The Neil Harris Effect

In 1994, when the Russian émigré painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid researched the type of painting that most appealed to Americans, they discovered preferences for outdoor scenes of nonreligious imagery, historical figures, groupings of people and wild animals, rendered with "expressive brush strokes" preferably in blue, and about the size of a dishwasher. They then made a series of paintings that fit the bill. One canvas, reminiscent of a Hudson Valley landscape, features a contemporary family, George Washington, and a small gathering of deer. Twentieth-century Americans were remarkably sensible about choosing art, preferring the work of a dead artist over a living one: "it's worth more if he's dead," reasoned one respondent.¹

The irony of such ideas would not have been lost on early American painters. Henry Inman complained that customers would not commission landscapes unless he used them as the backdrop for a portrait; Samuel F. B. Morse loathed negotiating with the "avaricious devotees of Mammon" (p. 65). The exceptionalist explanation is that such attitudes are essentially American, which either implies praise for an inherent American practicality and refusal of sophisticated, effeminate, and European notions of culture, or an indictment of the cultural failings of democracy.

The Artist in American Society rejects exceptionalism for functionalism. There was no art for art's sake in America, Harris contends, because of colonial conditions that made for spare cultural institutions and, in the post-Revolutionary era, a strong political culture. Harris argues that even as American culture developed institutions in support of the arts, particularly patrons and academies, critics and commentators repeatedly called for art to be put in the service of national, moral and pedagogical goals; while those goals might change, artists largely complied. The book, which began as a dissertation under Oscar Handlin at Harvard, took up questions of American art just as the subject was gaining scholarly legitimacy.² Harris did not apologize for the aesthetic failings of American art (he had little concern with connoisseurship), but instead framed the book as "an inquiry into the relationship between a community's values and its culture" (p. x). Topically, it has a far reach: painters, sculptors, and the public architecture of the early republic; nineteenth-century landscape architecture and reform; art patronage; and the cultural authority of critics and of art itself. Simultaneously, it poses an overarching dynamic for American cultural formation by which radical impulses and conservative control always find their center.

The book deserves rereading because its ambitious scope sets out the topics that still define nineteenth-century cultural history: the relationship between European and American culture; the visual programs of American art and their explicit or implicit links to nationalism; the place of the market and the influence of industrialization on art patronage; and the development of American cultural institutions. It is the fulcrum between the work of American art historians (including Jules Prown, Lloyd Goodrich, Mathew Baigell, James Flexner, Nicholas Civosky, John Wilmerding and Barbara Novak) and intellectual and cultural historians, particularly Warren Susman, Alan Trachtenberg, Ann Douglas, and John R. Stilgoe.³

Some elements of the book's sweep have weathered less well than others, but assessing them is the measure of where cultural history now stands. The book's governing concept of culture is a consensus one; what is meant by nationalism and the national in art is not as analytically focused as it could be (but yet anticipates its importance to the field); the cultural, social, and economic formation of American culture are entirely overshadowed in favor of European influence; neither what is meant by culture nor what is meant by politics are conceptualized with as much contest and friction as they are by contemporary cultural historians working with more or less Marxist-inspired versions of these terms.

But reading backward, the book foreshadows nearly every topic of nineteenth-century cultural history, punctuated by Roger Stein's contemporary John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought...