David M. Lubin

Picturing a nation : art and social change in nineteenth-century America

Examines six American artists: John Vanderlyn, George Caleb Bingham, Lilly Martin Spencer, Robert Duncanson, Seymour Guy, and William Harnett. This study describes how the images in their paintings both embraced and resisted the world around them - including its underlying social conflicts.

Claggett Wilson: The War Portfolio of 1919

Within months of the armistice that ended the First World War, the American artist Claggett Wilson (1887–1952), who had fought in France as a combat marine, produced a riveting portfolio of two dozen watercolors based on his wartime experiences. Wilson had trained in Paris at the progressive Académie Julien, exhibited at the Armory Show, and been an art instructor at Columbia University. Now he combined modernist techniques with popular visual culture in an effort to render visible the atrocities he had seen and the physical and mental wounds he had sustained. These paintings, long kept in storage and little known today, are vital testaments to an artist’s disturbing recollections of military violence. Reminiscent of the prints in Francisco de Goya’s early nineteenth-century Disasters of War series, they are tragic, appalling, and bitingly ironic.

Ariadne and the Indians: Vanderlyn's Neoclassical Princess, Racial Seduction, and the Melodrama of Abandonment

gard John Vanderlyns (1775-1852) Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos as a painting that, while technically proficient, is cold and derivative-a formula hybrid of Romanticism and Neoclassicism that depicts ardor without possessing or generating any of its own (fig. 1). The titles allusion to classical mythology appears to be little more than a ruse at drumming up cultural validity for a slickly provocative representation, life-sized and leering, of a curvaceous naked woman. Despite the paintings lush romanticism, sensational voyeurism, and stagy contrivance, however, we can discern in Ariadne more meaning than meets the eye. By considering the work in terms of the social and political history of its era, we will find its significance increase and its alleged vacuity diminish if not entirely disappear. In fact, Ariadne resonates with several critical themes from the early nineteenth century, among them the volatile relationship in early America between whites and Indians. Certainly in the Madisonian years of westward expansion, when Vanderlyn was painting Ariadne, no single question was more publicly troubling than how the new American republic was to maintain its high moral ground and yet respond, with the fullest economic and military advantage, to the indigenous peoples who possessed prior claim to the land. While I would not argue that Vanderlyn equated nude Ariadne with the American Indian and intended the painting as a vehicle for addressing the problem of Indian relations, the paintings subject (nude female figure in pastoral setting), style (possessing both French neoclassical and romantic elements), and theme (seduction and betrayal) interact so that the work is surprisingly relevant to this particularly pressing social issue. The aesthetic choices Vanderlyn made in this work are, whether or not he realized as