Alan Wallach

Thomas Cole : landscape into history

This is a biography of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River school of landscape painting. The authors present Cole in a broader dimension, painting him as a man deeply concerned with the historical issues of his time.

Thomas Cole's River in the Catskills as Antipastoral

Art historians and American Studies scholars have interpreted Coles River in the Catskills (1843)—a landscape view that includes a train—as a pastoral. This article maintains that Cole intended River in the Catskills as an antipastoral—as a deliberate attack on the conventions of pastoral landscape painting and consequently on a pervasive, if often contested, ideology that lauded improvement and material progress. Through an examination of historical and visual evidence and an analysis of the works landscape painting conventions, the article aims to recover meanings the painting may have held for the artist and for some of his contemporaries.

The Voyage of Life as Popular Art

In its day, Thomas Coles Voyage of Life (Figs. 1–4) enjoyed a popularity equaled by few works in the history of American art. In 1848, the series attracted perhaps as many as five hundred thousand people (then the equivalent of half the population of New York City) to the American Art-Unions memorial exhibition of Coles work.1 Later in the same year, when the Art-Union selected Coles series as a prize in its annual lottery, its membership almost doubled.2 Even after the series disappeared from public view, its popularity endured for another twenty or thirty years: between 1850 and 1875, as Howard Merritt has observed, printed editions of the Voyage of Life “were almost as often to be found in American homes as had been engravings of George Washington in an earlier generation.”3

Review of Renew Marxist Art History

tions and practices. For a study that considers aspects of photography’s materiality, the size and quality of some of the illustrations in the book are rather disappointing. A number of the images fall within the narrow outer margins of the text boxes, thereby depriving the reader of an opportunity to fully engage with these rarely published visuals. For example, a low-resolution black-and-white reproduction of a painting by Daoud Corm (fig. 21) appears larger than higher-resolution images by photographer Garabed Krikorian (for example, fig. 39), a central figure in the book. Some of the images are pixelated and have reproduced poorly (such as fig. 62), leading one to question the need for their inclusion if high-quality versions were not available. Additionally, while the highly nuanced and complex framework that the author sets up is commendable and original, it could be argued that the dedication to constructing this theoretical apparatus detracted from the analysis of the photographs themselves (in both their materiality and circulation). The book could also have benefited from a theoretical consideration of other contemporaneous visual practices, specifically, painting, which continued to be popular during this period and, in fact, served as an extension of photographic practice. The designation al-musawwirun, or “the imagemakers,” often referred to pre-twentiethcentury artists who could have been painters or photographers (a point also noted by the author). In fact, many almusawwirun were trained in both fields, and they made no clear distinctions between the two professions. The idea that the photographic practice in general, and the tradition of portraiture in particular, “emerged as the first global visual cultural phenomenon” (p. 12) or exists independently of other artistic traditions is thus easily problematized. The author, in chapter 2, discusses portrait paintings by artists like the Syrian Daoud Corm. However, he describes such works as images that were based on photographs, which implies that they are not necessarily substantial works in or of themselves. Similarly, in Sheehi’s discussion of Ottoman imperial portraiture in chapter 1, he makes no allusion to similar long-held traditions among court painters (who produced portraits well into the nineteenth century). Although The Arab Imago does not set out to explore painting, an argument could be made that during the nineteenth century painting and photography were often inextricably linked. Islamic art historian David Roxburgh, for instance, has maintained that in the context of Qajar Iran, painting was engaged “in a practice of remediation” with the emergence of local photographic traditions. It would have been interesting to consider whether similar developments could be seen in the context of Ottoman and Arab photography. Nevertheless, The Arab Imagomakes a significant contribution to the social history of photography in the Ottoman center and periphery, through an analysis of broad transformations from the uneven imperial Tanzimat to the ideologically motivated nahdah. Sheehi helps the reader understand the people both behind and in front of the camera’s lens by fleshing out the complex social codes informing the most banal of portraits and their production. To illustrate, Sheehi opens almost every chapter with a description of an anecdote, photograph, or individual from which he expands to an exploration of an alternative reading of photographs or their producers. He then proceeds to connect it to his theoretical vision of photography’s history in the Ottoman provinces. The Arab Imago paves the way to a much-needed social history of Ottoman Arab photography, one that has long been shrouded behind a textual, discursive study of Arab modernity.

The Birth of the American Art Museum

Before the Civil War, the United States could not boast of a single institution that could properly be called an art museum. After the war, the situation changed dramatically, with the opening in the 1870s of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Commentators at the time saw the new museums as proof of the cultural progress of the nation as a whole. Later observers would describe them in similar, nationalist terms as symbols of American democracy.1 But democracy was probably the least of the impulses underlying the creation of art museums in the period immediately following the Civil War. Instead, the new museums were a project of an emerging bourgeoisie intent upon founding institutions of high art as part of its drive toward cultural hegemony. Indeed, the very process of creating art museums contributed to the bourgeoisie’s developing awareness of itself as a class.