The "return" of religion in the scholarship of American art

Art Bulletin

Volumn 85, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 581-603

  Promey, Sally M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 64249159072     PISSN: 00043079     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3177387     Document Type: Article

References (205)

1. Leutze was nine years old when his family left Germany for Philadelphia, largely, it seems, in search of civil liberties denied them in his native Schwābisch-Gmūnd; Barbara Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 1816-1868: Freedom Is the Only King (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976), 13-14
2. Groseclose, Leutze, 34-44
3. Much of what I have to say about Leutze here is a lightly modified version of thoughts first published in Sally M. Promey, "Pictorial Ambivalence and American Protestantism," in Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life, ed. Alberta Arthurs and Glenn Wallach (New York: New Press, 2001), 189-231
4. Wendy Greenhouse introduced me to this image and shared her work on it with me. See Greenhouse, "The American Portrayal of Tudor and Stuart History, 1835-1865," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1989, esp. chap. 5, "Roundheads, Cavaliers, and Civil Wars"
5. and idem, "Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art," Winterthur Portfolio 31 (1996): 104-40. I tap only some of the cultural meanings of The Iconoclasts; as Greenhouse demonstrates in her dissertation, Leutze's painting concerns intolerance directed at both images and people in the decades leading up to the American Civil War, a period of nativist anti-Catholicism, spurred by increasing Catholic immigration and rising agitation against Catholic Mexico. Leutze, furthermore, trained at the Düsseldorf Academy and painted The Iconoclasts there; the contemporary political situation in Germany was not irrelevant to his work
6. That Leutze associated the subjects of history with contemporary concerns and, further, used emotion to transmit meaning and to produce viewer involvement and sympathetic identification is suggested in the contemporary pictorial theory of the Düsseldorf Academy where he trained. Cordula Grewe has charted the hybrid development of historical genre painting in the Düsseldorf school at just about this time; Grewe, "The Invention of the Secular Devotional Picture," Word and Image 16 (Jan.-Mar. 2000): 47
7. Iconoclasm is inherently a strategy of image substitution, a privileging of some pictorial forms over others - an acknowledgment rather than a dismissal of the power of images. For useful commentary and review of a number of recent books on the subject, see David Morgan, "The Vicissitudes of Seeing: Iconoclasm and Idolatry," Religion, forthcoming
8. "Religion is a hot topic in American art history"; Wanda Corn, Stanford Symposium in American Art, Apr. 10, 1999. The immediate precipitant was John Davis's paper titled "Viewing the Catholic Body in Antebellum America." Davis's research was subsequently published as John Davis, "Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire," in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 105-28.
9. "Davis's research was subsequently published as John Davis, "Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire," in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 105-28
10. See, for example, William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, 2 vols. (New York: George P. Scott, 1834)
11. James Jackson Jarves, Art Hints (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855)
12. idem, Art Studies (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861)
13. idem, The Art-Idea (1864), ed. Benjamin Rowland Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1960)
14. and idem, Art Thoughts (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869)
15. Alan Wallach, "The Ideal American Artist and the Dissenting Tradition: A Study of Thomas Cole's Popular Reputation," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973, see esp. 9 n. 1
16. See, for example, Joshua C. Taylor, "The Religious Impulse in American Art," in Papers in American Art, ed. John C. Milley (Mapleshade, N.J.: Edinburgh Press, 1976), 113-32
17. Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966)
18. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
19. Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967)
20. David C. Huntington, Art and the Excited Spirit: America in the Romantic Period, exh. cat., University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 1972
21. idem, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: George Braziller, 1966)
22. Wayne Craven, Colonial American Portraiture: The Economic, Religious, Social, Cultural, Philosophical, Scientific, and Aesthetic Foundations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
23. Charles Eldredge, American Imagination and Symbolist Painting, exh. cat., New York University, Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, 1979
24. Abraham A. Davidson, The Eccentrics and Other American Visionary Painters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978)
25. and Patricia Mullan Burnham, "The Religious Paintings of John Trumbull: An Anglo-American Experiment," Ph.D. diss, Boston University, 1984
26. See Sally M. Promey, "The Visual Culture of American Religions: An Historiographical Essay," in Exhibiting the Visual Culture of American Religions, by David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, exh. cat., Valparaiso University, Brauer Museum of Art, 2000, 1-8
27. Wanda Corn, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Elizabeth Johns," paper presented at a symposium in honor of Elizabeth Johns, "Looking Back: Critical Perspectives on American Art and Culture," Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Apr. 29, 2000
28. idem, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art," Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 188-207
29. Elizabeth Johns, "Histories of American Art: The Changing Quest," Art Journal 44 (winter 1984): 338-44
30. and Erika Doss, "The Visual Arts in Post-1945 America," in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 113-33
31. See, for example, Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1914), ed. Claus Wittich and Guenther Roth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)
32. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995)
33. and Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967). Berger has since reversed his position
34. See Berger et al., eds., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1999)
35. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 6, 19. While acknowledging complex connections between history and theory, my formulation of the secularization theory of modernity distinguishes between historical processes and theoretical constructions derived from them. Casanova, by contrast, frames secularization itself, in relation to its differentiation function, as the theory; he then proposes privatization and the decline of religion as two "subtheses" (19-20)
36. Peter Schjeldahl, "American Vistas," review of Novak (as in n. 11), Art in America 69, no. 2 (Feb. 1981): 15
37. Carter Ratcliff, review of Novak (as in n. 11), Print Collector's Newsletter 11, no. 6 (Jan.-Feb. 1981): 217
38. Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
39. See Jeffrey K. Hadden, "Toward Desacralizing Secularization Theory," Social Forces 65 (Mar. 1987): 587-611
40. and Rodney Stark, "Secularization: R.I.P.," Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 249-73
41. Sally Webster has recently suggested that the reading room program is best understood in relation to the Unitarianism of its conception; Webster, "Unitarianism and the Iconography of Democracy: Decorations for the Library of Congress," paper presented at the College Art Association Conference, Philadelphia, 2002
42. Art historical periodization rests on Lorenzo Ghiberti's application to art history of Petrarch's cyclical model, with its peak of civilization in antiquity, followed by a thousand-year decline of art beginning with the advent of Christianity, then rising again with Giotto and the reassertion of humanist perspectives. The problematic polarization of religion and secularity has left its mark on Italian Renaissance art history as well; see, for example, David S. Peterson, "Out of the Margins: Religion and the Church in Renaissance Italy," Renaissance Quarterly 53 (autumn 2000): 835-79
43. Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 12
44. This had, at least in part, to do with a deliberate rejection of institutional Christianity's often violent and oppressive past, although in the 20th century, racist conceptions of "spirit" did as much as the complicity of some Christian religious institutions to bolster Nazi ideology, for example. For an illuminating essay on the presence of this kind of thinking in the work of one American modernist artist, see Donna Cassidy, "The Invisibility of Race and Modernist Representation: A Case Study of Marsden Hartley's North Atlantic Folk," in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)
45. Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thinking in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996)
46. See also idem, "Portrait of a Collector as an Agnostic: Charles Lang Freer and Connoisseurship," Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 75-97
47. and idem, "John Twachtman and the Therapeutic Landscape," in John Twachtman: Connecticut landscapes, by Deborah Chotner, Lisa N. Peters, and Kathleen A. Pyne, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1989, 48-69
48. See, for example, Huntington, 1972 and 1966 (as in n. 11). For a recent book that critiques a similar valorizing tendency in the study of American religions, see Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000)
49. In order to underscore Barr's professional fervor, Alice Goldfarb Marquis framed her Barr biography in religious terminology, but she assigned only a few sentences to discussion of religion itself in Barr's adult life or thought; Marquis, Alfred H. Barr Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989)
50. In her new biography, Sybil Gordon Kantor examines Barr's religious background somewhat more rigorously, but relegates this discussion to the prologue and neglects mention of religious affiliations or commitments, intellectual or otherwise, during the 1940s and 1950s. She confines to a note Barr's activities with the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture (ARC) and diminishes the significance of this activity, describing it as an aberrant "residuum of his religious life"; Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 4-8, 380 n. 13
51. Exceptions include Sally M. Promey, "Interchangeable Art: Warner Sallman and the Critics of Mass Culture," in Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman, ed. David Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 148-80
52. and Deborah Martin Kao, "Radioactive Icons: The Critical Reception and Cultural Meaning of Modern Religious Art in Cold War America," Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1999. Kao's chapter on Meyer Schapiro indicates that Schapiro, who played an important role in shaping art history's secular identity, also participated in midcentury conversations on art and religion, providing content no longer exclusively Christian
53. On Shapiro's Judaism, see also Linda Seidel, "'Shalom Yehudin!': Meyer Schapiro's Early Years in Art History," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 3 (fall 1997): 559-94
54. and Donald Kuspit, "Meyer Schapiro's Jewish Unconscious," in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200-217
55. On Jewishness and Clement Greenberg, see Louis Kaplan, "Reframing Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg's 'Modernist Painting' in Light of Jewish Identity," in Soussloff, 180-99; and Margaret Olin, "C[lement] Hardesh (Greenberg): Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity," chap. 6 in The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). It is interesting to note, in this regard, that kitsch is a Yiddish term. When the full cast of prominent arts professionals is considered alongside Barr, and the largely unexplored connections to wider, related, American and European developments (Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish) are taken into account, this art/religion constellation emerges as a significant contributor to the formation of modernism and its audiences in the United States. It is this context that makes sense of the fact that two of the first four Andrew W. Mellon Lecturers in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art were neo-Thomists. Jacques Maritain's lectureship inaugurated the series in 1952; Étienne Gilson spoke in 1955. The lectures of each of these two men, delivered in this high-cultural secular institution, concerned the relationship of aesthetics and theology. My current research on the public display of religion explores this episode in shaping the public taste cultures of American belief
56. For more on the history of the Mellon Lectures, see The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Fifty Years (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2002)
57. In this regard, the continuing work of Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Dillenberger is relevant. In church-related educational institutions and theological seminaries, Jane Dillenberger's pioneering teaching and research on Christian art, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, deserve mention. The scholarship of John W. Cook, John Dixon, Margaret Miles, and Diane Apostolos-Cappadonna represent significant contributions as well. See, for example, Cook's illuminating essay "A Willem de Kooning Triptych and St. Peter's Church," Theological Education 31, no. 1 (autumn 1994): 59-73
58. Jane Dillenberger's Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998), among the earliest studies to attend productively to Warhol's religious subjects, adopts a heroizing perspective in tension with a more firmly grounded historical approach
59. See Leigh Eric Schmidt, "Mixed Blessings: Christianization and Secularization," Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 637-43
60. R. Stephen Warner, "Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States," American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 5 (Mar. 1993): 1044-93. The "new paradigm" for the sociological study of religion in the United States, according to Warner's already classic article, "begins with theoretical reflection on a fact of U.S. religious history highly inconvenient to secularization theory: . . . in the experience of the United States, societal modernization went hand in hand with religious mobilization" (1049)
61. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark assign this phenomenon to disestablishment and to the rise of an open market in religion in the United States; Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992)
62. For statistics on religion and religious belief in the United States, see, for example, George Gallup Jr. and J. Castelli, The People's Religion: American Faith in the 90s (New York: Macmillan, 1998)
63. E. H. Hastings and P. K. Hastings, eds., Index to International Public Opinion, 1994-95 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996)
64. David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
65. and Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
66. On fundamentalisms, see Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentals Observed, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
67. See, for example, T. R. Reid, "Hollow Halls in Europe's Churches: Attendance by Christians Dwindles as Number of Faithful Decreases," Washington Post, May 6, 2001, A1, A22
68. Among important recent art historical studies, see, for example, Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992)
69. Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)
70. David A. Hollinger, "The 'Secularization' Question and the United States in the Twentieth Century," Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 70 (Mar. 2001): 132-43
71. idem, "Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century," in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 462-86
72. and idem, "Justification by Verification: The Scientific Challenge to the Moral Authority of Christianity in Modern America," in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 116-35
73. See, for example, Sarah Gordon Barringer, "Blasphemy and the Law of Religious Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America," American Quarterly 52 (Dec. 2000): 682-719
74. In addition to important modifications in immigration legislation, the 1960s counterculture played a role in the rethinking of religious diversity; see Mark C. Taylor, introduction to Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11
75. Diane Winston, "Campuses Are a Bellwether for Society's Religious Revival," Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 16, 1998, A60
76. Tom W. Smith, "Religious Diversity in America: The Emergence of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Others," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 14 (Sept. 2002): 577-85
77. see also Ray L. Hart, "Religious and Theological Studies in American Higher Education: A Pilot Study," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 4 (1991): esp. 732
78. In this process, scholars of religion began to consider the material, sensory (including visual), and spatial dimensions of religious experience as well. See, for example, David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995)
79. Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994)
80. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993)
81. idem, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking Press, 1995)
82. Colleen McDannell, "Interpreting Things: Material Culture and American Religion," Religion 21 (1991): 371-87
83. idem, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
84. Barbara Daly Metcalf, Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
85. Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
86. idem, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)
87. idem, ed., Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999)
88. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
89. idem, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)
90. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
91. and Robert Wuthnow, Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
92. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973)
93. and idem, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983)
94. David Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988)
95. Sally M. Promey, Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993)
96. John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995)
97. John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)
98. Emma Jones Lapsansky and Anne A. Verplanck, eds., Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)
99. Michael Gaudio, "Between the Author and the Savage: Visual Practice and the Ethnography of Native America, 1585-1890," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2001
100. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, "Elijah Pierce and James Hampton: One Good Book Begets Another," Folk Art 19 (summer 1994): 52-57
101. Ann Kirschner, "From Hebron to Saron: The Religious Transformation of an Ephrata Convent," Winterthur Portfolio no. 1 (spring 1997): 39-64
102. Kari M. Main, "Pursuing 'The Things of This World': Mormon Resistance and Assimilation as Seen in the Furniture of the Brigham City Cooperative, 1874-88," Winterthur Portfolio 36, no. 4 (winter 2001): 191-212
103. Gretchen Buggeln, Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut's Churches, 1790-1840 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003)
104. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
105. Paul E. Ivey, Prayers in Stone: Christian Science Architecture in the United States, 1894-1930 (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1999)
106. and Saul Zalesch, "The Religious Art of Benziger Brothers," American Art 13, no. 2 (summer 1999): 56-79. Dissertations in progress include Jennifer Strychasz (University of Maryland) on religion, race, and history in African-American church art; Kimberly Orcutt (City University of New York) on Henry Ossawa Tanner; Marissa Vincenti (Duke University) on Aaron Douglas, Spiritualism, Gurdjieffian philosophy, and Marxist politics; Adrienne Baxter (Columbia University) on George Inness and metaphysics; Jane Carpenter (University of Michigan) on Betye Saar; Julie Levin Caro (University of Texas-Austin) on Allan Rohan Crite; and Leslie Brice (University of Maryland) on the visual and material culture of vodou in Haiti and the United States. For the most part, this essay has not cited master's theses but has focused instead on books and, in some cases, dissertations. Because of Irina Hans's tragic and untimely death in autumn 2002, I make an exception to this rule for her important work "The Religious Art of Andres Serrano," M.A. thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002
107. Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000)
108. Rachael DeLue, The Struggle of Vision: George Inness and the Science of Landscape Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming)
109. On Inness and Swedenborg, see also Promey, "'The Ribband of Faith': George Inness, Color Theory, and the Swedenborgian Church," American Art Journal 26, nos. 1-2 (1994): 44-65
110. On Jarves, see Charles Colbert, "A Critical Medium: James Jackson Jarves's Vision of Art History," American Art 16, no. 1 (spring 2002): 18-35
111. Earlier historians who had considered Jarves's religious convictions include Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951)
112. and Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). This book by art historian Stein provided American art with its first intellectual history and one of its early opportunities to engage the subject of religion in sustained analysis
113. Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
114. and Kristin Ann Schwain, "Figuring Belief: American Art and Modern Religious Experience," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2001. Schwain's dissertation examines the work of Eakins, Tanner, and F. Holland Day
115. Erika Doss: "Robert Gober's 'Virgin' Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art," in Morgan and Promey (as in n. 7), 129-45
116. Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
117. and "Rethinking Religion in Twentieth-Century American Art," paper presented at the College Art Association Conference, Philadephia, 2002. Doss's current book project, "Picturing Faith: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Issues of Religion," will pursue this subject. See also, for example, Schwain (as in n. 55)
118. Robert E. Haywood, "Heretical Alliance: Claes Oldenburg and the Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s," Art History 8, no. 2 (June 1995): 185-212
119. and James Elkins, "What Happened to Religion in Contemporary Art," at www.jameselkins.com/worksinprogress.html
120. Jennifer Roberts, Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming)
121. David Morgan, "Defining Visual Culture as Subject-Matter and Form," a chapter in Morgan's work in progress, "The Medium of Belief: Introduction to the Study of Religious Visual Culture"; see also Morgan, "Visual Religion," Religion 30 (2000): 41-53. In taking a visual culture approach to a fine art "object," one overt goal of Promey (as in n. 22) was to make use of insights to be gained from a number of methodological possibilities, such as visual and iconographic analysis, performance theory, ritual studies, ethnography, reception studies, and intellectual history
122. In addition to the two directors, participants included David Bjelajac, Gretchen Buggeln, John Davis, Erika Doss, Claire Farago, John M. Giggie, Paul Gutjahr, Stewart Hoover, Harvey Markowitz, Leigh Schmidt, Ellen Smith, and Thomas Tweed. University of Maryland graduate students Michelle Kloss (Ph.D., 2000) and Jennifer Krzyminski Younger (Ph.D., 1999) assisted
123. see, for example, Thomas A. Tweed, "America's Church: Roman Catholicism and Civic Space in the Nation's Capital," 68-86
124. ; John Davis, "Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire," 105-28
125. Erika Doss, "Robert Gober's 'Virgin' Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art," 129-45
126. Harvey Markowitz, "From Presentation to Representation in Lakota Sun Dance Painting," 160-75
127. David Bjelajac, "William Sidney Mount and the Hermetic Tradition in America," 176-90
128. Claire Farago, "Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos between Theory and History," 191-210
129. Ellen Smith, "Greetings from Faith: Early Twentieth-Century American Jewish New Year Postcards," 229-48
130. and John M. Giggie, " 'When Jesus Handed Me a Ticket': Images of Railroad Travel and Spiritual Transformation among African Americans, 1865-1917," 249-66
131. See also Ellen Smith, "Portraits of a Community: The Image and Experience of Early American Jews," in Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America, by Richard Brilliant, exh. cat., Jewish Museum, New York, 1997, 9-21
132. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995)
133. Soussloff (as in n. 30)
134. Olin (as in n. 30)
135. Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
136. Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997)
137. Baigell and Milly Heyd, eds., Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001)
138. and Baigell, Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
139. For insightful new work on Ben Shahn and Jewish identity, see Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman, and Jenna Webster, Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
140. Diana Linden, "Ben Shahn, The Four Freedoms, and the SS St. Louis," American Jewish History (Dec. 1998): 419-40, reprinted in Baigell and Heyd, 162-81
141. idem, "The New Deal Murals of Ben Shahn: Jewish Identity and the American Scene," in Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, ed. Susan Chevlowe (Princeton: Jewish Museum and Princeton University Press, 1998), 25-47
142. and idem, "Modern? American? Jew?: Museum Exhibitions and Ben Shahn's Late Paintings," in Modern Jewry and the Arts, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming)
143. See also Norman Kleeblatt and Gerard Wertkin, The Jewish Heritage in American Folk Art (New York: Universe Books, 1984)
144. Smith, 1997 and 2001 (as in n. 64)
145. Ori Z. Soltes, Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003)
146. and John Golding, "Divide and Conquer," New York Review 50 (Jan. 16, 2003): 32-35, on Barnett Newman's Jewishness and the 2002 Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
147. David Morgan (as in n. 30)
148. idem, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1
149. and idem, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6-8
150. Erika Doss, Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1999)
151. see also idem, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001)
152. esp. Morgan, "The Image of Religion in American Life," 139-57
153. Dispelling the possibility of "objectivity" in any domain, Donna Haraway, for example, maintains the instantiated and partial character of knowledge, which is always "produced by particular groups and persons for particular purposes within particular contexts"; referred to in Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 268
154. See Haraway, "Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183-201
155. Wilfred M. McClay, "Two Concepts of Secularism," Journal of Policy History 13, no. 1 (2001): 54
156. See also Gustavo Benavides, "Modernity," in Taylor (as in n. 38), 186-204
157. see also idem, "Celestial Visions: Shaker Images and Art Historical Method," American Art 7, no. 2 (spring 1993): 78-99
158. and idem, "Resurrecting Vision: The Pictorial Imagination of Shaker Revival," in Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs, ed. France Morin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 65-91, a book accompanying an exhibition of Shaker visionary drawings and paintings at the Drawing Center, New York, and the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2001
159. See also John T. Kirk, The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997)
160. For thoughtful treatments of religion in other sorts of art generally labeled folk, see Carolyn J. Weekley, The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks, exh. cat., Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Colonial Williamsburg, 1999; and Kleeblatt and Wertkin (as in n. 66)
161. Bjelajac (as in n. 51)
162. idem, Washington Allston, Secret Societies, and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
163. idem, American Art: A Cultural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000)
164. Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)
165. and Louis Nelson, "The Material Word: Anglican Visual Culture in Colonial South Carolina," Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2001
166. See, for example, Marc Treib, Sanctuaries of Spanish New Mexico (Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 1993)
167. Robin Farwell Gavin, Traditional Arts of Spanish New Mexico: The Hispanic Heritage Wing of the Museum of International Folk Art (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994)
168. Donna Pierce and Martha Weigle, eds., Spanish New Mexico: The Spanish Colonial Arts Society Collection (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996)
169. Diane Fane, ed., Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1996
170. Farago (as in n. 64)
171. and William Wroth, Images of Penance, Images of Mercy: Southwestern Santos in the Late Nineteenth Century (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)
172. See also Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
173. Johnston (as in n. 23), esp. Johnston, "Samuel F. B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre: Social Tensions in an Ideal World"; Cassidy (as in n. 23)
174. and Jeffrey Belnap, "Caricaturing the Gringo Tourist: Diego Rivera's Folkloric and Touristic Mexico and Miguel Covarrubia's Sunday Afternoon in Xochimilco"
175. see also David Steinberg, "Charles Willson Peale's Staircase Group and Early National Social Order." Johnston's book in progress, "Imminent Dangers': Nativist Thought in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture," considers a richly textured American religious culture as one among the important social factors contributing to her subject
176. In May 1999, "Religion and the Senses," a Princeton University symposium organized by Leigh Schmidt, investigated multisensory dimensions of religious experience and practice
177. Morgan, 2000 (as in n. 58)
178. See Henry F. May, "Religion and American Intellectual History, 1945-1985: Reflections on an Uneasy Relationship," in Lacey (as in n. 36), 21
179. Neil Harris, "Reluctant Alliance: American Art, American Religion," in Arthurs and Wallach (as in n. 1), 1-30
180. On colonial religious diversity, see Smith (as in n. 41), 577
181. Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 2002
182. and Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
183. Davis (as in n. 51)
184. and DeLue (as in n. 54)
185. See, for example, Allan I. Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966)
186. See Schmidt (as in n. 32)
187. David D. Hall, "Narrating Puritanism," in Stout and Hart (as in n. 36), 51-83
188. Fox (as in n. 40), 399 and n. 7
189. R. Lawrence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
190. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990);
191. and James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
192. By the same token, the absence of American Christianity as a significant participant in Karal Ann Marling's Merry Christmas: Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) compromises her otherwise compelling (even charming) history
193. It is also within the context of the sort of scholarly miscalculation I have described here that Dell Upton, in his immensely important study of colonial Virginia's Anglican parish churches, can label the meaningful function of the buildings as "secular" and attend to them without exploring the religious practices that the architecture facilitates and shapes; Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (1986; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)
194. and Peter Benes and Phillip D. Zimmerman, New England Meeting House and Church: 1630-1850, exh. cat., Boston University, 1979, 21. To the south, colonial Anglican congregations in Virginia commissioned impressive architectural altarpieces, often decorated with wall texts of the Decalogue and the Lord's Prayer or the Apostles' Creed. Artists and artisans laid these texts out on panels in such a way as to accentuate their visual and iconographic qualities. Sometimes the figures of Moses and Aaron bracketed the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Cherubs were also popular iconographic features; Upton (as in n. 86), 119-31. Similar lettered panels, including the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer, can be documented beginning some decades later, in the earliest years of the republic, up and down the Eastern seaboard. By 1812, one artist, John Ritto Penniman, had provided just this sort of decoration to be displayed above the Communion table at Boston's Christ Church (Old North)
195. In this case the four tablets - two bearing the commandments, one the creed, and one the Lord's Prayer - flanked a large-scale oil-on-panel painting of Jesus offering the bread and cup of the sacrament. See Carol Damon Andrews, "John Ritto Penniman (1782-1841), an Ingenious New England Artist," Antiques (July 1981): 147-70. I am grateful to David Brigham for bringing the Penniman painting to my attention
196. The vessel is in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. When it comes to the 17th century (or earlier), art history has lagged behind scholarship in other fields (especially folklore, literary criticism, and history of religion). It took a literary historian, in 1986, to argue that Puritan violence against the Pequot Indians was bolstered by a theology of the "true" image and a sense of conviction about where it did or did not reside; Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
197. See also Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
198. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)
199. and Richard Godbeer, The Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
200. and Gaudio (as in n. 52), esp. chap. 3, "The Space of Idolatry: An Enlightenment Perspective on Algonquian Religion."
201. Eleanor Heartney, "A Catholic Controversy?" Art in America (Dec. 1999): 39
202. For a statistical approach to the Sensation controversy, see David Halle, "The Controversy over the Show Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum, 1999-2000," in Arthurs and Wallach (as in n. 1), 139-87
203. Eleanor Heartney, "Postmodern Heretics," Art in America 85, no. 2 (Feb. 1997): 32-39
204. and idem, "Blood, Sex, and Blasphemy: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art," New Art Examiner 26, no. 6 (Mar. 1999): 34-39. Heartney's misleading dualisms rest on broadly painted historical "truths" and perpetuate severely reductionist sets of assumptions about the complex reality of relations between Protestantism and Catholicism over time and between the arts and each of these historically plural and diverse faith expressions. It is also the case that, in the interest of representing art as blameless in this public controversy, some art critics have themselves
205. and Edmund S. Morgan, "Those Sexy Puritans," review of Godbeer (as in n. 89), New York Review of Books, June 27, 2002, 15-16