Fall 2018 (4.2)
Articles
“A Kind of Traveling Gazette”: Edward Lamson Henry’s The Latest Village Scandal, Gossip, and History at the Dawn of Sensational Journalism
The nostalgic painting of provincial oral gossip is haunted by allusions to the rapid mass production and nationalization of newspaper scandal in the 1870s and 1880s.
Elevated: Along the Fringes of 291 Fifth Avenue
This essay suggests that the interactions that took shape within the physical boundaries of [Stieglitz's gallery] open insights into the broader dynamics of cultural discrimination and privilege.
In the Round
An Interview with the Curators of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings
Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings marks a turning point for early American art in the popular consciousness, both at home and abroad, by challenging the nativism and conservatism that surrounds narratives of that most marketable and yet most fraught of Americanist brand names: “Hudson River School.”
Bully Pulpit
Textualizing Intangible Cultural Heritage: Querying the Methods of Art History
How might technology restore the connections between the tangible and the intangible that text-based art-historical practices and their often singular focus on the visual have damaged or elided?
Responses
Karen Kramer, Curator of Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture and Director of the Native American Fellowship Program, Peabody Essex Museum
Jami Powell, Associate Curator of Native American Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw), Senior Curator, American Indian Cultural Center and Museum, Oklahoma City
Research Notes
Looking for Love: Identifying Robert Rauschenberg’s Collage Elements in a Lost, Early Work
The apparent plaintiveness and autobiographical transparency of Should Love Come First?, and its early prominence in the then unknown Rauschenberg oeuvre, felt intensified by its obliteration by the artist himself. If ever an artwork had a story worth sleuthing, I figured it was this one, even if it was just the story of its own production.
Dating Miss Maude Adams, as “L’Aiglon”
While organizing the 2017 permanent collection reinstallation at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Mythmaking and Truth-Telling: American and Regional Art, I made discoveries in the artist’s papers at the Archives of American Art that allow us to precisely date Miss Maude Adams, as “L’Aiglon” and to better contextualize the painting within the intellectual milieu of its creation.
Playing the Race Card: Thomas Le Clear’s High, Jack, Game
I immediately recognized that the instruments of his labor—brushes and a bucket of whitewash, used to brighten the walls of soot-filled homes—were often the stuff of racial satire and caricature in the nineteenth century. Was this a sympathetic portrayal of an African American or something much more complicated?
The Paintings Left Behind: Two New Paintings by Mary Cassatt from Seville
Boarding a train toward an affluent suburb northeast of Madrid, I wondered what this journey would bring. I had been contacted a little over a year earlier by a person who claimed to have two paintings by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926).
