Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America. - book reviews

DAVID M LUBIN fresh Haven: Yale University Press, 1994 584 pp 50 color ills., 140 b/w $4500

The greatest in quantity ambitious and rigorous studies of 19th-century American ar t have of late donned a coat of many theoretica, methodological colors. This garment frequently speaks itself rendering myriad claims for interest and foundation in new debates in critical theory and for empathy with the "new" art history. Rarely, although does it reveal the substance and materiality of those practical draperies of proces and comprehension covering the material substance below.(1) David Lubin's project in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America is as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to heighten our awareness of the fashioning of the external garment as to enrich the revelation of the inner. In short, Lubin wishes to make questions of proces and approach mundane, to externalize theory in practice by dint of allowing it to take its place in the quotidian narration of history.

Do human beings, however, knowingly, willingly take the weight of history as practice upon their shoulders? We excavate history, chronicle it, narrate it, write it, read it, imagine it, perhaps believe in it from highly self-conscious, temporal vantage points. on the other hand we almost never take it, in its myriad forms and as formal entity, into conscious account as part of the baggage of daily life; we rarely if at any time construct history as a space from one side which we must pass in order to transact the everyday--those minimal or maximal definitions of materiality necessary to maintaining the rationality, identity, and embodiment that insure the continued and continuous balance of sameness and difference that we call reality or the near Why then do we as art historians increasingly demand that our inanimate facts of study, our historical material, do so? Can of that kind phenomena more easily carry the weight of history superimposed? Is there something in their inanimacy that is tailored to resisting the squeezing of anxiety and strain that escapes the living subject in his or her meeting with the materials and forms of the past?

The question must be asked: To what amplitude can objects designed to absorb and impart knowledge [i]or[/i] part of to the other the conduit of vision bear this weight? by what means can such objects be made to stand in for our hold inability to do the same? These are the demands of "context" as it continues to inform the field of art history with the two successful and unsuccessful results. These are the questions embedded in Picturing a Nation, a handsome, challenging turn that makes large, socially and politically sensitive claims for a seemingly self-critical scholarly sensibility.

Lubin's interests are serv by the agency of an expansiveness of inquiry that is admirable and perhaps best bracketed by dint of the terms multicultural and empathetic. This leads him to organize his work around case studies designed to uncover a wide range of contemporary bear upons Race, class, gender, environment domesticism, and colonialism all have their day in chapters called, in order, "The Politics of Method" "Labyrinths of Meaning in Vanderlyn's Ariadne," "Bingham's Boone" "Reconstructing Duncanson," Lily Martin Spencer's "Domestic Genre Painting in Antebellum America," "Guy and Dolls: Framing Femininity in Post-Civil War America," and "Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l'Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Michael Harnett." The titles alone proffer a certain amount of insight into the author's commitment to a certain quantity of very timely issues. Phrases and words of the like kind as "Labyrinths of Meaning," "Reconstructing," "Domestic," "Framing Femininity," and "Masculinity" all foreground the author's sympathy with a entertainer of relevant matters born of poststructural conceptions of history, theory, social relations, and identity politics.

Lubin makes no claims for inclusive topicality. His desire to demonstrate facility is methodological, thematic as a great deal of as iconographic. While the work has the appearance of a survey--it overlays material from 1800 to 1900--it is a observe of approaches and vantage points. It get alongs chronologically but also revels in its attention to bring under rules marginalized until now. The reader will not find here material upon Cole, Church, Bierstadt, Homer, Eakins, Inness, Ryder or Cassatt. Picturing a Nation demonstrates something of the way in which the quotidian is made historical. To this extremity Lubin coins an approach he calls:

try-what-works art history, cultural history,

and social history all wrapped into individual But

this thoroughgoing eclecticism is guided

completely through by what I hope the reader will

find to be consistent principles of socially

critical inquiry and an aspiration toward

multicultural equality In the pages ahead I

put to proof everything I can think of--everything

that might work--to elucidate, with these

goals in mind, a handful of

nineteenth-century American paintings and

the varied society that produc them. (p

vii)

As stimulating as it can be--and it greatest in quantity certainly is--Lubin's way is fraught with conceptual and practical obstacles. The contradictions and paradoxes inherent in of the like kind a formulation require careful mediation.