ABSTRACT
As the cultural critic Homi Bhabha has pointed out, 'Nation and Narration' are profoundly intertwined; national identity and nations themselves are invented and articulated through stories, histories and myths. Landscape painting came to stand in the nineteenth century as a synecdoche for the national project of the United States, a part which encapsulates and stands for the whole, a genre of national self-portrayal central to the definition of American identity. Accordingly, it was necessary to present American landscape paintings as if they were as unique and free from corrupting external influences as the wilderness itself. American art presents a different challenge. Clement Greenberg remarked in 1955 that, before Abstract Expressionism, America 'had not yet made a single contribution to the mainstream of painting or sculpture'. In 1980, John Wilmerding of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC organized a major loan exhibition which drew together American landscape paintings from the period immediately after Cole's death.
