Fine Fitnesses: Dickinson, Higginson, and Literary Luminism

Abstract

As American Studies extends its interdisciplinary mandate to the pictorial arts, a manifest destiny that might be seen by some as but a new form of cultural imperialism, it behooves us to stop this juggernaut for a moment and consider the increasingly important question of historicism. An historicism strictly applied can provide us with a rubric rooted in fact rather than in speculation, chastening a self-reflexive presentism with documentary and contextual integrity. Nowhere is this discipline of the interdisciplinary more needed than in considering the application of a problematical term like “Luminism,” itself an ex-post-facto construct of American art history that, like a typical Baby Boomer, was born in the mid-fifties, came of age in the seventies, and now is an establishment figure of the late eighties. First conceived by John I.H. Baur, Luminism was nurtured by Barbara Novak in her magisterial American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, and all but beatified in the post-Bicentennial extravaganza of John Wilmerding's American Light exhibit at the National Gallery. With the acceptance of Luminism as a viable aesthetic category, American Romantic painting itself, so long international Modernism's stepchild and poor relation, came of age and was invested with the Toga Virilis of academic respectability. In looking backwards, Americanists once anxious about vindicating their attraction to a supposedly secondhand and second-rate pictorial tradition could proudly point out that the nation had always possessed a legitimate school of artists who responded in a unified yet creative way to the idiomatic qualities of the American scene.