Contributors

Prown, Jules David; Anderson, Nancy K.; Cronon, William

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Contributors

Jules David Prown, Nancy K. Anderson, William Cronon, Brian W. Dippie, Martha A. Sandweiss, Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, Howard R. Lamar

Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West

Contributors

Author

Jules David Prown, Nancy K. Anderson, William Cronon, Brian W. Dippie, Martha A. Sandweiss, Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, Howard R. Lamar

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00038.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15737

Contributors

Nancy K. Anderson is assistant curator of American and British painting at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where she is preparing a catalog of the George Catlin collection. She is the principal author of Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise and a contributor to The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier.

William Cronon is professor of history at Yale University, specializing in American environmental history and the history of the American West. He is the author of Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West and Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.

Brian W. Dippie is professor of history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He has written extensively on Indian policy and western American art, as in The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage, and Looking at Russell.

Howard R. Lamar is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, where he teaches American western history. His many publications include The Readers’ Encyclopedia of the American West, The Far Southwest, 1850–1912, and The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth’s Victim.

Jules David Prown is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has written widely on American art history and material culture, including John Singleton Copley and American Painting from Its Beginnings to the Armory Show.

Martha A. Sandweiss is director of the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College. She has written widely on western American photography and is the author of Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace, coauthor of Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848, and editor of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America.

Susan Prendergast Schoelwer is project coordinator in the American Arts office at Yale University Art Gallery. She is the principal author of Alamo Images: Changing Perceptions of a Texas Experience and is currently writing on images of women in the art of the American frontier.

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Book details

BOOKDiscovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West

Jules David Prown, Nancy K. Anderson, William Cronon, Brian W. Dippie, Martha A. Sandweiss, Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, Howard R. Lamar

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00038

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15727

A common theme of western American art—from the depictions of Indians by early explorers to the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the vibrant images of Georgia O’Keeffe—is the transformation of the land through European-American exploration and resettlement. In this book, leading authorities look at western American art of the past three centuries, reevaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history, and American studies.

Jules David Prown begins the book by discussing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to broaden the study of western American art. Nancy K. Anderson then calls for a reconsideration of western art as art rather than documentation and for the adoption of new methods to probe its aesthetic, historical, political, and cultural complexities. William Cronon explores what an environmental historian might learn from American landscape art, concluding that each image must be read as a multilayered view intertwining past, present, and future within a larger context of progress and expansionism. Examining representations of American Indians, Brian W. Dippie finds that early works pictured them caught in a process of dramatic change while later artists showed them frozen outside of time: when the frontier ended, western art made nostalgia its defining characteristic. Martha A. Sandweiss argues that the ways in which views of the American west and its peoples reached nineteenth-century audiences—through large-edition prints, book illustrations, or theatrical exhibitions—significantly affected both the images and the meanings attached to them. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer challenges popular perceptions of the frontier as a womanless domain, discovering abundant pictures of Native American women in the art of the western fur trade. Howard R. Lamar concludes by discussing the changing perceptions of western artists and inhabitants of their region’s landscape in the twentieth century.

Author

Jules David Prown, Nancy K. Anderson, William Cronon, Brian W. Dippie, Martha A. Sandweiss, Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, Howard R. Lamar

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

Yale University Press

Print publication date May 1992 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300057225

EISBN 9780300234312

Illustrations 132 illus.

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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