Making American Art (review)

The past few years have seen a number of new books on the history of American art, from fat surveys that span the centuries from the colonial era to the present day to more particular volumes that look at America's visual and material cultures in terms of identity politics, the advent of modernism, the growth of the art market, the effects of mass media, etc. Making American Art pursues a slightly different tack. While still taking up the "perennial and vexing" question "what is American about American art?" (a query that even today is featured on graduate exams in the field), the book's authors search for answers in the various cultural institutions that train America's artists and promote and disseminate American art.

Driven by a thematic approach, Making American Art includes chapters on art education, art copying and reproduction, art tourism (Hiram Powers's marble sculpture Greek Slave toured the country from 1847-1848 and was seen by over 100,000 people), the nation-building agenda of Western landscape painting (pictures by nineteenth-century artists including Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran are credited with helping spark interests in creating America's national parks), the evolution of museums and collectors devoted to American art, and the history and practice of American art criticism and scholarship from William Dunlap's History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834) to the plethora of "publishing machinery" (177) that exists today. The result, as the authors assert, is "an untidy history of American art," a lively hodgepodge analogous with an equally unruly contemporary era that "lacks consensus" and "questions a contradictory and fractured heritage." (5) Decontextualizing the fraught dynamics of nationalism, for example, including longstanding if uncritical assumptions of American exceptionalism set against the facts of geographical borders, acts of imperialism, and multiple and diasporic communities, helps to guide their project and, as they explain, "present a view that relates present disquiet and reassessments of the past triumphs of American art to a more complex history." (13)

Making American Art provides a refreshing overview of the multiple kinds of labor—physical, intellectual, economic, political, social—that drive and define cultural production in the United States. While many different works of art are considered, from colonial era paintings to contemporary public sculpture, the book is more explicitly focused on their industrial and institutional underpinnings: the eighteenth-century art manuals that taught American limners how to paint; the plaster casts that nineteenth-century artists sketched and copied; the museums, print workshops, international art shows, associations, universities, and media operations that have shaped and directed modern and contemporary art. Refusing to reduce "the diversity of the past to a streamlined, manageable story," (185) which the authors contend is the basic agenda of much art history, Making American Art offers a deliberately random narrative that will enthuse many readers, especially those already familiar with the field. It features an excellent bibliography, which is to be commended at a time when many publishers are eliminating such helpful resources for reasons of cost.