formulate about them. Associated with these valuations for many modernist scholars is the imperative (influenced by readings of Theodor Adorno, for example, as well as by modernist art itself) that art take the form of negation—critiquing previous habits of sight, for example, and ultimately false political consciousness. All these discriminations (formal innovation, problematization of representation, negation of ideology) are judgments of quality. While beauty is hardly a more comfortable topic for modernists than for Americanists, modernists are far keener, if sometimes covertly, to make judgments. As such, modernists tend to be more closely affiliated with criticism than their Americanist colleagues.⁶

Indeed Americanists are often proactive in their efforts to write about art that they recognize to be aesthetically or politically conservative. On their motivations for this equanimity, however, Americanists as a group have been uncertain: is it merely that much American art has been undervalued, or is quality inherently a corrupt criterion for scholarship? (In our view, the role of scholarly judgment has remained regrettably implicit and undertheorized on both sides: what in fact governs our choice of objects?⁷)

Modernist formalism sometimes gets cast as a pursuit of quality and innovation. While these Greenbergian tendencies do exist, they represent only an elementary piece of the scholarly modernist formalism of the last thirty years. In such scholarship, radicality of form is prized not merely because it is art-historically fresh, but specifically because it is seen to make available structural rather than superficial or familiar critiques of social reality. Yve-Alain Bois, a leading formalist in modernist art history, has written that, while historically some formalism was merely “morphological” and hermetic, strong formalist scholarship “envisions form as structural,” and always brings the scholar back to history.⁸

Just as they focus on the form of the art they write about, many modernists take a special interest in the aesthetic quality of their own prose. While there are some prominent exceptions, Americanist scholarship as a whole is written in a voice closer to that of general historical nonfiction, aiming to communicate to the broadest readership possible. Much modernist art history, by contrast, draws extensively not only on the vocabulary of translated French and German theory but also on its academic-poetic style. Rhythm counts highly, and the pleasures of the text sometimes trump its straightforwardness.

To summarize this distinction, we might observe that Americanists and modernists agree on something important: the central topic of art-historical inquiry is how things are represented. The difference is that, while the how in question is for Americanists largely cultural and social (what constructs of race are at work in a picture, say, or what ideas of nature?), for modernists the how is at first structural-formal (what modes of representation are being used?), opening only through such questions onto political matters.

History (and Politics)

If the two fields are distinguished by the degrees and characteristics of their orientation to form, they are likewise distinguished by the lenses they use to view history. The vast majority of Americanist scholarship operates in the mode of the social (or, perhaps more precisely, cultural) history of art. Context—chronological, local, and national—matters, so scholars carefully offer information about an artist’s studio, her training and reading, her relationship to recent problems reported by the popular press, and, at least somewhat more than modernists do, her biography. Following recent models in cultural history, this “local knowledge” becomes an entry point for understanding broader cultural issues and the social forces that underlie them.

Most modernists, by contrast, tend to see the impor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Writing American Art History
• Part II: Geographies: Rethinking Americanness
• Part III: Subjectivities
• Part IV: Art and Public Culture
• Index
• End User License Agreement