JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History.IN 1855 the American artist Frederic E. Church paints the Andes of Ecuador, a South American landscape that has been read by critics from the nineteenth century to the present as an emblem of American national destiny. Church presents us with a primeval creation scene, a nature that is pristine and untouched, except, perhaps, by the violating eye of the painter and beholder, who appropriates the power of an Andean landscape to the purposes of his own vision. And that vision, as David Huntington has elegantly shown, is a parochial one: a mid-nineteenth-century reformed Calvinist version of birth and resurrection.1Huntington understands this painting, as indeed he does the whole of Church's oeuvre, as a visual trope upon the doctrine of American manifest destiny, an iconographic aggrandizement of New World scenes in the service of American cultural hegemony. Church's landscape recapitulates in pigments that tendency of the New England mind to convert Old Testament types and prophecies into American antitypes and fulfillments. As early as the seventeenth century, New Englanders had staked their future to larger eschatological ends; the result, as Sacvan Bercovitch has demonstrated, was a habit of mind that viewed national history as a mode of salvation history.2 The success of this national mission depended upon the ability of Americans to transform their local politics into a vehicle for godly ends.The Andes of Ecuador may be understood from this point of view as an effort to harness the traditions of the sublime for New World purposes ( fig. 1). Church renders a local, if idealized, landscape as the scene of a new dispensation. The painting effects its transformation of secular into sacred by two means: iconographically, through its juxtaposition of earthly crosses in the lower left of the canvas with the heavenly cross of light in the center, and in more painterly fashion through its use of light. The sun presides over a world in which matter is dematerialized into energy, and each day begins with the promise of new creation. Huntington's account of the Andes of Ecuador provides us with a language for understanding the ideological underpinnings ofThis content downloaded from 185.44.78.31 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 15:49:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NEW LITERARY HISTORY Church's New World vision. We encounter Church as his contemporaries might have encountered him, and perceive on the other side of his Andean landscape the Presbyterian nationalist who created it.At the same time, we have remained within the boundaries of cultural intent. We...
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. in order to challenge traditional interpretations of their role in American culture. He announces immediately in his preface that his enterprise is that of a critic and not of a historian. With a stance that is at once self-conscious and essentially "presentist," Wolf uses the modern critical vocabulary of structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and other "postmodern" ventures that emphasize the present perceiver's response to "texts" from the past. Wolf's responses to these artists' texts, he tells us, are shaped by the conviction that the past is neither recoverable nor worth trying to recover on its own terms. The past is valuable instead for what it will tell us about ourselves, in the terms we find most provocative in understanding ourselves: in Wolf's case, the language of structural patterns, cultural signs, and theories of the unconscious and repression. Throughout his text, Wolf cites the leading adapters of these viewpoints to cultural studies, among them Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Harold Bloom, and Jacques Lacan, and such writers on artists as Michael Fried and Ronald Paulson.With its highly technical vocabulary, this book is not easy to read. In recasting Wolf's arguments below for the general reader, I remove them from the ideological context of their language, but not, I hope, from their essential meaning.Wolf proposes that in the early Romantic painting of Washington Allston, John Quidor, and Thomas Cole we can find the beginning of modernism in American art. Modernity, in Wolf's terms, is a characteristic of consciousness. The modern mind is torn by the irrecoverability of the past, the limits of language, and the unknowability of the world beyond what the self recreates in language. It was their preoccupation with these concerns that fueled the work of Allston, Quidor, and Cole, Wolf claims, not their interest in particular subject matter, or conventions, or even raw nature. Wolf suggests that these artists' emerging modernity was a signal of explicit as well as subterranean tensions in American society in the early 19th century.In Part One, titled "Romanticism and Self-Consciousness: Washington Allston," Wolf postulates the breakdown of Allston's faith in the dualism of the world, and thus in the referentiality of human thought (and paintings) to a reality outside the self. The first painting he examines closely is the artist's Portrait of Samuel Williams, before 1818, which shows the banker enclosed in a heavy architectural setting that opens at one point in the background to reveal an ideal landscape. Wolf reads the conventions...
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