Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 (review)

In her introduction to Looking into Walt Whitman, Ruth L. Bohan sets out to provide "an enlarged understanding of Whitman's place in history"—and she does just that. This book convincingly positions Whitman within American visual culture, deftly bridging several disciplines, including art history, cultural history, biography, and literary studies. While Whitman's connection to photography, the new technology of his day, is often stressed and has been well-documented by critics, Bohan persuasively argues that Whitman also had a deep appreciation for and interest in other visual arts, including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Writing in lucid, accessible prose, Bohan provides extended analyses of the multiple connections between Whitman and the visual arts both during his life and in the three decades following his death. In addition to being meticulously researched, the book is beautiful, with glossy pages richly embellished with color and black-and-white illustrations.

Part 1, "Imaging Whitman: The Nineteenth Century," is largely biographical in nature, examining the place of art in Whitman's life and his poetic vision and his relationships with artists of his time. Bohan analyzes the visual representations of Whitman made during the poet's lifetime, from the 1855 frontispiece of Leaves of Grass to works by Charles Hine, Stephen Alonzo Schoff, G. Frank Pearsall, William J. Linton, George C. Potter, Herbert Gilchrist, Frank Henry Temple Bellew, Edward Carpenter, Gabriel Harrison, George W. Waters, Percy Ives, Frank Hill Smith, Dora Wheeler, John White Alexander, Sidney Morse, Frederick Gutekunst, Thomas Eakins, and Samuel Murray. Bohan also offers some provocative readings of Whitman's work based on his experiences with art. For example, in chapter 1 Bohan explores the connection between Whitman's experiences of salon-style art exhibitions in New York and his development of the catalogue technique in his poetry. Chapter 2 offers a thorough analysis of the various portraits that Whitman used in different editions of Leaves of Grass and how his shifting poetic persona was embodied in those images. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Whitman's relationship with artists in the years following the centennial through the 1880s; Bohan presents an aging poet who established in his Camden home a studio for artists who came to paint, sketch, and sculpt the poet's likeness.

The painter Thomas Eakins is the focus of the final chapter of Part 1; in particular, Bohan's analysis of his painting The Concert Singer is thorough and astute. Though ostensibly a portrait of female Camden vocalist Weda Cook, the painting, according to Bohan, "foregoes conventional notions of referentiality, the foundation of the portrait tradition. It interrogates Whitman's presence without explicit reference to his person." Bohan goes on to make multiple connections between the painting and the poet and then places the work in "a pivotal position within the nexus of visual and verbal responses that circulated around Whitman during the poet's last years." In fact, Bohan sees in Eakins' painting the beginnings of the shift to modernism: "The painting mediates the cultural and artistic space between the conservative practices of Eakins' nineteenth-century colleagues and the diverse and vastly expanded representational strategies in the arsenal of the first generation of visual modernists."

The focus of her study thus shifted, in Part 2, "Whitman and the Modernists: The Twentieth Century," Bohan takes up Whitman's influence on early modernist artists, fleshing out a claim she makes in the introduction: "Whitman became a catalyst for a modernism grounded in American cultural experience." Rather than an overview of Whitman's influence on visual art in the first decades of the twentieth century, the three chapters that make up Part 2 are narrowly focused studies in Whitman's reception history. In chapter 6, Bohan examines the work of painter Marsden Hartley, focusing on his early landscapes and the ways in which these works relate to Whitman's idea of "manly comradeship." Chapter 7 analyzes Robert Coady's journal The Soil as a composite work of art...