Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
John Davis, Michael Leja
Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with quality reproductions of artworks, it offers a resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures—including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederick Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman—are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists.

A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Print publication date April 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171689
EISBN 9780300257335
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Illustrations 127
Print Status in print
Publisher (in print)
WorldCat
Google Books

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List of illustrations

  • The Long Room, Interior of Front Room in Peale’s Museum, detail
  • The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, detail
  • Golden Eagle, detail
  • Penn's Treaty with the Indians
  • A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham)
  • The Artist in His Museum
  • The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, 17 June, 1775
  • Gallery of the Louvre
  • Iceland or Jer Falcon
  • View in the East Nave (The Greek Slave, by Power [sic]; from Recollections of the Great Exhibition), detail
  • Frontispiece of "Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians. . . ", detail
  • Distribution of the American Art Union Prizes at the Tabernacle, Broadway, New York, 24th Dec. 1847, detail
  • George Washington
  • The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton)
  • Frederick Douglass
  • The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowa
  • Belshazzar's Feast
  • Greek Slave
  • M. B. Brady’s New Photographic Gallery, Corner of Broadway and Tenth Street, New York, detail
  • Hosmer on ladder with sculpture of Thomas Hart Benton, detail
  • Frederic Church’s painting "The Heart of the Andes" as displayed in the fine art gallery at the Metropolitan Fair in New York
  • Young Husband: First Marketing
  • Kindred Spirits
  • Zenobia in Chains
  • The Heart of the Andes
  • Negro Life at the South or Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South
  • The Freedman
  • The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
  • Varnishing day at the New York National Academy of Design, detail
  • The Women's Life Class, detail
  • Castellated rocks on the Chugwater, S.R. Gifford, Artist, on Right, detail
  • The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine
  • The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
  • At the Water Trough
  • Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic)
  • Turkish Page
  • The Two Doorways
  • The West Wind
  • People looking southwest from Manufactures Building, detail
  • James McNeill Whistler Standing at a Press in His Paris (rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs) Studio, detail
  • Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Class at Art Students League, detail
  • The Old Violin
  • Venice
  • Hide and Seek
  • Fifth Avenue in Winter
  • The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse)
  • In the Loge
  • Sita and Sarita
  • The Flatiron
  • The Banjo Lesson
  • Installation view of the Armory Show in New York, detail
  • Mary Benson with some of her baskets, detail
  • The Helter Skelter, Luna Park, Coney Island, NY, detail
  • Adolescent Girl, a Spinner, in a Carolina Cotton Mill
  • The Coffee Line
  • The Steerage
  • Movement: Fifth Avenue
  • Synchromy No. 2, To Light (from Synchromy in Blue-Violet Quartet)
  • Series I – From the Plains
  • Fountain (photograph of a readymade by Marcel Duchamp)
  • Protest held by the John Reed Club and Artists’ Union, detail
  • A newsstand in Omaha, Nebraska, November 1938, detail
  • Children at a free Federal Art Project art class, July 14, 1939, detail
  • The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted
  • Midwest (from America Today)
  • American Gothic
  • Swing Landscape
  • Nighthawks
  • Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers
  • Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children, Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California (known as Migrant Mother)
  • Jackson Pollock, detail
  • Installation view of Navajo Indians sand painting on March 26, 1941, at the exhibition Indian Art of the United States, detail
  • The Abstract Gallery, designed by Frederick Kiesler, one of the spaces in Peggy Guggenheim Art of This Century gallery in New York City, detail
  • Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949
  • Onement I
  • No. 61 (Rust and Blue) [Brown Blue, Brown on Blue]
  • The Blind Leading the Blind
  • Collection
  • Flag
  • Trolley—New Orleans
  • The Art Strike on the steps of the Met, May 22, 1970, detail
  • Judy Chicago addresses a gathering of volunteers in the Dinner Party Studio, detail
  • Black Panthers John Bowman and Emory Douglas in front of the Fillmore office, San Francisco, with several of Douglas’s artworks visible in background, detail
  • The Street
  • Campbell's Soup Cans
  • I Can See the Whole Room and There's Nobody in It
  • Untitled (Stack)
  • Diagram and Certificate for Wall Drawing number 49, 1970: A Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, Each with a Different Line Direction and Colour, and All Combinations
  • Contingent
  • The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear
  • Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid, Spain, 1992, detail
  • Installation view of AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall, Washington, DC, detail
  • Installation view of the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 4–June 20, 1993, detail
  • Untitled #66
  • Vietnam Veterans Memorial
  • Notary
  • Thomas
  • Public Enemy
  • Cabinetmaking, 1820–1960, detail of Mining the Museum installation
  • Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart
  • Map of North America, c. 1783
  • Map of the United States, c. 1850
  • Map of the United States, c. 1900
  • Map of the United States, 2000
  • Cartouche of New Amsterdam, detail
  • An Indian painted for the hunt: with three feathers, a bow and quiver
  • The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770, by a party of the 29th Regt
  • Plan of the city of Washington
  • The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, first building
  • Travelling on the Erie Canal
  • Jennie Fields, Trail of Tears survivor
  • Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington, DC
  • The Runaway
  • Dunker Church
  • East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail
  • Home Insurance Building
  • Five Cents a Spot
  • 291—Picasso-Braque Exhibition
  • I Want You for U.S. Army
  • Woman Suffrage Parade, May, 1914
  • At the Time of the Louisville Flood
  • Aerial view of clouds raised by an atomic bomb test explosion over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean
  • Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd at the March on Washington, DC, August 28, 1963
  • View of a collage, which includes several posters, in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, San Francisco, California
  • Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot of the first lunar landing mission, July 20, 1969
  • Demonstrators march in support of The Perfect Moment exhibition
  • World Trade Center site in the days following the terrorist attack that took place on September 11, 2001
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Contents
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Contents
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
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Foreword
Elizabeth Glassman
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
~The Terra Foundation for American Art is proud to provide this anthology, an unprecedented resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States to readers around the world. By bringing together in a single volume artworks and period documents spanning three centuries, Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
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About the Book
Francesca Rose
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
~Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources provides a historical, cultural, and social framework for learning, teaching, and critical thinking about its subject by offering a thoughtful selection of primary documents and artworks spanning three centuries. The book is intended to be a companion to a range of courses in American art and American...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
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Editorial Note
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
~The book’s editorial approach is deeply indebted to Sarah Burns and John Davis’s American Art to 1900: A Documentary History and follows the same penchant for maintaining the balance between transparency and ease of use. The following style guidelines are observed throughout to facilitate use of the volume:
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
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Introduction
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
~The texts gathered in this volume offer insights into the social, intellectual, cultural, and material worlds of the visual arts in the United States between 1750 and 2000. Many were written by artists, although critics, patrons, curators, and cultural commentators also have been enlisted to help illuminate the circumstances in which art was made, supported, and...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artArts and society

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1. Building Patronage and Institutions, 1750–1830
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Histories of the United States often begin with an evocation of the “first” contact made by European explorers with the territories that would become the American nation, but this is at best an imprecise and misleading enterprise. Was it the Norsemen who are thought to have visited New England as early as the eleventh century, or the Spanish military and religious men who first...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--History--Revolution, 1775–1783Museum exhibitsArt--Studying and teachingArts and society

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2. Landscape, Democracy, Race, 1830–1850
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
American historians refer to the period of the late 1820s to about 1850 as the Jacksonian Era, a way of indicating the importance of the polarizing figure of Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837, in nearly every aspect of politics, culture, and society in the United States during these years. Jackson was a leader like no other the young nation had seen. The first six presidents had all been...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artArt--Political aspectsSlavery--United StatesLandscape painting

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3. The Civil War and Its Aftermath, 1850–1870
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
The decade of the 1850s was, for many, a period of a satisfying coming of age. The Industrial Revolution, which had developed in the United States a bit later than in England, had matured, and the nation was on its way to being a global economic presence (despite a financial depression in 1857). The Gadsden Purchase in 1853 transferred Mexican land (this time without going to war) to the US...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--History--Civil War, 1861–1865Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865–1877)Slavery--United StatesGenre painting, American

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4. The Gilded Age, 1870–1885
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
When former Union general Ulysses S. Grant was elected president on the Republican ticket in 1868, defeating the sitting Democratic candidate, Andrew Johnson, many hoped that he would be able push through the reforms of Reconstruction ...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artArts and societyNaturalism in artArt criticism

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5. A New Internationalism, 1885–1900
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Cultural commentators writing about the American scene during the 1880s and 1890s might be forgiven for assuming that they lived in the most important place on Earth at the most exciting time in modern history ...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artImpressionism (Art)--United StatesArts and societyArt--Studying and teaching

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6. Progressivism and Modernism, 1900–1918
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
At the end of the nineteenth century, philosopher John Dewey was astonished by the transformations wrought in the span of a lifetime. The United States had gone from being a respectable manufacturing nation to an industrial powerhouse, surpassing the production of Britain, France, and Germany combined. In an 1899 lecture, published the next year in The School and Society, Dewey listed the...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artModernism (Art)Arts and societyPhotography--United States

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7. Prosperity and Depression, 1918–1939
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
In overview, the period from 1918 to 1939 presents a neat package. It is bracketed by world wars and bifurcated by the stock market crash of 1929, with an economic expansion during the 1920s on one side and the Great Depression of the 1930s on the other. On closer view, the story is less easily told.
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artArts and societyModernism (Art)African American artists

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8. War and Cold War, Anxiety and Affluence, 1939–1960
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
As the German army swept across Europe in 1939 to 1941, and as Japanese forces conquered the Pacific, the United States remained wary of being drawn into another tragic and costly overseas war. Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941 ended the uncertainty; the country became unified behind President Roosevelt’s ensuing declaration of war. The first several...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artArts and societyAbstract Expressionism--United StatesModernism (Art)

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9. Political Polarization, Counterculture and Reaction, 1960–1980
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of extraordinary turbulence in the United States politically, socially, economically, and culturally. The visual arts thrived in this atmosphere, in some cases deeply engaged in the tumult, in some cases relatively detached from it. A number of important artists were motivated to write about their work in manifestos, statements, interviews, and theoretical essays....
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artArts and societyRacismConceptual art--United States

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10 Culture Wars and Post-modernism, 1980–2000
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 marked a decisive turn toward political conservatism that reshaped national life for the rest of the decade and beyond. Reagan had been a movie actor who served two terms as governor of California, during which he established his conservative credentials by using state police and National Guard troops to suppress demonstrating students at the...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Subjects: Artists' writingsUnited States--In artArts and societyPostmodernismInstallations (Art)

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Maps
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Maps Chronology 1500–2000
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art

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Chronology 1500–2000
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Chronology 1500–2000
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art

Access to this content is only available to subscribers. If you are at an institution that currently subscribes to the A&AePortal, please login to your VPN before accessing the site. If you have already purchased an individual subscription, please sign in to your account to access the content. Learn more about subscriptions.

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Acknowledgments
Francesca Rose
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
~For every anthology of this nature, there is a script involving comparable steps, give or take, and countless decisions. Each milestone reached along the way defies today’s digital pace. But the tireless exchanges over continents, the many challenges met, and the endless deliberations over details that paved the years gone by between the initial idea and the...
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
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Index
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Index
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Read
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Credits
John Davis, Michael Leja
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
Credits
Author
John Davis, Michael Leja
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Copyright© 2020, Terra Foundation for American Art
Read
Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
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