The Uncertain Landscapes of Nationalism

Right up front, Angela Miller, professor of art history and American studies at Washington University, declares, “I came of age at a time when the concept of nationalism was (and is) highly suspect.” Ironically in this era when tribalism has replaced nationalism the world over, Miller has produced a masterful analysis of the relationship of American art to American nationalism. Today, as the very bonds of nationhood are strained as at no time since the Civil War — when public order is severely tested by tribal and “gang” loyalties, gender, ethnic, and class warfare are the intellectual diseratum, the government cannot defend the country from terrorists and the threat of nuclear proliferation — it is only appropriate that Miller reminds us just how precarious was the status and future of the “United” States in the years from the birth of the Republic to the end of Reconstruction. Her fascinating, massively researched treatise on the arts recalls Frederick Somkin’s Unquiet Eagle (1967), Perry Miller’s The Raven and the Whale (1973), Ernest Tuveson’s The Redeemer Nation (1968), and my own When the Eagle Screamed: The Romantic Horizon in American Diplomacy (1966) among the rising tide of works that do not see a solid nation state emerging in America until at least the middle of the Civil War. Gary Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992) is only the latest contribution to this literature.

Miller’s Empire of the Eye is one of the most important and thought-provoking books on this subject published in recent years. The general theme is the “politicization of the landscape” as reflected in the works of eastern American artists. Miller writes of “how the national landscape [paintings] came into being, which individuals were engaged in its invention, what their motives were and what alternatives existed” (p. 6). In so doing she argues that “There was little that was natural or inevitable about the process” (p. 3). America as “nature’s nation” was an artificial construct in which “artists, critics, collectors and men of letters collaborated in devising an institutionalized aesthetic... that subsequently appeared as a fully natural development of an emergent nationalism” (p. 3). Considering Miller’s sentiments about the value of the nation state, her story should inevitably be a tragedy, but she fails ultimately to see the overall logic of where her ideological analysis has taken her. Nonetheless this is a brilliantly stimulating book — many-layered and multidimensional as it touches upon the historical context of the failed attempt to develop a national art.

Common wisdom has it that Thomas Cole and the Hudson River painters early on created a national art. Miller refutes that assumption. She sees Cole and the Hudson River painters as a regional school that included some New England artists as well. To her they are the “New York School,” cuffed into national status by New York City’s American Academy of Art, newspaper critics like Henry T. Tuckerman, and later the Crayon magazine. Their paintings of European or Claudian versions of the Catskills and parts of New England became “national” by means of an agreed upon critical synecdoche. That is, the academicians and media critics as well as early men of letters agreed that this part of the new nation could stand for the whole. Cole, himself a Whig, was the darling of New York and New England Whiggery. So were painters like Kennsett, Doughty, Durand, Morse, Cropsy, and the young Frederick Church.

In Miller’s scenario, however, Cole is an ambiguous figure. At one point he has absorbed the Claudian rules of eighteenth-century landscape painting, as in his The Garden of Eden (1827). He is an Enlightenment figure whose feeling for the universal rises above nationalism, localism and “that earlier wilder image.” ¹ Seen as a devotee of the Scottish Realism of Archibald Allison and Adam Ferguson in which “Associationism” governed artistic choices, he is in the same category as those litterateurs of the Knickerbocker School...