Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America. - book reviews

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Angela Miller

By David M. Lubin, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1994; 364 pages, $45.

The title of David Lubin's Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America suggests the central concerns of his book. What unifies Lubin's six extended essays--each of which focuses on a specific artist or work of art--is that all are sustained inquiries into the relationship between visual images and the personal, social and historical issues that have shaped experience within our particular culture. Though these concerns have motivated much of the more adventurous scholarship in the field of American art over the past decade, Lubin's approach is unusual. Historically grounded, theoretically informed and often wonderfully intelligent, it is also speculative, allusive and open-ended in its readings. In short, Picturing a Nation is an odd hybrid not often seen in the scholarship on American art,

Though Lubin treats a limited number of artists and works, his discussion ranges from the beginning to the end of the century, and covers virtually every genre of painting produced in the United States during those years except for portraiture.. From his first chapter on John Vanderlyn's mythological Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos (1809-12), he proceeds to George Caleb Bingham's Emigration of Daniel Boone (1851-52), a work which combines landscape, history and genre. He goes on to discuss the landscape paintings of the African-American artist Robert Duncanson and the "sentimental" domestic genre works of Lily Martin Spencer. Then he devotes a chapter to Seymour Joseph Guy's Making a Train (1867), a genre painting by a once-prominent post-Civil War artist known for his works featuring the subject of "American girls." His concluding chapter deals with the late-19th-century trompe l'oeil still-life paintings of William Harnett. By including two relative rarities in the world of American 19th-century art--a woman artist and an African-American artist--Lubin lays claim to a new inclusiveness, bringing the contemporary concerns of multiculturalism to his reading of the past while also providing historical evidence for his insistence upon the multivocal nature of American culture. Along the way, he employs terms of analysis borrowed from literary and cultural history and rehearses a number of the key issues that have informed these fields of study over the past 15 years, such as: the shifting and fluid character of political self-definition, the veiled discourses of race, the meanings of sentimental culture, the impact of commodification upon construction of the self, the emergence of a market culture and its impact upon notions of truth and authenticity.

Readers should be warned that Lubin's book does not aim to provide authoritative reinterpretations of canonical or lesser known works of American 19th-century painting. Rather, in the multiple turnings and returnings of his arguments, he offers what might be seen as a textual parallel of the complexities of social experience itself. Writing about Vanderlyn's Ariadne, for example, he indicates that there are various and sometimes conflicting ways in which it can be read--whether as "a cultural residuum of westward expansion and racial warfare" or as it "relates to the struggle for hegemony in the early republic between anglophiles and francophiles"--and suggests that the instability of the painting's political allegory is indicative "of the political instability of the artist and his times." For Lubin, esthetic choices also represent social choices, a link that works beautifully in his discussion of Vanderlyn's Neo-Classical and patently Francophilic image of a luscious nude, which was exhibited at a time when the early republic was divided between "those who sought to navigate the ship of state toward British waters and those who wished instead to sail in the direction of France."

Throughout, Lubin combines this parallelism of the esthetic and the social with the principle of overdetermination, whereby causality is always perceived as multiple; in his view, therefore, images and texts never speak in one voice or with one message. Instead, meanings are layered palimpsestically, or (to vary the metaphor, as Lubin does) they are labyrinthine. "Paintings," he writes, "are cultural constructs that are not intrinsically meaningful but rather are invested with meaning ... by historically situated subjects, whether they be producers, consumers, or nonconsumers of those paintings." Everywhere, Lubin casts a deliberately wide net, commandeering for his readings whatever discourses he can demonstrate to have been historically available to his artists and their audiences. "In each chapter," he notes, "I have sought to understand how works of art that appear to have little or nothing to do with the underlying social conflicts of their era were nonetheless responsive to those conflicts, whether as direct commentary, thinly disguised allegories, or wishful attempts at escape." He admits that his "textual presentism" (i.e., his interpretation of a work from the past "in terms of whatever the interpreter finds relevant to the present historical situation") may be irritating for some readers. On the other hand, he refuses to be bound by the historicist's resistance to multiple interpretations and desire for an authoritative reading. Lubin sees that "dread of promiscuously proliferating meaning" as an echo of both the "nineteenth-century dread of female insatiability" and of "that century's alarm at uncontrolled propagation." He himself seeks to find a middle ground between what he identifies as the repressive empiricism of the historicist and the "semiotic masturbation" of the textualist.