Last spring the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art became embroiled in a bitter controversy over “The West as America,” an exhibition that attempted a revisionist interpretation of images of the frontier. The show became a national issue in May when Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska accused exhibition organizers of promoting a leftist political agenda and threatened to curtail the Smithsonian’s federal financing. Neoconservative columnists spewed invective, calling the exhibition “Marxist,” “perverse,” “simplistic,” “destructive,” and, predictably, “politically correct.” Publicity surrounding the controversy implied that revisionism in art history was on the verge of taking over the museum world.
Unfortunately, this is hardly the case. Indeed, “The West as America” represented one of the very few attempts in recent years to mount an exhibition along revisionist lines. Despite the prestige that revisionist art history now enjoys in colleges and universities, museums for the most part have done everything in their power to ignore it.
“Revisionist” or “new” art history grew out of the crises of the 1960’s when young scholars -- many of whom were taking part in the civil-rights, anti-war, and women’s-liberation movements -- criticized the discipline’s narrow focus on problems of connoisseurship and artistic “influence.” These scholars began to search for new ways to understand the relation between art and its historical, political, and social contexts.
At first much of the new art history tended to be Marxist or feminist -- or, frequently, a combination of the two. In a field that prided itself on upholding standards of “civilization,” the “new” art history seemed rough-edged and argumentative. It engaged in confrontational politics, took issue with built-in assumptions and biases, and exposed pervasive sexism and elitism. It also called for increased attention to theories underlying the practice of art history and for the recovery of the discipline’s intellectual heritage -- the focus on historical and philosophical problems that had made the field central to the humanities in the early decades of the century.
I do not exaggerate when I say that “new” art history was responsible for the discipline’s revitalization. Revisionist art historians insisted on discussion and debate in place of the usual numbing silence. Their probing and questioning opened the field to new areas of inquiry and to new theoretical perspectives.
Today revisionism generally dominates academic art history. Leading graduate programs vie for the services of Marxists, feminists, and semioticians. Theory has become a crucial part of the curriculum even at such strongholds of tradition as Columbia and New York Universities. Annual meetings of the College Art Association routinely feature sessions on such subjects as the construction of gender, the politics of representation, and the social history of art.
Thus revisionism has transformed academic art history; yet its impact on museum exhibitions has remained slight.
In 1987, the Metropolitan Museum of Art put on a blockbuster exhibition, “American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School Painters.” The first large-scale retrospective since 1945 of Hudson River School landscapes, the exhibition brought together 88 works and featured rooms devoted to canvases by Thomas Cole, Frederic E. Church, and Asher B. Durand.
A few months later, the Hudson River Museum of Westchester (N.Y.) -- an institution little known outside its immediate area and generally ignored by New York reviewers -- staged its own Hudson River School exhibition, “The Catskills.” Organized by Kenneth Meyers, a young American-studies professor at Middlebury College, “The Catskills” brought together more than 150 objects -- landscape, genre and portrait paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, maps, postcards, books, china, railway timetables, hotel bills, and other artifacts relating to 19th-century Catskill tourism.
The Hudson River School is my particular area of specialization, and I visited the two exhibitions repeatedly. The contrast between them -- one representative of old, traditional art history, the other of the “new” -- could not have been more telling.
“American Paradise” was all glossy spectacle. The spacious galleries, the brilliant lighting, and the lush setting combined to produce an experience in which visitors were overwhelmed by the beauty and power of the paintings. Yet something was missing. By viewing the landscapes of the Hudson River School as so many timeless masterpieces, viewers gained no sense of the paintings’ history or their historical role. Patronage, contemporary response to the works, the art market, tourism, religious beliefs, industrialization, Jacksonian politics, Manifest Destiny, slavery, the Civil War -- all these topics were largely absent from, or rather were absorbed by, the exhibition’s pseudo-historical theme. Instead, the show promised visitors gleaming visions of a conflict-free American past, a “return to Paradise,” in the words of the advertisement put out by the Chrysler Corporation, the exhibition’s sponsor.
“American Paradise” exemplified traditional art historical wisdom: Choose the best works, gather them together under a familiar if tendentious label (Treasures, Masterpieces, Genius, Paradise), add wall texts with a smattering of background information, and, voila, success is pretty much assured. But what if you depart from formula? What if you seriously want to explore relations between art and its historical context? That was the problem the Hudson River Museum set for itself.
The exhibition was laid out in the museum’s large central gallery. Paintings hung on temporary walls facing cases with books, prints, and other artifacts related to the paintings. Wall texts set forth basic premises. Visitors followed a roughly chronological path. At almost every step, one encountered fascinating juxtapositions -- for example, stereoscopic images of the Catskill Mountain House, a rendering of it on Staffordshire china, Frederic Church’s painting of the view from the Mountain House, and so forth. There was nothing forced or self-consciously didactic about the installation. Nor did the presence of objects in different media -- traditionally a curatorial taboo -- detract from the enjoyment of individual artifacts.
Still, as you worked your way through the exhibition, you became increasingly aware of how the materials on display derived from, and also helped to constitute, a touristic culture. Seen in this light, landscapes by Cole, Church, Durand, and others began to make greater historical and artistic sense. No longer reified masterpieces, objects of a disembodied aesthetic contemplation, they could be seen in relation to a range of 19th-century cultural practices, such as tourism, nature worship, and patriotic beliefs that equated American nature with American identity.
“The Catskills” demonstrated one way in which museums can break out of the masterpiece-treasure-genius-paradise syndrome. There are others. An exhibition in 1988 at New York’s Center for African Art called “Art/Artifact” subjected the category “art” to a searching examination by recreating the different exhibition formats in which African works have been seen in the United States since the late 19th-century. They included a “curiosity room”; a natural-history display complete with diorama; an “atmospheric” big-museum type of installation; and a stark contemporary gallery. The center even included “authentic” period labels.
Another example was the Menil Collection’s “Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks” in 1988. Visitors encountered a variety of works -- oil paintings, watercolors, lithographs, wood engravings from Harper’s -- that allowed them to explore in detail the artist’s complex response to the changing situation of blacks during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
These exhibitions provoked no heated controversies, no blowups over “Marxism” or “political correctness.” Still, these and similar path-breaking shows usually turn up in smaller institutions, sites beneath the notice of the national news media. As a consequence, they reach audiences limited to local museum patrons, students in the area, and art historians in the know.
Why don’t larger, national institutions like the Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery mount similar exhibitions? Why have they generally failed to take advantage of the large body of revisionist scholarship now available? Why are they so irrevocably attached to their formulaic blockbusters and treasure-house displays?
The usual response from such institutions -- “We give the public what it wants” -- begs the question. Indeed, it abdicates responsibility, since museums are supposed to be in the business of shaping, not reflecting, taste. A steady diet of commodified culture can only dull the public’s critical capacities. Or is that really the point in an age in which trustees from a leading museum travel to Disney World to study ways of improving exhibition techniques?
“Revisionist ideas about patronage, class, or gender aren’t ideas for exhibitions” is another frequent objection. On the contrary, exhibitions can tell complex stories spatially. A successful exhibition is not a book-on-the-wall, a narrative with objects as illustrations, but a carefully orchestrated deployment of objects, images, and texts that gives viewers opportunities to look, to reflect, and to work out meanings. Revisionists know this quite as well as traditionalists, as the three exhibitions cited demonstrate. What this objection usually boils down to is a fear that revisionists will neglect or ignore art’s aesthetic dimension. This fear makes sense only if you believe that the aesthetic is destroyed by the presence of anything else (historical artifacts, works of art in different media, information about patronage).
I believe that the real reason for museums’ reluctance to draw upon revisionist scholarship is their deep-seated fear of controversy and critical thought. Museums like the National Gallery thrive on the notoriety that comes with cheap stunts such as the exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s prurient “Helga Pictures.” Genuine controversy is something else entirely: It raises basic questions, involves people in issues, makes them care passionately about ideas. In a society in which culture ultimately is controlled by corporate elites, controversy is too dangerous -- it cuts too close to the nerve.
I am aware, of course, that museums always have been deeply conservative institutions. Dependent upon corporations, government agencies, and wealthy donors, and presided over by well-heeled trustees usually more interested in prestige and the fate of their personal art collections than the public good, they have every reason to avoid anything that would bring down the wrath of their financial backers.
This built-in conservatism has been reinforced in the last few years by the appearance of dour, neoconservative critics who have taken upon themselves the task of insulating the public from radical or even mildly dissenting views. Their wild-eyed assault on “The West as America” -- whatever the exhibition’s flaws, its historical premise was hardly novel -- will no doubt inspire even greater caution on the part of curators and museum directors.
Thus, prospects for revisionist exhibitions are not especially bright. Still, this should not be cause for despair: Revisionism is here to stay. And this means that its specter will continue to haunt museum corridors.
Alan Wallach, an associate professor of art history and American studies at the College of William and Mary, currently is working on a study of patronage and vision in 19th-century American landscape painting.