Framing America

For more than a generation, critics and scholars have been revising and expanding the customary definition of American art. A tradition once assumed to be mainly European and oriented towards painting and sculpture has been enriched by the inclusion of other media such as ceramics, needlework, and illustration, and the work of previously marginalized groups such as Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Now, in a brilliant combination of original scholarship and synthesis, Frances Pohl's Framing America provides the first comprehensive survey of this new, enlarged vision of American art. Here are the many strands of North America's history and visual culture: the first contacts of the Spanish with the Aztecs and other Native Americans; the post-Revolutionary definition of nationhood; the visionary feeling for landscape and nature; the images of social and military conflict of the nineteenth century; and the tempering of the twentieth century's heady plunge into modernism by the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the culture wars. Framing America's consistent presentation of the resonance between art and history offers a coherent sense of the evolution of a new, generously defined conception of American art. Pohl's account is an adroitly inclusive fusion of many themes. Her discussion of the early definition of nationhood includes the traditional painters of the grand manner, West, Copley, Trumbell, and Stuart. But Stuart's portraits of George Washington, for instance, are also viewed in relation to portrayals of Washington in wood carvings, embroidery, and the vogue for "mourning pictures" after Washington's death, which create a domestic counterpoint to the more institutional portrayals. Pohl's description of the great landscape tradition of Cole, Durand, and Church shows how the optimistic assertion of a sublime sense of the American nation was accompanied by a sense of loss as the nation expanded westward. As our appreciation of the rich cultural diversity of American life has grown, our sense of American artits sources, its motives, its possibilitieshas become more varied too. Fresh and contemporary, Framing America embraces what our history can tell us about our art and what our art can tell us about our past and present. 665 illustrations, 337 in color.

Frances K. Pohl is Professor of Art History at Pomona College, California.