INDEPENDENT ART HISTORY RESEARCH PAPER

Independent Art History Research Paper

Table of content

THE OLD QUEST FOR NEWNESS3

THE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE6

THE TRANSATLANTIC HISTORIANS9

MARINE PAINTINGS FROM THE BUTLER INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN ART15

ITINERARY21

HAS IT LOST ITS NECESSITY TODAY?44

METHODS: OBJECT, VISION, CULTURE, SOCIETY48

FINAL THOUGHTS66

REFERENCES71

Independent Art History Research Paper

The Old Quest for Newness

No Europeans felt about the Old in quite the same way Americans came to, and none believed as intensely in the New. Both are massively present in the story of American art, a story that begins weakly and derivatively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and acquires such seemingly irrefutable power by the end of the twentieth. (Worringer's , Einfuhlung , 1907) In this way, the visual culture of America, oscillating between dependence and invention, tells a part of the American story; it is a lens through which one can see in part some (not all) of the answers to Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's well-known question, posed in the eighteenth century: "What, then, is the American, this new man?"

Robert Hughes, American Visions

Who gets to tell the story of American art? With his American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, produced both as television series and in book form, the Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes recently emerged as a major authority on the "story" of American art. (Worringer's , Einfuhlung , 1907) Supported by the media-conglomerate of Time/Warner, no other purveyor of that story has ever received such extensive public exposure. (Toker, 1986) In the United States, the public television channel PBS broadcast American Visions in five one-hour segments; BBC viewers in Great Britain saw the program in ten half-hour slices. Carefully timed with the broadcasting of the series in the United States in 1997, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf released its book version -- a 635 page tome fully illustrated in color. At the 1999 annual meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles an entire session was dedicated to the "media blitz" surrounding American Visions. (Worringer's , Einfuhlung , 1907)

As the opening quotation from the introduction to his book indicates, Hughes employs a sweeping rhetoric that borders on cliche: American art was born in a dialectic relationship between Old and New World, between "dependence and invention;" its trajectory moved from weakness and derivation to "irrefutable power;" the passage then culminates in the quotation from an Urtext of American Studies, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. (Worringer's , Einfuhlung , 1907) While Hughes' epic posturing invites deconstructive readings, the basic premise behind his opening remarks seems more difficult to dismiss: the study of American visual culture is fundamentally an American studies project. Yet it is exactly from an American Studies perspective that Hughes' quest for an "Epic History of Art in America" should give rise to suspicion. Doesn't Hughes' epic tale of a "new man" creating a new art simply reproduce previous grand narratives? Indeed, by evoking Crevecoeur, Hughes appropriates the trope of newness, only shifting from a transatlantic to a transpacific ...