British and American Art at Yale: Papers in Honor of Jules D. Prown: Introduction

Introduction

Jules David Prown, Paul Mellon Professor of History of Art, Yale University.

The essays contained in this edition of The Yale Journal of Criticism were initially prepared for “British and American Art at Yale,” a symposium held in New Haven in October 1995. The symposium marked the 35th anniversary of teaching at Yale University by the distinguished professor of art history and material culture, Jules David Prown. In all, some 30 papers were included in the 2-day event. The editors of the journal have chosen an even dozen of these for inclusion here.

In our original conception for the symposium, the conference co-organizers, Karen Lucic, Angela Miller, and I, were primarily concerned with acknowledging Prown’s prominence as a graduate instructor whose many students over the years have established successful careers as college and university teachers, museum curators, archivists, librarians, and independent scholars. With this goal in mind, we systematically tracked down as many as possible of his Ph.D. recipients from the past three-and-a-half decades, including his most newly minted ones, and invited them all, as well as one of his esteemed colleagues in Yale’s American Studies program, to participate in the symposium, either as presenters of papers or members of the audience. Our chief stipulation with regard to the papers was that each had to be focused upon a specific artifact in one of the university’s museum or library collections. We thought this in keeping with Prown’s oft-repeated advice to his students to work from locally available objects. A hallmark of his teaching has been his insistence on direct visual and (if feasible) tactile engagement with discrete material objects rather than with their photographic reproduction. We also meant by this stipulation to pay tribute to Prown’s various stints as director at both the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, each of which houses a major teaching collection.

But once the idea for the conference was in motion and letters of support flooded in from Prown’s former graduate students across the United States and Great Britain, what became clear was that, more than merely a family affair, the symposium was going to be a significant scholarly event. It would allow participants an opportunity to take stock of the diversity of approaches to British and American art history and material culture that have emanated from Yale over the past third of a century.

When Jules Prown began teaching at Yale in 1961, connoisseurship (in which he had recently been trained at Harvard) and iconography studies were dominant modes of art-historical discourse, while consensus history and exceptionalist doctrine prevailed in academic discussions of the American past. None of these critical methods or ideologies escaped radical censure in the late 1960s and decades since, as assaults were mounted against them from disparate quarters: Marxism, critical theory, structuralism, poststructuralism, new historicism, feminism, queer theory, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, commodity aesthetics, and constructionist theories of race. Critical approaches that were dominant in American art history and American studies at the time Prown began teaching at Yale were altered under this constant pressure into scarcely recognizable but nonetheless dialectically related versions of themselves. This is not to say that the old wine of Prown’s early days was simply being decanted into faddish new bottles suitable to the times. But neither is it to presume in an equally reductive and ahistoric manner that there is no connection or underlying relationship between the former analytical methods and the innovations that replaced them.

Thus, for example, however much the methodological protocols of prestructuralism’s art connoisseur may seem worlds apart from those of poststructuralism’s (inter)textualist, they still bear provocative resemblances, insofar as in both instances the practitioner’s focus is fixed upon intricate internal matters of style, code, and signification rather than external matters of historical context. Similarly, the old-fashioned study of iconography, though rejected by hermeneutics and deconstruction as lacking in sufficient epistemological rigor, genetically prefigures those procedures, inasmuch...