ABSTRACT

This anthology of essays on different critical approaches and methodologies for the analysis and interpretation of American art and artists is designed for students and teachers in American art history and American studies programs. It contains twenty selections from academic journals on American art from colonial times to 1940. Mary Ann Calo provides an introduction to the anthology, explaining its purpose and organization, and each selection has a brief introduction about its main focus and scholarly approach. These case studies show the diversity of scholarly thinking about interpreting American works of art, which should be useful for teachers and comprehensible and interesting for students.This anthology contains twenty articles on American art from colonial times to 1940. The selections are mainly from academic journals and aim to provide the student and teacher with different critical approaches and methodologies for the analysis and interpretation of American art and artists. Mary Ann Calo's preface to the anthology explains its purpose and organization, and each article will have a brief introduction about its main focus and scholarly approach.This text meets the need in American art history studies for an anthology of essays on critical approaches and methodologies.

chapter 1|34 pages

Coming of Age

Historical Scholarship in American Art

chapter 2|11 pages

Reading Eighteenth-Century American Family Portraits

Social Images and Self-Images

chapter 3|12 pages

Ariadne and the Indians

Vanderlyn’s Neoclassical Princess, Racial Seduction, and the Melodrama of Abandonment

chapter 4|18 pages

Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America

The Course of Empire as Political Allegory

chapter 5|16 pages

George Caleb Bingham’s The County Election

Whig Tribute to the Will of the People

chapter 6|16 pages

Two Sculptures for the Capitol

Horatio Greenough’s Rescue and Luigi Persico’s Discovery of America

chapter 7|15 pages

American Folk Art

Questions and Quandaries

chapter 9|20 pages

Albums of War

On Reading Civil War Photographs

chapter 10|15 pages

Trapper, Hunter, and Woodsman

Winslow Homer’s Adirondack Figures

chapter 12|22 pages

The “Earnest, Untiring Worker” and the Magician of the Brush

Gender Politics in the Criticism of Cecilia Beaux and John Singer Sargent

chapter 13|21 pages

Lifting the “Veil”

Henry O. Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor

chapter 14|22 pages

Columbus and Columbia

Man of Genius Meets Generic Woman, Chicago, 1893

chapter 15|9 pages

George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s

Boxing, Violence, and Male Identity

chapter 16|15 pages

Who Will Paint New York?

The World’s New Art Center and the New York Paintings of Georgia O’Keejfe

chapter 17|16 pages

American Art and National Identity

The 1920s

chapter 18|10 pages

“In My Family of Primitiveness and Tradition”

William H. Johnson’s Jesus and the Three Marys

chapter 19|7 pages

Images of American Women in the 1930s

Reginald Marsh and Paramount Picture

chapter 20|16 pages

Florine Stettheimer

Rococo Subversive