Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920, and: Within the Landscape: Essays on Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (review)

These two books, both by art historians, seemingly share interdisciplinary goals. Phillip Earenfight, director of the gallery whose symposium led to Within the Landscape, says the essays collectively address “a group of artists and writers . . . [who] played leading roles in shaping visions of the American landscape” (3). Ruth Bohan sets out to describe “the shifting dynamics that transformed the relationship between literature and the pictorial arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (6). Within the Landscape focuses on antebellum art while Bohan concentrates on post-war developments, yet the only direct intersection between them comes in Kevin Avery’s essay in Within the Landscape, in a travel writer’s quotation of Walt Whitman’s poetry. This is because most of the scholars in Within the Landscape cite a variety of contemporary authors in order to help articulate broad cultural attitudes to nature. Bohan instead aims to show the “dynamic reciprocity” (6) between modes of writing and visual culture—but around Whitman alone.

Bohan’s book is divided into two parts. “Imaging Whitman: The Nineteenth Century” claims both that Whitman wanted to yoke his poetry to the expressive power of the visual arts and that nineteenth-century artists expressed their embrace of his ideas primarily through portraits of the poet. Bohan thus analyzes both the pictorial character of Whitman’s verse and how his portraits evoke malleable, multiple selves. Where previous studies of Whitman have emphasized his involvement with photography, Bohan observes that Whitman devoted a third of his editorial output to the visual arts, accepted the “sister arts” ideal and actively supported the Brooklyn Art Union’s program for free public access to the fine arts. Her book will be particularly helpful for Whitman scholars, as she systematically traces Whitman’s multitudinous art world connections, from early gatherings at sculptor Henry Kirke Brown’s Brooklyn studio, to patrons of Jean-Francois Millet in Boston, to the later circles around editor Richard Watson Gilder in New York City. Her chapter on Thomas Eakins is particularly nuanced, introducing evidence connecting Eakins’ Concert Singer to his portrait of Whitman.

The second part, “20th-Century Whitman and the Modernists,” centers on three figures exemplifying different brands of modernism. Marsden Hartley developed Whitman’s linkage of the mystical and the musical, a transcendence activated by the sexualized male body. Gallery owner Robert Coady’s magazine The Soil (1916–17) turned to Whitman’s democratic embrace of the marketplace and corresponding attack on artistic hierarchies. Italian immigrant artist Joseph Stella encountered Whitman in Europe, leading to his stress on the flux of modern experience in his Brooklyn Bridge series. As in her analysis of the personal, sexual and social politics of Whitman’s reception in the nineteenth century, Bohan demonstrates how networks between artists, patrons, and writers mediated encounters with Whitman’s writing, and thus what artists took from it.

Within the Landscape’s essays offer a sampling of current methods in the field by noted scholars, giving it value for the classroom. David Schuyler’s “The Mid-Hudson Valley as Iconic Landscape” argues that while the taste for wilderness was associated with democratic assertions of America’s contribution to the world, it was landscape tourism’s economic transformation of the Catskills that stimulated a preservationist impulse among men like Washington Irving and Thomas Cole. Nancy Siegel, a co-editor of the volume, reprises key findings from her 2003 book Along the Juniata: Thomas Cole and the Dissemination of American Landscape Imagery, in “Decorative Nature.” She emphasizes that most of the middle class encountered landscape images in a form considerably different than an oil painting in a gallery, as in the transformation of a Cole drawing into a more stylized, less “wild,” design on imported ceramic...