American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity Book

Part 1: From Ancient Times to the Late Colonial Era 1

Chapter 1: The Art of Indigenous Americans before 1500 c.e. 3

The Art of the Eastern Woodlands 5

Framing the Discourse: New World Origins 5

Framing the Discourse: Names and Native Americans 7

The Art of Archaic and Woodland Cultures 6

Poverty Point 7

Hopewell Culture 8

Mississippian Culture 9

Myths and Legends: Nineteenth-Century Myths of the Moundbuilders 9

Moundville 10

Spiro 11

Cahokia 13

Arctic Alaska 15

Old Bering Sea Culture 15

Ipiutak Stage 16

Ancient Art of the Southwest 17

From Basketmakers to Potters and Architects 17

Anasazi or Ancestral Pueblo 17

Chaco Canyon 18

Mimbres Painted Pottery 19

Art and Culture Change in the Proto-historic Period: Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma 20

Conclusion 21

Chapter 2: The Old World and the New: First Phases of Encounter, 1492—date? 23

European Images of the New World: The First Century 23

The Earliest Images 24

Columbus Landing in the Indies 24

Paradise and Hell 24

The “Noble Savage” 24

A Beckoning Princess 25

Fast Forward: The Long History of the Feathered Headdress 25

The Empirical Eye of Commerce 26

John White 26

De Bry’s Great Voyages 28

New World Maps 29

Ceremonies of Possession 30

The Spanish Requirimiento 30

The French and the Timucua 31

The English: Taking Possession of the Land 32

Indigenous Eastern North America: Forging a Middle Ground 32

New Materials and New Markets 33

“Powhatan’s Mantle” 33

Horse Effigy Comb 34

War Club 35

Pipe Tomahawk 35

A Pair of Ceremonial Pouches 36

A Painted Hide 37

Wampum: A Contract in Shells 38

Fast Forward: The Repatriation of Wampum 39

“Fond of Finery”: Portraiture and Self-Display 39

Hendrick and John: Eighteenth-century Gentlemen at the Boundaries of Cultures 40

Northern New Spain: Crossroads of Cultures 43

A “Bi-Ethnic” Society 44

The Matachines Dance 44

Pueblo and Mission in New Mexico 45

Fast Forward: Santa Fe Fiesta–Reenacting the Conquest 46

Acoma 47

Adobe: Converging Traditions 48

The Mission and Convent of San Esteban at Acoma Pueblo 49

The Church of San Agustín at Isleta Pueblo 50

The Mission Church and Convent of San José at Laguna Pueblo 51

Pecos Pueblo and Mission: An Intercultural Zone 51

The Segesser Hides: A Pictorial Record of Spanish and Pueblo Bravery on the Great Plains in 1720 53

Conclusion 55

Chapter 3: Early Colonial Arts, 1632—1734 57

Designing Cities, Partitioning Land, Imaging Utopia 58

Hispanic Patterns of Land Settlement in North America 58

El Cerro de Chimayo 59

British Patterns of Land Settlement in North America 60

An engraved map of Savannah 60

New Haven 60

Organic, Grid, Radial 61

Boston 62

Myths and Legends: The Puritan Ideal 62

New York City 64

Philadelphia 64

The Ordinance of 1785 65

The District of Columbia 66

Seventeenth-Century Painting: Puritans in Kid Gloves 67

Portraits 67

The Freake Portraits 67

The Mason Children 70

Captain Thomas Smith’s Self-Portrait 71

Hispanic Village Arts 73

The Santero Tradition 73

Saint Joseph by Rafael Aragón 73

Retablo Painting and the Santero Tradition 73

Retablo at San José, Laguna Pueblo 73

Santero Painting 74

Fast Forward: The Virgin of Guadalupe: Transnational Icon 75

Native Elements in Santero Painting 76

Architecture and Memory 76

The Spanish in the Southeast: Saint Augustine 76

Castillo San Marcos, in Saint Augustine 77

Building in New England and Virginia 77

Hingham Meeting House, Hingham, Massachusetts 78

Saint Luke’s Church, Smithfield, Virginia 78

Houses 80

Myths and Legends: Myth of the Log Cabin 80

Bacon’s Castle, Surry County, Virginia 80

Ward House, Salem, Massachusetts 80

Fairbanks House, Dedham, Massachusetts 82

Methods and Techniques: Reading Architectural Plans 82

Style and Substance 83

Design, Material Culture, and the Decorative Arts 84

The Seventeenth-Century Interior 84

The Chair 84

Methods and Techniques: Theories of architectural preservation 85

The Court Cupboard 85

A Silver Sugarbox 86

Textiles 87

Embroidery 87

A Native Basket 88

The Carver’s Art: Colonial New England Gravestones 88

“The Charlestown Stonecutter” 89

The Lamson Family Carvers 89

Representing Race: Black in Colonial America 90

The First Africans in America 91

Colonoware 91

The Descent into Race-Based Slavery in America 92

Two African American Slave Sculptures 92

Conclusion 93

Chapter 4: Late Colonial Encounters: The New World, Africa, Asia, and Europe, 1735—1797 95

The African Diaspora 95

Thomas Coram’s View of Mulberry (House and Street) 96

The Shotgun House 97

Framing the Discourse: Diaspora and Creolization 98

The African House 98

Virginia: Eighteenth-Century Land Art 98

Oak Alley Plantation (Vacherie, Louisiana) 98

Mount Vernon 99

Methods and Techniques: The Classical Orders 101

Palladio and “Georgian” Building 102

Palladio’s Four Books 102

Georgian Domestic Architecture 102

Mount Airy, in Virginia 103

Mount Pleasant, in Pennsylvania 104

Whitehall, in Rhode Island 105

Georgian Religious Architecture 106

The Quaker Meeting House 106

The Touro Synagogue 107

Trinity Church 107

The “Colonial Church” 108

The Mission System in Texas, Arizona, and California 109

Fast Forward: New England Meets Hawaii 109

Texas Missions 109

San José y San Miguel de Aguayo 110

Arizona Missions: San Xavier del Bac 110

San Xavier del Bac 110

California: The Mission Santa Barbara 112

Mission Santa Barbara 113

The Crafted Object 114

Ben Franklin’s Porringer 114

Cultural Contexts: Colonial Money 114

Paul Revere the Silversmith 115

Sons of Liberty Bowl 116

The Line of Beauty 116

The Combination of Aesthetic Languages in Decorative Objects 116

The Colonial Artisan 118

John Goddard, Master Cabinetmaker 118

The Cosmopolitan Wigwam 119

Artists Painting 120

Copley and West: Beacon Hill and the Academy 121

Copley’s Colonial Portraits 122

West’s History Paintings 125

Painting, Portraiture and Race 128

Justus Kühn’s Henry Darnall III as a Child 128

Sea Captains Carousing at Surinam, by John Greenwood 128

Watson and the Shark 129

Conclusion 131

Part 2: From Ancient Times to the Late Colonial Era 133

Chapter 5: Art, Revolution, and The New Nation, 1776—1828 135

The American Revolution in Print, Paint, and Action 135

Print Wars 136

The Deplorable State of America 136

The Bloody Massacre 137

“Playing Indian” 138

Reinterpreting the Revolution: John Trumbull 139

Cultural Contexts: Festivals and Parades 139

The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, 17 June, 1775 140

Celebrating Franklin and Washington 141

Franklin as Experimentalist 141

The “Athenaeum Portrait” 143

Fast Forward: Washington as Zeus 144

The African American Enlightenment 145

Scipio Morehead’s portrait of Phyllis Wheatley 145

Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences by Samuel Jennings 147

Joshua Johnston 147

Fast Forward: Two Versions of Education 147

Classical America 149

Thomas Jefferson’s Western Prospect 150

Monticello 150

The Virginia State Capitol 151

The University of Virginia 152

Capitols in Stones and Pigment 153

Charles Bulfinch, Architect 153

The United States Capitol 153

A Portrait of the Capitol: Morse’s The House of Representatives 154

Cultural Contexts: The White House 156

Domestic Life 156

Gore Place, a Neoclassical Home 157

A Carved Mahogany Chair, attributed to Samuel McIntire 158

Cultural Contexts: The China Trade 159

Ladies’ Furnishings 159

Fast Forward: A Greek Revival Interior 160

Women’s Artistic Education 160

Painting in the New Nation 163

Portraiture and Commercial Life: Gilbert Stuart 163

The Skater 163

Painting and Citizenship: Charles Willson Peale 164

The Staircase Group 164

The Artist in his Museum 165

Myth and Eroticism: John Vanderlyn 166

Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos 166

Early Romanticism: Washington Allston 167

Elijah in the Desert 167

Moonlit Landscape (Moonlight) 168

Conclusion 169

Chapter 6: The Body Politic, 1828—1865 171

The Language of Emotion 171

Home and Family 171

Lilly Martin Spencer 172

“Sentimentalism in Nature” 173

Sculpture 173

Harriet Hosmer 173

Edmonia Lewis 174

Hiram Powers 174

Gothic America 176

Lyndhurst Architect, by Alexander Jackson Davis 176

Moss Cottage, Oakland, California 178

Gothic Revival Furnishings 178

The American Woman’s Home 178

Egyptian Revival 180

The Washington Monument 180

A Silver Sauceboat 180

Art of the People 180

Quilts and Women’s Culture, 1800—1860 180

Baltimore Album Quilts 183

Friendship Quilts 183

Raising Funds and Social Awareness 184

Folk and Vernacular Traditions 184

Rural Painters 185

Silhouettes 186

“Just for Pretty” 187

Fraktur 187

Native Imagery in Vernacular Art 188

Shaker Art and Innovation 190

Shaker Box 190

Shaker Furniture 191

Shaker Spiritual Visions 191

The Cultural Work of Genre Painting 193

Culture vs. Commerce: Allston, Morse, Mount 193

The Poor Author and the Rich Bookseller 193

The Gallery of the Louvre 193

The Painter’s Triumph: A Reply to Morse 194

Woodville: the Pleasures and Perils of the Public Sphere 196

War News from Mexico 196

Politics in an Oyster House 197

Street Scenes 197

John Carlin 198

Young Husband: First Marketing, by Lilly Martin Spencer 198

Framing the Discourse: Hannah Stiles and the “Trade and Commerce Quilt” 199

Mount: Abolitionism and Racial “Balance” 200

Farmers Nooning 200

Eel Spearing at Setauket 201

Antebellum Anti-Sentimentalist: Blythe 202

Slaves and Immigrants 203

John Quidor 203

Minstrel Shows 206

Conclusion: Domesticity and the West 207

Chapter 7: Native and European Arts at the Boundaries of Culture: The Frontier West and Pacific Northwest,
1820s—1850s 209

Plains Cultures of the West: From Both Sides 210

The Myth of the Frontier 211

Setting Differences Aside on the New Frontier 211

Native Plains Culture in the 1820s and 1830s 212

The Vision Quest 212

Picturing Prowess 213

Chief Máh-to-tóh-pa as Portrayed by George Catlin 213

Máh-to-tóh-pa’s Depictions of his Own Heroic Exploits 214

“Authentic” Indians 215

Plains Women’s Artistry in Quills and Beads 216

Quillwork 216

A Northern Plains Dress 217

Trade Beads 218

George Catlin’s Indian Gallery 218

William Fiske’s Portrait of Catlin 219

Documenting “A Dying Race” 219

Fast Forward: The Indian as Spectacle 221

Living Traditions and Icons of Defeat 222

The “Vanishing” American Indian 222

The “Good” Indian 222

The “Bad” Indian 224

George Bingham and the Domestication of the West 225

Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap 225

Bingham’s Aesthetic 226

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri 226

Framing the Discourse: Institutional Contexts: The American Art-Union 228

The Bawdy West 229

Native Arts of Alaska 230

Tlingit Art: Wealth and Patronage on the Northwest Coast 231

The Whale House of the Raven Clan 231

Raven and the Sun 232

Methods and Techniques: Formlines and Ovoids: The Building Blocks of Northwest Coast Design 232

Trade Goods 234

The Concept of at.óow 235

Aleut, Yupik, and Inupiaq Arts: Hunters and Needleworkers 235

Fast Forward: Tlingit Art, Ownership, and Meaning Across the Generations 236

A Waterproof Parka of Seal Intestine 236

A Hunting Visor 237

Bending Wood and Bone 238

Fast Forward: Intercultural Arts in Nome, Alaska, circa 1900 238

Conclusion 239

Chapter 8: Why Paint Landscapes? 241

Framing the Discourse: A Brief History of the Word “Landscape” 243

Picturesque Beginnings 243

Looking East from Denny Hill 243

View Near Fishkill 243

Picturesque Parks 245

Mount Auburn 245

Framing the Discourse: Memorializing Death 246

Central Park 247

Picturesque Architecture: Andrew Jackson Downing 248

Rotch House 248

The Anti-Picturesque: Functionalism and “Yankee Ingenuity” 249

Mechanized Manufacture 250

Balloon Frame Construction 250

Interchangeable Parts 251

The Sublime: The Formation and Development of the Hudson River School of Painting 252

The Practice of Landscape Appreciation 252

Catskill Mountain-House 252

Niagara Falls 253

Politics By Other Means: Thomas Cole 253

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden 254

The Course of Empire 255

Democratizing the Landscape: Asher B. Durand 258

Kindred Spirits 258

The New National Landscape: Frederic Edwin Church 259

The Influence of Claude Lorrain and the “Middle Landscape” 259

Merging the Local with the National: New England 259

Geology and Church’s “Great Picture”: Heart of the Andes 261

Feminizing the Landscape: Luminism 263

John Kensett 264

Fitz Henry Lane 265

Sanford R. Gifford 265

Representing War 266

Daguerreotypes and Early Photography 268

Photographic Documents of Slavery 269

Mathew Brady and his “Gallery of Illustrious Americans” 270

The Photographic Image and the Civil War 271

Images of the Fallen 271

War and Peace 274

Prisoners from the Front by Winslow Homer 275

Two Versions of the Home Front 275

Conclusion 277

Part 3: From Ancient Times to the Late Colonial Era 279

Chapter 9: Post-War Challenges: Reconstruction, the Centennial Years, and Beyond, 1865—1900 281

Representing “Race”: From Emancipation to Jim Crow 282

Thomas Nast: Racial Caricature and the Popular Press 282

The Mixed Legacy of Emancipation: Monuments to Freedom 284

The Freedman 284

A Quilt by a Former Slaveowner 284

Saint-Gaudens’s Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw: Common and Uncommon Soldiers 286

The Post-War South: Richard Brooke and Winslow Homer 287

A Pastoral Visit 287

Dressing for the Carnival 288

The Gulf Stream 289

The Turtle Pound 290

Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilts: Popular Religion and Black Emancipation 291

Henry Ossawa Tanner 292

The Banjo Lesson 292

Facing Off: Divided Loyalties 293

Compositional and Thematic Polarity 294

The Morning Bell 294

The Persistence of the Past: The Colonial Revival 295

The Puritan 296

The Shingle Style 296

Quaint, Endearing, and Comforting 297

Popular Prints and the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchies 298

Chromolithography 298

Methods and Techniques: Print Techniques 299

The Post-War West: Expansion, Incorporation, and the Persistence of the Local, 1860—1900 300

Landscape Art, Photography, and Post-War National Identity 300

“Booster Artwork”: Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas 300

Cultural Contexts: Circulating the West 301

“Disinterested Knowledge”: Yellowstone and other Surveys of the West 302

New Mexico and Arizona Territories: Local Cultures and Expanding Markets 304

Pueblo Pottery and Carving 306

Navajo Weaving and Worldview 307

The Art of the Penitente Brotherhood 309

The Clash of Cultures, From Both Sides 311

Plains Ledger Drawings: Native Commemoration in an Era of Change 312

Sitting Bull’s Exploits as depicted by Four Horns 312

Prison Drawings from Fort Marion 312

Wohaw of Two Worlds 313

Black Hawk’s Vision of a Thunder Being 314

The Noble Indian and the “Vanishing Race,” Once Again 315

The End of the Trail 316

The Dawes Act 316

The Song of the Talking Wire 316

Myths and Legends: The Past as Spectacle: Buffalo Bill Cody’s “Wild West” 317

The North American Indian by Edward Curtis 318

“Alaska Views” 319

Conclusion 319

Chapter 10: A New Internationalism: The Arts in an Expanding World, 1876—1900 321

The Cosmopolitan Spirit in American Art 322

Generational Divisions 323

The Artist and His Studio 323

Breaking Home Ties 326

Japonisme: The Meeting of East and West 326

Framing the Discourse: Race and Class: “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow” 327

American Impressionism 327

Childe Hassam: Aestheticizing the City 328

John Henry Twachtman: Beyond Impressionism 329

American Expatriates: At Home Abroad 329

John Singer Sargent 330

James Abbott McNeill Whistler 332

Methods and Techniques: The Fine Art Print 334

Mary Cassatt and Henry Ossawa Tanner 334

The Marketplace of Styles 336

The Crazy Quilt Mania and the Philadelphia Exposition 336

The New American Architecture 338

The Influence of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris 338

Richard Morris Hunt 339

Origins of the Skyscraper 339

History and the Individual Talent: H. H. Richardson 339

Trinity Church, Boston 339

Architecture and the New Metropolis: Louis Sullivan 341

The Department Store 342

The Office Building 343

The Transportation Building 343

Reform and Innovation: Handcraft and Mechanization in the Decorative Arts, 1860—1910 344

Origins in Social Theory 344

Herter Brothers 345

Cultural Contexts: Inventions, Patents, and the (Non)Collapsible Chair 346

Women Designers and Artistic Collaboration 346

The Arts and Crafts Movement 347

Cultural Contexts: Hawaiian Quilts and Cross-Cultural Collaborations 347

California Baskets and the Arts and Crafts Movement 351

Tiffany, American Indian Basketry Design, and the 1900 Paris Exposition 353

Awakening the Senses: The Glasswork of Tiffany and Company and John La Farge 354

Conclusion 355

Chapter 11: Exploration and Retrenchment: The Arts in Unsettling Times, 1890—1900 357

Victorian into Modern: Exploring the Boundaries between Mind and World 358

Framing the Discourse: Victorian 358

The Antimaterialist Impulse: Symbolism and Tonalism 359

George Inness 360

Willard Metcalf 360

Albert Pinkham Ryder 361

Trompe l’Oeil: “The Real Thing”? 361

Cultural Contexts: American Art and the New Perceptual Psychology 362

John Haberle 363

Late Homer, Early Modernism 364

Right and Left 364

Feminine/Masculine: Gender and Late-Nineteenth-Century Arts 366

Women Artists and Professionalization 366

A Woman’s Self-Portrait 367

Men Painting Women; Women Painting Themselves 368

Getting Together for Tea 368

The Life of Leisure 368

The Female Experience 369

The Artifice of Feminine Behavior 370

Thomas Eakins: Restoring the (Male) Self 371

Mechanization Sets the Terms 371

Life of the Mind, Life of the Body 373

Portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing: Crossing Cultures 375

Reasserting Cultural Authority 377

The Universal Language of Art 378

Monumental Architecture in the Age of American Empire 378

The Library of Congress 380

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893 382

Photography and Modernity 384

Jacob Riis: “Capturing” the Slum 384

How the Other Half Lives 385

The People Take the Pictures: Democratizing Photography with the Kodak 386

‘Modernizing Vision’: Eadweard Muybridge and Instantaneous Photography 386

Conclusion 387

Part 4: From Ancient Times to the Late Colonial Era 389

Chapter 12: The Arts Confront the New Century: Renewal and Continuity, 1900—1920 391

Early-Twentieth-Century Urban Realism 392

Framing the Discourse: Modernism/Modernity/Modernization 392

The Ashcan Artists 393

Robert Henri: “The Art Spirit” 393

George Bellows 393

John Sloan and the Act of Looking 394

Ethnic Caricature 397

Gender and the Ashcan Artists 399

Graphic Satire in The Masses 399

The Social Documentary Vision: Lewis Hine 400

The Road to Abstraction 401

Cultural Nationalism/Aesthetic Modernism: Alfred Stieglitz 402

Fast Forward: Disney’s Fantasia: Middlebrow Modernism 403

Stieglitz as Gallery Owner 403

Stieglitz as Magazine Publisher 404

Stieglitz’s Equivalents 404

Stieglitz and His Circle 404

Cultural Contexts: The Lyrical Left 405

Organic Abstraction: Arthur Dove 405

Georgia O’Keeffe 407

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe: “Love in the Machine Age” 411

Fast Forward: Vision as Meditation 411

An Organic Expressionist: John Marin 412

Photography: From Pictorialism to “Straight” 413

Establishing Photography as a Fine Art 414

The Photo-Secession 414

“Pictorialist” Photography 414

The Beginnings of Photographic Modernism 416

The Steerage 416

Paul Strand 417

Fast Forward: Modernist Photography in the 1930s and the f.64 Group 418

Conclusion 419

Chapter 13: Transnational Exchanges: Modernism and Modernity Beyond Borders, 1913—1940 421

American Apprenticeship to European Modernism 422

Before the Armory Show 422

An American in Paris 422

The Armory Show 424

Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 425

American Modernity, From Both Sides 426

New York dada: A Transatlantic Collaboration 426

Framing the Discourse: Winning the Public Over to Modernism 426

Emigré Influence 427

Gender Play 428

The Primitive and the Modern 429

Duchamp and the “Readymade” 431

Alexander Calder: Reinventing the Gadget 432

Expatriation and Internal Exile Between the Wars 434

Ironic Distance: Gerald Murphy and Josephine Baker 434

Homosexual Exiles: Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth 436

Comfortably at Home in the Not-at-Home: Stuart Davis 439

Sculpture: The Primitive and the Modern 440

Direct Carving: Modernist Primitivism in Sculpture 440

William Zorach 441

John Flannagan 441

A Stylized Modernism: European Emigrés and American Sources 442

Elie Nadelman 442

Gaston Lachaise 443

Alexander Archipenko 444

Architectural Encounters: Transnational Circuits 444

The Early Career of Frank Lloyd Wright 445

American Architecture Abroad 447

“Silo Dreams”: American Industrial Architecture and European Modernism 447

The Modern American Industrial Factory 448

Conclusion 449

Chapter 14: The Arts and the City, 1913—1940 451

The Skyscraper in Architecture and the Arts 451

Designing for Modernity: The “Moderne” Style 453

Luxury Interiors 454

Glamorous Garments 454

Cubism in the American Grain 455

The View from the Top 455

Cubistic Camerawork 456

The Skyscraper City 456

Imaginary Skyscrapers and Visionary Artists 458

Y.T.T.E. 458

Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers 458

The Urban/Industrial Image in 1910—30 459

From Fragmentation to Unity 459

Max Weber 459

Joseph Stella 460

Precisionism: Modernist Classicism and the Aesthetics of Immobility 463

Charles Sheeler 463

“Tombstones of Capitalism” 464

The Commercial Landscape of the Everyday 466

“Modern Vernacular” 466

Stuart Davis 466

Photography and Advertising: Modernism Allied to Commerce 467

Steichen as Ad Artist 468

The Painter, the Poet, and the City: Charles Demuth’s Poster Portrait of William Carlos Williams 468

The City and Popular Media: Comics and Animation 469

Little Nemo 470

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat 470

A Comic Strip by a Modernist Artist 471

The Beginnings of Animation: “Felix the Cat” 472

The Human City: Spectacle, Memory, Desire 474

The City as Spectacle: Reginald Marsh 474

Quiet Absorption: Isabel Bishop’s Women 475

The Emergence of Urban Black Culture 476

Archibald Motley, Jr. 476

The Margins of the Modern: Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield 477

Edward Hopper 478

Charles Burchfield 480

The Dream-life of Popular Culture 480

Joseph Cornell 481

Henry Darger 482

Conclusion 483

Chapter 15: Searching for Roots, 1918—1940 485

The Rediscovery of America 485

Forging Continuities with the Nineteenth-century Craft Tradition 486

Framing the Discourse: The Usable Past 486

Sheeler’s Barns 486

Folk Art Revival 488

The Dark Side of the “Folk”