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Trouble in Paradise. Twenty-Four Essays on the Social History of American Art

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Published Nov 2024

Alan Wallach

Author: Alan Wallach
A collection of highly readable critical essays (1977-2023) by a leader in the field of American social art history. Among the subjects Alan Wallach explores are the art of Thomas Cole, patronage of the Hudson River School, so-called “Luminism,” the rise of the American art museum, the historiography of American art, scholarship and the art market, as well as the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood, Philip Evergood, and Norman Rockwell. Throughout, Wallach employs a materialist approach to argue against traditional scholarship that considered American art and art institutions in isolation from their social, historical, and ideological contexts.

Biographical Note

Alan Wallach, Ph.D. (1973), is the Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art History and Professor of American Studies Emeritus at the College of William and Mary.

Readership

This book is especially relevant for academic libraries, art libraries, art museum libraries, historians of American art, undergraduate and graduate art history students, undergraduate and graduate American Studies students, art museum professionals, historians of American art, specialists in the history of the United States, students of American history and American literature.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Copyright Acknowledgements
List of Figures

Introduction

Part 1 Circa 1977: State of the Field

1 John Wilmerding’s American Art (1977)

2 Trouble in Paradise (1977)

Part 2 Six Critical Museum Studies

3 Rereading an anti-catalog: Radical Art History and the Decline of the Left (1998)

4 ‘Norman Rockwell’ at the Guggenheim (2003)

5 The Norman Rockwell Museum and the Representation of Social Conflict (2006)

6 The Unethical Art Museum (2006)

7 Private Property versus the Public Interest: Asher B.Durand’s Kindred Spirits Leaves the New York Public Library (2008)

8 The Birth of the American Art Museum (2010)

Part 3 Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School

9 Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke (1993)

10 Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire (1994)

11 Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills as Anti-Pastoral (2002)

12 Accounting for the Panoramic in Hudson River School Landscape Painting (2007)

13 Rethinking ‘Luminism’: Taste, Class, and Aestheticizing Tendencies in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting (2011)

14 Patronage and the Hudson River School of Landscape Painting (2023)

Part 4 Short Takes

15 Coming to Terms with Saint-Gaudens: Patronage, Class, Ideology, Myth (2005)

16 Exhibition Review: Rockwell Kent (1979)

17 Grant Wood: The Insider as Outsider (1991)

18 Philip Evergood: Universal Connotations (2022)

Part 5 Historiographical Reflections

19 Meyer Schapiro’s Essay on Style: Falling into the Void (1997)

20 Oliver Larkin’s Art and Life in America: Between the Popular Front and the Cold War (2001)

21 On the Social History of American Art (2015)

22 Bully Pulpit: Whither Connoisseurship? (2015)

23 Bully Pulpit: On Patriotism and the Study of U.S. Art (2017)

24 ‘A Distasteful, Indelicate Subject’ (2019)

Coda

Capitalism and the History of United States Art (2023)

Bibliography
Index