Internationalizing the History of American Art

In this volume, a distinguished group of scholars considers the shaping and dissemination of the history of American art domestically and internationally, past and present, theoretically and practically, from a variety of intellectual positions and experiences. To do so, they draw on a literature that, collectively, constitutes a bibliography for the future of the field. Three sections—“American Art and Art History,” “Display and Exposition,” and “Post-1945 Investments”—provide the structure in which the contributors examine the existing narrative framework for the history of American art. This examination indicates a direction for the field and a future historiography that is shaped by international dialogue.

Barbara Groseclose is Professor and Graduate Chair in the Department of the History of Art at Ohio State University. She was a Distinguished Chair of American Studies in Utrecht (1994) and in Florence (2001) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2006). Her major publications are Nineteenth-Century American Art (2000) and British Sculpture and the Company Raj (1995).

Jochen Wierich is Curator of Art at Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art. He has published articles in such periodicals as Winterthur Portfolio, American Art, American Studies International, and Film and History. He is a contributing author to a number of exhibition catalogues, including New World: Creating an American Art (2007) and The Eight and American Modernisms (2009).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Barbara Groseclose and Jochen Wierich

I. American Art and Art History

1. Newness, Flatness, and Other Myths: Looking for National Identity in European (and a Few British) Histories of American Art

Rebecca Zurier

2. Mutual Seduction: German Art History and American Art

Jochen Wierich

3. American Art Pre-1940 and the Problem of Art History's Object

Andrew Hemingway

4. Beyond the Borders: Nineteenth-Century British and American Art in Comparative Perspective

David Peters Corbett

II. Display and Exposition

5. The Absolute Past: Your Version or Ours? Canadian Constructions of Pre-1945 American Art History

Marylin McKay

6. An Artistic Tradition in the Making: Looking at American Art in French Nineteenth-Century Criticism

Veerle Thielemans

7. Ceci n'est pas un musée: Distance and Resistance in Franco-American Cultural Displays

Derrick R. Cartwright

8. Transatlantic Complexities: A Traveling Exhibition About Traveling Artists

Sophie Levy

III. Post-1945 Investments

9. Ménage à trois: Paris, New York, São Paolo, and the Love of Modern Art

Serge Guilbaut

10. The “Triumph” of American Art? Pop Art in the Postwar World

Christin J. Mamiya

Notes

Contributors

Index

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Art History & Architecture

           American

           Art Theory & Criticism