Framing America

by Pohl, Frances K.

• ISBN13: 9780500283349
• ISBN10: 0500283346
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-02-01
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Summary

For more than a generation, critics and scholars have been revising and expanding the customary definition of American art. A tradition once assumed to be mainly European and oriented towards painting and sculpture has been enriched by the inclusion of other media such as ceramics, needlework, and illustration, and the work of previously marginalized groups such as Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Now, in a brilliant combination of original scholarship and synthesis, Frances Pohl's Framing America provides the first comprehensive survey of this new, enlarged vision of American art. Here are the many strands of North America's history and visual culture: the first contacts of the Spanish with the Aztecs and other Native Americans; the post-Revolutionary definition of nationhood; the visionary feeling for landscape and nature; the images of social and military conflict of the nineteenth century; and the tempering of the twentieth century's heady plunge into modernism by the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the culture wars. Framing America's consistent presentation of the resonance between art and history offers a coherent sense of the evolution of a new, generously defined conception of American art. Pohl's account is an adroitly inclusive fusion of many themes. Her discussion of the early definition of nationhood includes the traditional painters of the grand manner, West, Copley, Trumbell, and Stuart. But Stuart's portraits of George Washington, for instance, are also viewed in relation to portrayals of Washington in wood carvings, embroidery, and the vogue for "mourning pictures" after Washington's death, which create a domestic counterpoint to the more institutional portrayals. Pohl's description of the great landscape tradition of Cole, Durand, and Church shows how the optimistic assertion of a sublime sense of the American nation was accompanied by a sense of loss as the nation expanded westward. As our appreciation of the rich cultural diversity of American life has grown, our sense of American artits sources, its motives, its possibilitieshas become more varied too. Fresh and contemporary, Framing America embraces what our history can tell us about our art and what our art can tell us about our past and present. 665 illustrations, 337 in color.

Author Biography

Frances K. Pohl is Professor of Art History at Pomona College, California.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 9
Art and Conquest	p. 13
The Spanish and the Aztecs	p. 16
The Northern Territories of New Spain	p. 22
France Bringing the Faith: the Northeast	p. 41
The Exploration of the Mississippi and Mississippian Culture	p. 49
A Protestant Presence in America	p. 54
The Art and Architecture of the Northern British and Dutch Colonies	p. 58
Products of the Needle and the Chisel	p. 66
Foreign Wars and Domestic Unrest	p. 69
Defining America	p. 73
Representing the Revolution and Its Aftermath	p. 74
Presidential Poses: Images of George Washington	p. 83
Architectural Symbols of a New Nation	p. 93
An Architecture of Discipline	p. 98
Nationhood and Native Americans	p. 104
The Schooling of the Nation's Artists: Samuel F. B. Morse and the National Academy of Design	p. 112
The Entrepreneurial Spirit and the Production of American Culture	p. 118
Nature and Nation	p. 129
Nature and the Sacred in Native American Art	p. 131
God, Nature, and the Rise of Landscape Painting	p. 134
Thomas Cole, Federalism, and The Course of Empire	p. 139
Edward Hicks and The Peaceable Kingdom	p. 144
Landscape Painting at Mid-Century: Frederic Edwin Church and the Luminists	p. 146
Native Americans as Nature	p. 152
Depicting the "Looks and Modes" of Native American Life	p. 155
Nature Transformed: Settling the Landscape	p. 163
Woman as Nature: The Nude, the Mother, and the Cook	p. 171
Nature Morte: Still Life and the Art of Deception	p. 175
A Nation at War	p. 185
The War between the United States and Mexico	p. 186
Mexican Culture as American Culture	p. 191
Prelude to the Civil War: Representing African Americans and Slavery	p. 197
Race and the Civil War	p. 204
Images of Reconstruction	p. 211
Monuments to Freedom	p. 217
Native Americans in the Popular Press: Harper's Weekly and the Washita River Massacre	p. 224
Encyclopedias of Experience: Native American Ledger Art	p. 226
The End of the Ghost Dance	p. 232
The Hampton Institute and Lessons in American History	p. 236
Work and Art Redefined	p. 239
One Hundred Years of Independence: Taking Stock of America at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition	p. 242
Images of Workers	p. 245
Celebrating the New Male Professionals: Portraits by Thomas Eakins	p. 252
The Female Body and the Rights of Women: the "Declaration of Sentiments" and Hiram Powers's The Greek Slave	p. 258
Domestic Culture and Cultural Production	p. 260
The Feminine Ideal and the Rise of Aestheticism	p. 269
Images of the Particular: Portraiture and "Trompe l'Oeil" Painting	p. 275
The Battle over Public Space	p. 282
The End of a Century: Art and Architecture and the World's Columbian Exposition	p. 288
The Machine, the Primitive, and the Modern	p. 301
Realism and the Ashcan School	p. 304
Modernism and the Avant-Garde	p. 317
World War I and the Art of Reproduction	p. 322
Modernism, Gender, and Sexuality	p. 327
Escape to Mexico	p. 337
Mexico in America: Imaging the American Southwest	p. 343
The Harlem Renaissance	p. 350
Art for the People, Art Against Fascism	p. 363
A New Deal for Art	p. 365
Modernist Architecture, Domestic Design, and Planned Communities	p. 378
Alternative Visions: Urban Life and the Industrial Worker	p. 381
Alternative Visions: The Corporate View of Industrial America	p. 391
Alternative Visions: Women at Work in the City	p. 399
Alternative Visions: Rural America	p. 404
Art Against Fascism: The Popular Front and the American Artists' Congress	p. 413
The War at Home: Japanese American Internment and American Patriotism	p. 416
Social Surrealism, Abstraction, and Democracy	p. 419
From Cold War to Culture Wars	p. 429
Gestures of Liberation: Abstract Art as the New American Art	p. 432
Pastiche and Parody: Another Take on the Real	p. 445
Minimal Forms	p. 456
Popular Art, Pop Art, and Consumer Culture	p. 464
An Art of Protest: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War	p. 473
The Personal is Political: Feminist Art of the 1970s	p. 483
Public Art and Public Interest	p. 491
Is Less More? Re-evaluating Modernism in Architecture	p. 496
Postmodernism and Art	p. 502
The Culture Wars	p. 512
Timeline	p. 521
Bibliography	p. 526
Websites	p. 541
Acknowledgments for Illustrations	p. 542
Index	p. 546
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