in reading any text. Analyzing historical representation, for instance, Hayden White conceives of history in ways that are not dissimilar to what the epigraph from Henry James implied and that are central to this book. For White, history is a type of composition, without which the past can neither be told nor represent the historical. Ordering principles and language construct narratives that mold disparate events with rhetorical patterns, from which the meaning, coherence, and significance—which we call history—are derived.7
Language, as noted above, is taken here as contingent; it is considered a form inextricably wedded both to history and to thought. Language bears, in other words, a relationship to its object that is deeply historical as well as deeply subjective; it is necessarily interpreted. Interpretation nevertheless does not imply arbitrary or self-involved relativism. By contrast, interpretation means that we must continually exert pressure on the language in question and respond to the pressure it exerts on us, sounding its repetitions and silences, its relationship to period discourses, and its role in tropic and rhetorical structures of the moment in order to represent as fully as possible the historicity that it asserts.8
With this grounding in the methodology and with a broad overview of the general field, we can now get back to the book’s primary arguments. The three writers of the study will be introduced further on. At hand are the more complex overall propositions. They will be presented one at a time, though conceptually (and in the rest of this book) they collapse a bit more fully into one another. The first proposition is that the historiography of nineteenth-century American art relies to a great extent on the apparent existence of aesthetic and conceptual contrasts in art on either side of the Civil War. These contrasts also provide the periodizing framework that helps order the field overall; they are contrasts that aid us in plotting trends, grouping thematically, and giving coherent order to the art of the nineteenth century. This framework makes certain formal features, certain ideas, and certain personalities stand out more than others, regardless of whether the high relief accords with the original shadow they may or may not have cast.
What are these contrasts? They are quite familiar to students of American art. There is a good deal of consensus, regardless of other methodological or ideological interests, that American art can be understood as undergoing substantial change in the aftermath of the Civil War with regard to its interest in “reality” or putatively objective representations of the material world. Classic texts in the field recount a progressive development for American art in which there is an increasing distaste for anecdotal pictures, diminished emphasis on literal, detail-oriented finish, and greater interest in more freely painted and expressive styles after the war.9 We traditionally register, in other words, an apparent change in attitude toward painting in which the postbellum art world gave precedence to form over content and subjective feeling over objective fact. These contrasts shape an explanation in which American art advances formally and critically along the path later drawn by the paradigm of modernism: antebellum nativism gave way to postwar cosmopolitanism and the ostensibly more subjective and individualist concerns of an emergent modernism.
Newer methodological interventions have, of course, made us skeptical of any “master narrative” in American art. Indeed, we see more thematic studies and essay collections than surveys, almost automatically limiting the chronological arrangement of art. This newer tendency is employed to overtly eschew unified narrative and its repressive connotations, its predisposition toward hierarchy and canon formation. It consists frequently of socially attuned scholarship that desires to pluralize, aided by theories developed in areas such as gender studies, material culture, and identity politics. Thus, American identities, American cultures, competing discourses, competing regions, external influences, and so forth have become our new standard.10 Nonetheless, the idea of divergent pictorial practices on either side of the Civil War continues to give structure to the other questions we then bring to the art in question. Similarly, the perception that new critical voices spoke out after midcentury in defense of ideas such as beauty or individual creativity remains, and such ideas continue to suggest to us that objective vision and “reality” as representational goals were replaced by new idealist goals and individual vision.11 Thus, some underlying assumptions persist.
Running deeply through the field of American art history is a sense of social commitment, for which many art historians, myself included, have been drawn to the field. This commitment is manifested in the field’s strong tradition of social history, its interest in material culture, its resistance to the implicit hierarchical order of connoisseurship, and its Emersonian faith in the social utility of intellectual activity.12 It is a tendency to be proud of, yet it is one that leads us to conceive of the historical in certain ways and to perceive some narratives as being more historical than others. And, finally, it begs the question of what is really the subject of American art history.
The question at hand is thus not whether painting changed; there is no doubt that it did. There is no doubt that, say, a landscape painting by Asher B. Durand from the 1850s and one by George Inness from the 1880s are notably different, with pictorial strategies and formal concerns that are widely divergent. Likewise, it is the case that critics speaking out in favor of a “new” art denigrated what they called reproduction and slandered sentimentality. It remains to my mind, however, important to question whether these aesthetic and critical differences are accurately represented by plotting an opposition of reproduction versus individual vision, of real versus ideal definitions of art, and whether the former is rejected in favor of the latter in conjunction with the century’s most clamorous events. And while there are many indications of new priorities, they coexisted with strong indications of continuity that are equally valid. (For instance, the new art and the “younger men,” according to some critics, referred to artists rejecting academic conventions in favor of more attention to factual detail.) Thus, the book seeks to question why rupture has been privileged over continuity, how and why it has been read in a critical discourse that also expresses rather different ideas, and the ways in which fundamental art historical constructions are implicated in this process.
This brings us to the next proposition: the periodization of described here relies to a large extent, as hinted above, on the rhetorical pillars of the real and ideal and the objective and subjective. With deep roots in Western culture, these pairs were particularly prominent in definitions and judgments of nineteenth-century American painting—thanks in part to the art criticism of Jarves, Cook, and the Crayon (Stillman). They remain central to our modern narratives of transformation. How we approach these fundamental philosophic cornerstones is deeply ideological. The book argues that we use them in a manner somewhat different from that of Jarves, Cook, and Stillman, and that in these differences we can find traces of the “deep structures” that order our art histories.
The term “deep structure” is borrowed from Hayden White, and it plays a substantial role in my argument. White explains that deep structure refers to his conception of the “precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be.” He further explains the necessary differentiation between such structures and methodological approach:
Unlike other analysts of historical writing, I do not consider the “metahistorical” understructure of the historical work to consist of the theoretical concepts explicitly used by the historian to give to his narratives the aspect of an “explanation.” . . . [The metahistorical level instead] postulate[s] a deep level of consciousness on which a historical thinker chooses conceptual strategies by which to explain or represent his data. On this level, I believe, the historian performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use.13
Thus, overt methodological differences may assert different explanations for the history of American art, but there remain additional precritical structures that operate at a deeper level regardless of the chosen theoretical approach. Following White’s overall conception (if not arriving at the same poetic modes he finds), I believe we can identify some prefiguring operations
