Gilbert Stuart, George Washington (The Lansdowne Portrait), 1796.
Charles Wilson Peale, George Washington as Colonel of the Virginia Regiment, 1772.
Charles Wilson Peale, Washington at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777, 1784.
Tuesday & Thursday 2:40 - 4 PM |
Robert Slifkin Office: Library 320 Office Hours: Thursdays 9 AM-12 PM |
Course Description:
The concepts of representation and democracy have been fundamental to the political and cultural identity of the United State since the country’s inception. This course will explore the history of visual art in the United States from its formation through the birth of the industrialized and modernized nation in the late nineteenth century using these two concepts as guiding principles and foundational themes. Throughout the semester we will examine in particular how the political and social anxieties and ideals of the nation were negotiated and represented by artists, using specific works of art as in depth case studies.
Course requirements:
Attendance and participation (three or more unexcused absences will result in the student receiving no credit for the course).
Completion of all assignments. NO EXTENSIONS. All late work (barring documented emergencies) will be docked a letter grade each day past deadline.
Suggested texts:
Frances Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002)*
David C. Miller, ed. American Encounters: New Approaches to American Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).*
Angela Miller, et. al. American Encounters: Art History and Cultural Identity (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2008).
*Available for purchase at Reed College Bookstore
Syllabus
Tuesday, January 29 - Course introduction
T. J. Clark, “Painting in the Year 2,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 15-564, esp. pp. 15-22; 32-35; 40-53.
Publicus, "Federalist No. 10," (1787). Available online.
Thursday, January 31 - Washington Portraits - Representation vs. Reproduction
The Smithsonian offers an iconographic analysis of Gilbert Stuart's Lansdowne Portrait of George Washington.
Edmund Morgan, “Inventing an American People,” in Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 263-287
David Summers, “Representation” in Critical Terms for Art History, Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3-16.
Raymond Williams, “Representative,” in Keywords, revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 266-269.
Christopher Prendergrast, “The Triangle of Representation,” in The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1-17.
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Appendix, On Etymology,” in The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 241-252
Week 2: The American Representational Tradition, Political and Aesthetic
Tuesday, February 5
John Singleton Copley, Sir William Pepperell and His Family, 1778. |
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Margeretta Lovell, “The Picture in the Painting,” in Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 26-48.
Michel Foucault, "The Limits of Representation," in The Order of Things (New York: Vinatge, 1970 [1967]), 217-249.
Thursday, February 7
Jay Fliegelman, “Introduction,” “Jefferson’s Pauses,” and “Soft Compulsion,” in Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford University Press, 1993): 1-62.
Jill Lepore, “An American Language,” in A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Vintage, 2002), 15-41.
Early American Imprints: 18th Century Alphabet Books
Week 3: The Crisis of Republican Virtue
Tuesday, February 12
Wendy Bellion, “Illusion and Allusion: Charles Wilson Peale’s Staircase Group at the Columbianum Exhibition,” American Art 17 (Summer 2003): 18-40. Available online.
Laura Rigal, “Peale’s Mammoth” in David Miller, ed. American Iconology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 18-38.
Thursday, February 14
Joyce Appleby “The Promise of Prosperity” from Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 25-50.
Steven Watts, “A New Era Has Commenced in the United States” from The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 2-15.
Francois Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 89 (March 2003), 1295-1330. Available online
Assignment #1: Choose one of the paintings in the above image gallery and write a 500 word ‘catalog essay’ on the image. You should refer to the following texts for general background information of the work but your own essay should try and offer a new and even surpring interpretation, one that can draw upon some of the non-art historical readings we have encountered so far in the class.
Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, 1792. American Encounters, p. 147.
Gilbert Stuart, The Skater, 1782, American Encounters, 163-4.
John Vanderlyn, The Murder of Jane McRae, 1802-04. Framing America, p. 108-9.
The essence of this genre lies in balancing generalizing contextual information with the specifics of the work at hand. That is to say, you should try and place the work within a meaningful artistic and historical context while simultaneously revealing what is unique and most significant about the specific work. Your essay should unite all aspects of your formal analysis around a focused thesis. You may want to consider locating one detail or specific visual aspect of the work that you believe embodies or thematizes your thesis. Due in class on Thursday, February 14.
Assignment #2: Pick a bird discussed in Audubon’s Writings and Drawings, (pp, 195-515) and write a 2-3 page essay that describes how the image may embody, represent, or be in dialogue with the emergent democratic culture of the United States. Ground your thesis is a vivid visual analysis of the image. You may draw upon any of the readings from the class and particularly those listed for this week. You may also integrate Audubon’s written "Ornithologial Biography" account of the bird (from the Writings and Drawings volume) into your analysis. Due in class on Tuesday, February 26.
Many of Audobon's watercolors and prints are available online. Here are a few links:
Birds of America, Audubon's Watercolors
John Audubon's Birds of America
John James Audubon, Writings and Drawings (New York: Library of America, 1999), 753-764. (Available on reserve)
Christopher Irmscher, “Violence and Artistic Representation in John Audubon,” Raritan 15:2 (1995), 1-34. Available online
Laura Rigal, “Feathered Federalism: Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology, 1807-1814,” in The American Manufactory: Art, Labor and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 145-178.
Chritopher Looky, “The Constitution of Nature: Taxonomy as Politics in Jefferson, Peale, and Batram,” Early American Literature 22 (December 1987), 252-73. Available online
David R. Bingham, “Ask the Beasts and They Shall Teach Thee’: The Human Lessons of Charles Wilson Peale’s Natural History Displays,” in Amy R. Myers, ed. Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1998): 11-34.
Week 5: Democracy as an Ideal and Affliction
Tuesday, February 26
Wendy Bellion, “Heads of State: Profiles and Politics in Jeffersonian America,” in New Media, 1740-1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B Pingree (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 31-59.
Alexander Nemerov, “The Anatomical Sculptures of William Rush and the Problem of Democratic Scale,” in Mammoth Scale, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 2002).
Sean Wilentz, “Prologue” in The Rise of American Democracy (New York: Norton, 2006), 3-10.
Raymond Williams, “Democracy,” in Keywords, 93-98.
Thursday, February 28
Alexander Nemerov, "Blackbeerries," in The Body of Raphaelle Peale, Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 11-57
Week 6: The Panoramic Landscape – Cole and Church
Tuesday, March 4
Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” in American Iconology, 80-91.
Angela Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as a Political Allegory,” Prospects 14 (1990), 65-92.
Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (1835). In John W. McCourbey ed. American Art 1700-1960 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), 98-110.
Thursday, March 6
Angela Miller, “Nationalism as Place and Process: Frederic Church’s New England Scenery,” in The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics 1825-1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 167-207.
Angela Miller, “The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular,” Wide Angle 18 (1996): 34-69. Available online.
Week 7: Middle Class Providence:
Tuesday, March 11
William T. Oedel and Todd S. Gernes, “The Painter’s Triumph: William Sidney Mount and the Formation of a Middle Class Art,” in Reading American Art, 128-149.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Davy Crocket as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America,” from Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985), 90-108.
link to webpage about Crockett alamanacs run by the Saint Louis Mercantile Library
Thursday, March 13
Bryan Wolf, “All the World’s a Code: Art and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Journal 44 (Winter 1984), 328-337.
Neil Harris, “The Operational Aesthetic,” in Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973): 59-89.
Week 8: No class Spring Break March 14-22
Tuesday, March 25
Eric Lott, “Working Class Culture and the Languages of Race,” in Love and Theft: Blackface, Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), 63-88.
Sarah Burns, “Cartoons in Color: David Gilmour Blythe's Very Uncivil War,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 66-83.
Thursday, March 27
David Lubin, “Lily Martin Spencer’s Domestic Genre Painting in Antebellum America,” in American Iconology, 135-162.
Gabrielle Gopinath, “Harriet Hosmer and the Feminine Sublime,” Oxford Art Journal (March 2005), 61-81.
Tuesday, April 1
Lisa Fellows Anrus, “Design and Measurement in Luminist Art,” in American Light: The Luminist Movement, exh. cat.(Washington, National Gallery, 1980), 31-56.
Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers,” in Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999), 40-76.
Thursday, April 3
Martin Bruckner, “Literacy for Empire,” in The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps Literacy and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 238-263.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836) in Collected Essays
***Lecture: Bryan Wolf, Professor of American Art History, Stanford University
"Teapots and Air Pumps: Science, Sentiment and Painting in the 18th Century."
Bio 19, 5:30 PM
Assignment #3: Choose one painting by Lane or Heade and write a 500-word ‘catalog entry’ on it. See assignment #1 for more details. Due in class on Thursday, April 3.
Week 11: Representing Unification and Repressing Rupture: Bingham and Homer
Tuesday, April 8
Angela Miller, “The Mechanisms of the Market and the Invention of Western Realism: The Example of George Caleb Bingham,” in American Iconology, 112-134.
Jonathan Weinberg, “The Artist and the Politician – George Caleb Bingham,” Art in America 88 (October 2000). Available online
Thursday, April 10
Lucretia H. Giese, “Prisoners from the Front: An American History Painting?,” from Winslow Homer, Paintings from the Civil War, exh. cat (San Francisco, CA: The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1988), 65-82.
Steven Conn, “Why are These Pictures So Terrible?,” History and Theory 41 (December 2002): 17-42. Available online
Tuesday, April 15
Michael Leja, “Eakins’s Reality Effects,” in Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 59-92.
Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” [1877], in The Philosophy of Peirce, Selected Writings, ed. Julius Buchler, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 23-41
Thursday, April 17
David Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood in the Art of Thomas Eakins,” in Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, eds. Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 133-166.
George M. Beard, “Causes of American Nervousness,” [1881] in Democratic Vistas, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 238-247.
Week 13: Trompe L’oeil Painting: The Limit Case of Representation
Tuesday, April 22
Paul Staiti, “Illusionism, Trompe-l’oeil, and the Perils of Viewership,” in William M. Harnett, ed. Marc Simpson et. al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992)
Walter Benn Michaels, “The Gold Standard,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 137-180.
Thursday, April 24
NO CLASS
Assignment #4: Write a 2-3 page essay exploring the representational philosophy posited by trompe l’oeil paintings? In particular consider how such works might reveal a paradigm or ideal for other representational systems (such as language, currency, and even human bodies). Focus on particular works of art and particular passages and details in the work for your primary evidence. Due FRIDAY April 24. (You can email me a copy of your essay any time on the 24th).
Assignment #5: Class Presentation: This is an opportunity to share your research topic and preliminary findings with the class. Ideally you will have formulated a provisional thesis and will be able to bring a few images to class as part of your presentation. The length of the presentation will depend on enrollment but should be around 10-15 minutes. It needn’t be written but can be. Most important, you should convey of what you plan to argue and some of the evidence you have found so far.
Assignment #6: A 10-12 page research paper of a subject of your choice. Papers can be based on previous written work submitted for the class or address an artist or work of art not addressed in class (although such topics should be approved by the professor). Successful papers will contain a focused thesis that is substantiated by vivid formal analyses coupled with external textual evidence, some of which should come from sources not included in the syllabus. The paper is due Thursday, May 15th at 5 PM.
