Recent Native American Art || Art since 1945

Art since 1945Art since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present by Daniel Wheeler; Explorations: The Visual Artssince 1945 by Katherine HoffmanReview by: Deborah RosenthalArt Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3, Recent Native American Art (Autumn, 1992), pp. 103-105+107Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777356 .

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art of individual freedom rather than one of social

struggle. The fact of this odd source of support for modern art has been known for some time.12

Doss, who is among the first to touch on the role of the Rockefeller interests in describing the commercial co-option of modernism, does not really explore this lead. Clearly, there are some very sophisticated people and forces at work here, but Doss has failed to be the first to put all the pieces together to solve the puzzle of why the establish- ment backed an art with such radical political antecedents. Still, she has directed our attention

by identifying some interesting twists and provid- ing serious, thought-provoking insights.

Although this is one of the first histories to focus on the continuities in art of the thirties and

forties, Doss's approach is cautious. There is signif- icant new information about patronage, but what

distinguishes the book is Doss's effort to create a new political perspective on the transition between the figural art of the 1930s and Abstract

Expressionism. While Doss has not been alto-

gether successful in this regard, she has made

important contributions toward her goal. Signifi- cant among them is the identification of the sim- ilarities in consciousness that informed both Benton and Pollock-the leading artists of prewar Regionalism and postwar Abstract Expressionism. Doss also has provided a good, new picture of the transformation of Pollock from Benton's student to a leader of the new movement, Abstract Ex-

pressionism. Doss's picture of the co-option of

Regionalism by commercial interests represents a fresh, invigorating approach to the problem. When she draws the parallel with the co-option of Abstract Expressionism, she provides us with one of the deep and challenging, suggestive insights of the book, making us realize we need to know more. She has also confirmed Henry Adamss view of Benton as complex, knowledgeable, and politically and socially conscious. One might have

hoped for more primary sources in the notes; Doss acknowledges the original sources, but often has cited them from secondary material. The absence of a bibliography is a real shortcoming and

compromises the usefulness of the book, since one is forced to comb painstakingly through the notes to find sources. Still, this book will stand as a

step along the way to a better understanding of

the most amazing transition in the art of our

tumultuous century. o

Notes 1. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modem Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 8. 2. Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word (New York: Bantam Books, 1976) and From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Washing- ton Square Press, 1981) offer devastatingly critical though amused (half in jest and all in seriousness) responses to the related phenomena of nonfigural art and International Style architecture. 3. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). Exhaustive research under- taken for his exhibition of the same name convinced Adams to undertake this solid, pioneering reappraisal of Benton and his work, as an effort to correct the serious misunderstanding of Benton. 4. Quoted from Charles and Mary Beard, America in Mid-

passage (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 767. 5. The quoted text is from Norbert Lynton, The Story of Modern Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 112. 6. The definitive article on the impact of the Hitler-Stalin Pact on the American art community is Gerald R. Monroe, "The American Artists Congress and the Invasion of Finland," Jour- nal of the Archives of American Art 15, no. 1 (1975): 14-20. 7. Doss cites Trotsky's articles written for Partisan Review in 1938. 8. Quoted from Clement Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York," in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 230. This is a telling remark, which Serge Guilbaut emphasized in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (p. 17). 9. "The Museum of Modern Art . .. aimed to show and advertise the advanced artists of Paris to America [Alfred H. Barr, quoted from Russell Lynes, The Lively Audience: A Social

History of the Visual and Performing Arts in America, 1890- 1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 355] .... MoMA's definition of modern art, one of many competing for legit- imacy throughout the twentieth century, was almost entirely formalist in nature: 'modern' was a succession of new styles, rather than the merger of art and life. Modernism's original sensibility as an aesthetic which aimed to integrate disparate cultures and classes was abandoned, replaced by an institu- tional obsession with the objective qualities of pioneering styles" (p. 90). 10. This author touched upon the important role of the Rock- efellers as patrons of modern art in "Thomas Hart Benton's Mural The Social History of Missouri" (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri at Columbia, 1989). 11. Doss repeatedly discusses Benton's efforts to support lib- eral producerism; see, for example, p. 93. 12. Doss, pp. 367, 387, and elsewhere, makes note of the

intelligence community's involvement in art, a situation in which Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and other pro- ponents of Abstract Expressionism were complicitous. Doss cites numerous sources on this subject.

JAMES G. ROGERS, JR., assistant professor of art history at Florida Southern College, is working on a book and interactive video disk on Benton's mural A Social History of Missouri.

Art since 1945 DEBORAH ROSENTHAL

Daniel Wheeler. Art since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present New York: Vendome Press, 1991. 344 pp; 350 color ills., 250 black-and-white. $60.00

Katherine Hoffman. Explorations: The Visual Arts since 1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 416 pp.; 9 color ills., 257 black-and-white. $45.00

eading these two books has led me to ask myself, What is a textbook on recent art history-that is, what relationship

does such a textbook have with the very recent

history its author addresses? In my experience, students may confuse the textbook with history itself. Several years ago one of my art history students at the New York art school where I was then teaching asked why I had assigned a revised version of the textbook required by the depart- ment, since, as the student said, "History doesn't

change, does it?" Either Explorations or Art since

Mid-Century will, I think, serve to reinforce my students sense that a history textbook equals the truth. Both Daniel Wheeler and Katherine Hoff- man pack their texts with names and dates: they tick off an incredibly large number of artists, critics, dealers, movements, and stylistic terms. To the student this overload of information cannot but feel all-encompassing. The student may not notice the absence of a distinctive viewpoint, but it is this absence that gives both books their veneer of impartiality. These books are not occasioned by ideas so much as they are aimed at a market-a market for instant history. Wheeler and Hoffman are responding to the demand for a one-volume

accompaniment to the many courses that have

appeared in art-school and university curricula all over the country, dealing with works of art created within the past five decades, right up to and in-

cluding the present scene. Since in some cases such a course may be the

only one a student takes in modern art, these texts would be the primary histories of our century of art to which she or he would be exposed. Both volumes appear to be designed to stand alone as the sole source for the student. They are, first of

all, organized in modules that can be assigned

weekly to classes and around which a syllabus can be constructed. Like H. W. Jansons History of Art

or Helen Gardner s Art through the Ages, the Hoffman and Wheeler volumes are equipped with

copious illustrations (though Wheeler s book has more color), footnotes, selected bibliographies, and indexes. Both books offer a chronologically arranged account of the period, though their material is framed in slightly different ways: Wheeler

gives separate chapters over to themes or

"schools," such as "Assemblage, Environments,

Happenings" or "Pattern and Decoration," while

Hoffman organizes her subjects by medium;

ART JOURNAL

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104

Hoffman includes architecture, Wheeler doesn't; and so forth. Art since Mid-Century is a hand- somer and more carefully edited production than

Explorations, which is too full of factual errors to be put with confidence into a student's hands. If I had to choose between them, I would choose Wheeler's Art since Mid-Century as the lesser of two evils.

More importantly, though, the two authors' versions of this history-the substance and focus of their accounts-are remarkably parallel to each other (down to the same choice of reproductions, even in some not-so-obvious cases). In the spirit of

my erstwhile inquiring student, I think it worth- while to ask how these histories got to be what

they are. What, besides course adoption, is the end toward which Explorations and Art since

Mid-Century are directed by their authors? If the course has served as motivation for the creation of the text, the text in turn may be designed to justify the view of history that the course represents.

Both Hoffman and Wheeler support the view of art since 1945 as a discrete entity-a widely held though not universal view. (An enterprising student embarking on one of these courses or one of these textbooks should ask, Why start at 1945 and go to the present?) Hoffman's introduction to this construct is found in her brief but telling preface to Explorations. There, folded in among many almost totally empty generalizations-the first sentence (atypical one) of this book reads, "Since World War II experiments and changes in the visual arts have been many and varied" (p. xv)-are some rather startlingly bald assertions. Hoffman writes, The evolution of the visual arts since 1945 has been toward increasing openness of form and

content, and toward a breaking down of boundaries between traditional media of the visual arts and between the visual arts and other art forms." And more important, perhaps, is this statement: "There are no set boundaries and rules anymore for making or judging a work of art, which makes the task of understanding the diversity of work done in the visual arts since 1945 all the more difficult" (pp. xv-xvi). The monotone in which these statements are made-it is the voice of the whole book-equalizes these three statements so that the listening student may miss Hoffman's shift from platitude to value judgment. "The evo-

lution of the visual arts since 1945 . . . toward

increasing openness of form and content,"

as well

as "there are no boundaries and rules anymore for

making or judging a work of art" are unshaded

assertions many artists and writers on art would

not agree with totally, about issues still in the

making; yet Hoffman presents them as received

wisdom rather than as critical problems. Her ap-

proach raises the question of whether an

omniscient-sounding historical voice can-or

should- be invoked at all about works and issues

of the present moment.

A more adept writer, a shrewder mind than

Hoffman, Daniel Wheeler seems to recognize this

problem, as he writes disarmingly to the professor

in his preface to Art since Mid-Century (where he confesses, too, to his hope for course adoption of his book). In the preface, Wheeler disavows the notion that he is creating a canon in his text, and

suggests that there might be different but equally valid versions of the past fifty years of art; he never does give us a sense of what those might be, however. His text turns out to be a selection of works and artists that is, in the main, remarkably similar to Hoffman's selection-the same canon, in fact. Wheeler introduces his student to this construct with a short chapter called "Modernism and Its Origins," in which some thirty-nine small color and black-and-white reproductions of West- ern sculpture and painting, from Raphael's The School of Athens to a 1920s work by Chaim Soutine are made to form a backdrop- culminating in "earlier modernism"-to Wheeler's version of the past fifty years, the art that he labels "late-modern" and "postmodern."

Wheeler, unlike Hoffman, has at least seen the necessity of setting the stage for his account of a very recent past-or perhaps he just wants his book to have a somewhat traditionalist coating. In the event, both authors largely dispense with the continuities between past and present that are the substance of history. Most significantly, Wheeler minimizes and Hoffman simply omits the postwar oeuvres of the artistic masters of this century. Wheeler provides them a sort of cordon sanitaire in the form of a chapter titled "The European School [sic] of Painting: 1945-60." In this chapter are to be found Wheeler's sole considerations, beyond a line or two, of postwar Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse, although Matisse worked for almost a decade after the end of the war, Braque painted for another decade and a half, and Picasso continued to work until his death a full twenty-eight years after these writers' cutoff date of 1945. Wheeler does trot out some

ripe, appreciative prose for some of the greatest of

Braque's and Matisse's late work, namely Braque's Studios and birds, Matisse's Vence chapel and his cutouts. But the extent to which his rhetoric sounds "off"-Wheeler goes on about the "hu- manism" of Matisse, for example-suggests stock reverence rather than real intimacy. At least these artists' major postwar works are mentioned; the postwar art of such major figures as Joan

Mir6, Marc Chagall, and Andre Masson is not

discussed at all in Art since Mid-Century, and the

oeuvres of Sonia Delaunay and Jean H6lion are

never considered.

Against the single paragraphs on Braque or

Balthus included-or secluded-in Wheeler's

chapter on postwar European art, consider these

statistics from a book whose chapters run not

much longer than forty pages each: seven pages on Robert Rauschenberg; two and a half pages on

Roy Lichtenstein; four and a half on Andy Warhol; and seven and a half on Jasper Johns (all copiously illustrated). Of Johns, Wheeler even writes, "The

Braque of a mid-century America claiming Rau-

schenberg as its Picasso would have to be Jasper

Johns" (p. 134). The student who then goes look-

ing for Picasso himself will find one page's worth of text (under the title "Old Masters of Modern- ism"), where his wonderful 1950 Portrait of a Painter, After El Greco is submitted to the follow-

ing summing-up:

Uncannily, Picasso was also guaranteeing the life of his art in a future present, when his recondite variations, which had appeared formally and

conceptually retardataire in the Abstract Expres- sionist fifties, would become forerunners of both the serialism and the appropriative passions of not only the Pop and Minimalist sixties but also the post-modernist seventies and eighties (p. 63).

This is an example of Wheeler's approach to

bringing art history up to the minute, but it sounds

quite a bit like the bad, old art history, with its dedication to inexorable progress. How many of us have had students who insist that Egyptian art is "primitive"? The student reading Wheeler on Picasso will learn that Picasso painted (at least from 1945 on) so that Mike Bidlo could rip him off and earn big bucks doing it. Wheeler's hip version of postwar painting is so "uncanny" that it turns from art history into sci-fi.

Katherine Hoffman's Explorations is not different in approach, only in degree: she simply leaves out the seminal European artists altogether (except for Alberto Giacometti, whose sculpture both Wheeler and Hoffman include, alongside Picasso's; there is, I concluded, too little sculpture without them to make up a chapter). In Explora- tions, we get Wifredo Lam and Rufino Tamayo, and mention of their ties to Picasso and Paris-but the sole reproduction of a postwar Picasso is his

sculpture Baboon with Young. In her section on

postwar printmaking, Hoffman discusses S. W. Hayter's influential Atelier 17 (where, as Ameri- cans like to point out, Jackson Pollock worked and absorbed the lessons of advanced European art), but she includes neither a reproduction of a Hay- ter nor any discussion of the modernist ideas

taught in his studio-classroom. Hoffman's single sentence, yes, sentence on postwar Matisse is perhaps the most astonishing example of her approach. On the first page of her "Painting, 1970s"

chapter, Hoffman writes that "Pattern and Deco- ration . . . had a variety of historical roots. There

were the 'decorative,' brilliantly colored cutouts of

Matisse" (p. 207). The student eager to under-

stand those "historical roots" may be surprised to

discover (he or she will have to learn it elsewhere;

Hoffman is silent on this) that they date from less

than twenty years before the Pattern paintings. And lacking a reproduction of the Matisse cut-

outs, the student will understand little about the

way that Pattern painting may have emerged from

roots in Matisse.

Neither Hoffman's nor Wheeler's history will

enable a student to view the past analytically. Rather than organic unfoldings, their accounts of

the recent past remind me of what I've read about

the computer-generated study of fractals, in

FALL 1992



which the calibration of a measuring instrument is so greatly increased that the actual dimensions of a known contour increase-with the result in some real sense a distortion. In these two text-

books, fashion and the market are the mechanical measures that have replaced the individual's perspective on the past. The very sense of time is altered in these histories: the present moment is seen constantly to rush away from us and is there- fore made infinitely expansive. The past is ob-

scured; there is no room left for it, and with it goes the possibility of seeing where we have come from or where we are now. And, of course, as Hoffman admits in her preface, It is impossible to discuss in depth any one artists development" (p. xv).

It is hard to understand what Hoffman has to

say about the artists she does find room for in

Explorations. I do not know how students could

successfully navigate this book, which reads at times like a set of index card entries. Hoffman's

ideas, such as they are ("Violence did not end in the sixties" is the introductory sentence of a section [p. 205]), are at best mechanically connected, and very often lack meaningful emphasis. Con- fused syntax, persistent use of the passive voice, and, as they say, buzz words mar her prose. Here is a characteristic passage on a well-known though controversial artist:

Kiefers paintings are more than paintings: the viewer is lured into a physical and instinctual world of myth, religion, and history, with Kiefer's extraordinary combination of materials such as

acrylic, emulsion, and oil paints entangled with

straw, sand, shellac, or molten lead. Born in Bavaria in 1945, two months before the end of World War II, Kiefer was raised Roman Catholic and denied "access" to the whole Nazi era and

subsequent division of Germany (p. 291).

Questions (I hope) students might ask: When-

why-is a painting "more than a painting"? When the artist creates "a physical and instinctual

world," when he uses collage elements, or both?

Why is "access" in quotation marks; what does the word mean in this context? Was Kiefer "denied access" because he was born in Bavaria, because he was born in 1945, because he was

brought up Roman Catholic; all of the above; or

for some other reason?

As part of her coverage of the present mo-

ment in art, Hoffman attempts to be inclusive

about her selection of artists. Here, too, the me-

chanical quality of her method leads to distor-

tions; the way in which women artists are dealt

with in Explorations provides a good example. Hoffman writes in the introduction to her book

that her "cast of characters" will "provide a bal-

ance of male and female artists on an international

level" (p. xv). With this bland statement, Hoffman

sweeps away the painful fact that not even since

1945 has the cast of characters of major or well-

known artists been equally divided between the

sexes; surely it is important to acknowledge that

fact if you wish things to change. But what is also lost or distorted here is the ambivalence that is a

part of every artist's sense of history; after all, in the perception of the distance one stands from a beloved artistic past lies some sadness. And for a woman artist looking back at a past composed primarily of male artists, this sadness is com-

pounded in some interesting ways. Hoffman gives us nothing of all this. Her artificial evening-up of the score (male vs. female artists) instead leads to some obscure passages in Explorations. Here, for

example, is the complete text of her entry on a

young artist I had never heard of:

Patricia Gonzalez, born in 1958 in Cartagena, Colombia, was the daughter of an architect Her

parents separated when she was eleven and she lived with her paternal grandmother until moving to London with her mother at age eleven. She received a

B.F.A. from the Wimbledon School of

Art and in 1980 moved back to Cartagena. But she found it difficult to find an artistic community and returned to London temporarily, then on to Texas to join one of her former painting teachers, Derek Boshier Her paintings, such as Fountain

View, relate to landscape imagery of South Amer- ica but go beyond in their dreamlike evocation of

layers deep within the human psyche. Gonzalez has referred to Van Gogh, Nolde, and Frida Kahlo as painters she particularly admires. One can see a little of each in Fountain View. The small figure that lurks behind the leaflike form in the painting is both primitive and modern in its vulnerability and sense of unknowing (p. 316).

The student who is still interested after this recita- tion of a r6sum6 will look in vain for Fountain

View, with its "small figure" and "leaflike forms"-for no work by Gonzalez is reproduced. On the other hand, Hoffman, an author who claims to want to "balance" her representation of male and female artists, omits all mention of such well-known women painters as Nell Blaine, Jane

Freilicher, Louisa Matthiasdottir, and Joan Snyder, all of whom have been visible at the national level for decades.

Wheeler's Art since Mid-Century strikes me as an account no less mechanical than Hoffman's for being more competently composed. Wheeler still puts a mock impartiality at the heart of his

account. He proclaims in his preface:

As for originality-the post-modernist's bite noire-/ disclaim it in the interests of my desire to

provide a middle-of-the-road, consensus report on or view of the period and its art. Except here

and in quotations, the first person singular-the

egocentric "l"-cannot be found between the

two covers of Art since Mid-Century (p. 5).

Wheeler's absence from the present-his coy dis-

avowal of the authorial voice-pretty well

matches his reluctance or inability to invite the

viewer/reader into the spirit of an artist or a time.

Here are two examples of his observations, culled

from either end of the book, the first on Claude

Monet and the second on the contemporary painter David Reed:

Ifsuch painting offended the majority of Parisians who first saw it, the explanation may lie in their discomfort at sensing how the molecularized sur- face became an analogue for the increasing ano-

nymity and atomization of modern life, at the same time that it also pushed art frighteningly far towards abstraction, still more than had the most unfettered works of Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet (p. 12).

If all this drama, like the theatrical lighting ef- fects, strident colors, and suave, syncopated de-

sign, pays homage to Caravaggio and Rubens, not to mention Jules Olitski and the later Larry Poons, it does so in the ironic manner of Lichtenstein when he parodied de Kooningesque Abstract Ex-

pressionism (p. 334).

Always rushing away from an encounter with the work itself, Wheeler in the first passage stuffs the work of art into the future (anachronism); in the second passage, he substitutes the abstractions of names-and how many there are there!-for the concreteness of visual qualities. No wonder Wheeler can say, later in that second paragraph, "But as all who attend art-history lectures know, color slides, or images, may have even greater impact than the objects they represent" (p. 334).

Not every art historian would concur with that last statement; and, for that matter, "middle of the road" and "consensus" are not necessarily the stuff of which mainstream art history is made. E. H. Gombrich wrote the wonderfully idiosyncra- tic single-volume history called The Story of Art

during wartime without access to his library; he

says that he wrote what he remembered. The result is a book that is probably the only art-

history survey text laying no claim to exhaustive- ness. Declaring in the book's very first sentence, "There really is no such thing as Art. There are

only artists,"'1 Gombrich proceeds through his text to bring the reader more vividly into the mind of the artist than any other textbook writer I have ever come across. What is an artist if not an "1"? What is art history meant to do if not to uncover all the aspects that made up the "I"s who create works of art? Wheeler and Hoffman do not seem to me to be really part of the audience for works of

art. For them, passionate disagreement about

highly publicized artworks or artists seems to have

ceased to exist with the nineteenth century. Gombrich, though-an "I" speaking to a "you" about another person, the artist-writes in his

first page about the many ways art permits us

entree to the minds of people distant from us in

time and place-and about the ways people dis-

agree about works of art.

What may be most revealing about Wheeler's and Hoffman's view of the artist is the admiration

both of them evince in their texts for artists who

give up their art. Marcel Duchamp, so bored with

painting that he gave it up for chess, is of course

the prototype, but Jean Dubuffet and John Bald-

ART JOURNAL

105



essari are two others the authors praise for integrity in stopping their work for a while, or destroy- ing it. (Come to think of it, the attraction of Giacometti for these writers may lie in all that

snuffing out of his sculptures he is supposed to have done.) What does this praise signify? In a faceless and voiceless, programmatic art history, carrying on with one's work has too low a profile to register on the graph. The artist who carries on in the face of daily, hourly despair over the hopelessness of what he or she is trying to do-the

hopelessness in the face not only of the present, but also particularly of the past; the same artist

who, in a larger sense, carries on-that is, the traditional artist, modernist or otherwise, whose work is truly an outgrowth of what came before: this artist plays almost no part in these two histories of the past five decades.

There is a whole other possible history of the

past fifty years, which it is the philosophical bias of such books as Explorations and Art since Mid-

Century to ignore and bury. Among the artists of recent decades whose work has been crucial to the artists and the art scene I know, but who go unmentioned in these textbooks, are these

painters: Ilya Bolotowsky, Burgoyne Diller, Leland

Bell, Earl Kerkam, Nell Blaine, Louisa Matthiasdot- tir, Gabriel Laderman, Robert De Niro, Joan

Snyder, John Heliker, and Gretna Campbell. In this other history waiting to be written, the likes of

Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein are, far from

geniuses, hardly artists of any stature at all. Sup- porting this view are many of those who still be- lieve that there are rules and boundaries-

judgment, in short-and for some of these people the work of artists most valued by the "mainstream" is not a radical break with, but a failure to measure up to the art of the past. In this view, modernism, far from being a dead letter, is a living continuum from one end of the century to the

other, and its structural implications, moreover, are felt in a traditionalist figuration as well as in non-

objective works. I cannot insist on putting these words in the

mouths of Daniel Wheeler or Katherine Hoffman. But the mass-mind voice with which they both

speak to a faceless public is drowning out the

alternative, the vital voices I hope students may hear. Particularly at a moment when we are being reminded that a textbook view is not synonymous with history-that the diversity of many vantage

points matter-we should not adopt new text-

books like these, which claim to transcend the

individual viewpoint. o Note 1. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 13th ed. (Oxford: Phai- don Press, 1979), 4.

DEBORAH ROSENTHAL is a painter who shows at Bowery Gallery in New York. An associate professor of art at Rider College, she writes for the New Criterion among other publications.

Hung in Guilt Frames MARTHA KINGSBURY

Brian W Dippie. Catlin and His Contempo- raries: The Politics of Patronage. Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1990. 572 pp.; 16 color ills., 125 black-and-white. $50.00

Ronald Fields. Abby Williams Hill and the Lure of the West Olympia: Washington State Historical Society, 1989. 120 pp.; 33 color ills., 40 black-and-white. $29.95

Chris Bruce et al. Myth of the West. New York: Rizzoli and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 1990. 192 pp.; 105 color ills., 73 black-and-white. $45.00

William H. Truettner, ed. The West as America:

Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier

Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 412 pp.; 103 color ills., 220 black-and- white. $60.00

s somebody guilty? Hanged, or framed? Sev- eral recent publications about representing the West of the United States demonstrate

the difficulties of holding those questions clearly in mind, let alone answering them. Together these books exemplify a shift in studies of American art.

The typographical error "hung in guilt frames" appeared in a catalogue George Catlin

prepared to accompany his Indian paintings. Brian

Dippie connects this phrase, ironically, with Cat- lin's exploitative touring of paintings, artifacts, and troupes of Indians to audiences in the eastern United States and Europe, and Catlin's playing on the misfortunes of the tribes to increase the lure of his exhibits. To varying degrees, the publications under review direct attention to motives or im-

pacts other than aesthetic. Some can be under- stood to impugn the integrity of artists. The West as America and the exhibition it accompanied at the National Museum of American Art in Wash-

ington, D.C., aroused public anger, along with characterizations ranging from wrongheaded and

misleading to simplistic and preachy. Members of

Congress threatened and fumed, while disparag- ing reviews appeared in the national press. The

projects organizer, William H. Truettner, eventu-

ally answer the critics in print, reasserting the

purpose of the exhibition as being to "explain the

images . . . as ideological constructions."1 Yet, most works that address the nonaesthetic aspects of such art have been taken in stride by public and

academics alike.

Dippie's Catlin and His Contemporaries manifests the extreme of nonvisual considerations

that interest art historians today. The book is gen-

erously illustrated to enable a nonspecialist to fol-

low the argument. For the artistry or the visual

meaning of individual works, however, Dippie re-

fers reders to Truettner's earlier The Natural Man

Observed: A Study of Catlin's Indian Gallery? While Dippie clearly respects Catlin's work and his

developing cultural relativism, his project con-

cerns Catlin's goal of establishing his Native Amer-

ican visual documentation in an institution of national stature-the Smithsonian Institution or the New-York Historical Society-and finding suita- ble published form for them. Catlin's search for

government patronage and the commercial show-

manship with which he sustained himself and

kept the material together as a unit were both carried out less in the arena of "art" than we

customarily imagine and much more in the prov- ince of nineteenth-century sciences-

archaeology, geology, anthropology. Catlin's

struggle was not so much for paintings to be commissioned or purchased but for projects to be funded and publications to be underwritten. The cumulative form and its claims to instructive value

played at least as great a role as aesthetic claims. Three of the book's eight chapters focus on

Catlin's competitors. Using letters and other archi- val materials, Dippie constructs a plausible sce- nario of bitter competition and shifting alle-

giances among "Indian specialists," including painters, writers, and government agents, most with some claim to scientific or naturalist status.

Angry quarrels and resentment over intellectual

priorities, territories, and legitimacies sound like

contemporary claims for credit in scientific break-

throughs. While we are accustomed to acrimony and double-dealing in political, social, economic, even scientific histories, we have focused elsewhere in histories of art. Even more fundamen-

tally different, this history is not about the appear- ances and meanings of individual artworks; it is about systems formed by objects-in this case, a

catalogue of certain matters, described from a certain vantage point, imbued with a claim to cumulative meaning. How and to what extent the

system is brought to realization and what the

system signifies in itself and as it interfaces with other systems is at issue.

Ronald Fields's presentation of totally new material contrasts with Dippie's extending our

perspectives on an already prominent subject. Abby Williams Hill and the Lure of the West is a

compact monograph about an American painter (1861-1945) who moved to Tacoma in 1889, the

year Washington became a state. Fields explores the quality, variety, and development of Hill's

work, and, drawing on her letters and daybooks, he introduces issues that cry out for further study. A number of Hill's best-documented paintings are

landscapes done on contract with the Great

Northern and Northern Pacific railroads in the first

decade of the twentieth century. Hill was an in-

domitable camper and outdoorswoman; the rail-

roads' passes enabled her to travel far afield and

camp for months in the western mountains. She

also undertook portraits, some of Native Ameri-

cans. She had reformist ideas about women's is-

sues and was politically active through the Con-

gress of Mothers. Both her extensive travels and

her camping were integrated with her painting

ART JOURNAL

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Documents

Recent Native American Art || Art since 1945