The Art of History and Vice Versa

Jim Farrell

February 4, 2010

We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all

day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.

William Kittredge

Elements of Historical Thinking

• Chronology: Thinking in time.

 • Causation: One way that things in time are related.

• Context: Things happen in the midst of other things, and they’re mutually influential.

• Complexification: The only simple truth is that there are no simple truths. Multiple causation.

• Contingency: At any given moment, anything can happen.

 • The wisdom of whys. Not just what happened but why it happened.

Doing “dense facts”In approaching our subject of choice, we should not only look straight at it but travel around and beyond it, watching how it connects into concentric fields raying from its center outwards.

Gene Wise, “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies”

 

Five interconnected steps to achieve this “perspectivistic method:”

1) Focus on an experience in the culture

2) Identify the various fields surrounding the experience (art, literature, politics, business, ideas, family, peers, etc.)

3) Learn the distinctive forms of expressive media of each field

4) Connect the fields to one another

5) Know that it's not done when it's done

“Texting” America: or “Image-ination”

• 1) Text (microscope): What do we see?

• 2) Context (macroscope): What did the painters see around them?

 • 3) Subtext: What subtle meanings might be in the text?

Are there implicit as well as explicit meanings?

 • 4) Contest: How have people interpreted the meanings

of this text, then and now?

Emmanuel Leutze, “Washington Crossing the Delaware”

John Trumbull, “The Declaration of Independence” (1817-19)

Emmanuel Leutze, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”

Albert Bierstadt, “Looking Down Yosemite Valley” (1865)

George Caleb Bingham, “The County Election” (1852)

George Catlin, “Painting the Portrait of a Mandan Chief” (1861/69)

“The Vanishing Indian” I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble

races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting

away at the approach of civilization...

For this purpose, I have designed to visit everytribe of Indians on the Continent, if my life shouldbe spared; for the purpose of procuring portraitsof distinguished Indians, of both sexes in each

tribe, painted in their native costume; accompaniedwith pictures of their villages, domestic habits,

games, mysteries, religious ceremonies, &c. withanecdotes, traditions, and history of their respective

nations.

If I should live to accomplish my design, the result ofmy labours will doubtless be interesting to futureages; who will have little else from which to judge

of the original inhabitants of this simple race ofbeings, who require but a few years more of themarch of civilization and death, to deprive them

all of their native customs and character.

Edward Curtis, “Vanishing Race”

Gilbert Stuart, “George Washington” (1796)

Matthew Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln”

Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother” (1936)

Norman Rockwell, “Freedom of Speech” (1943)

Norman Rockwell, “Freedom from Want” (1943)

Walker Evans, “Brooklyn Bridge” (1929)

Walker Evans, “Brooklyn Bridge” (1929)

Joseph Stella, “Brooklyn Bridge” (1919/1920)

Charles Sheeler, “American Landscape” (1930)

"Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers—it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression"

Charles Sheeler

Charles Demuth, “Incense of a New Church” (1921)

Charles Sheeler, “Water” (1945)

Hannah Greenlee, “Crazy Quilt” (c. 1896)

Susan McCord, “Grandmother’s Fan” (c. 1900)

Hannah Greenlee, “Crazy Quilt” (c. 1896)

Jackson Pollock, “The Key” (1946)

Susan McCord, “Grandmother’s Fan” (c. 1900)

Morgan Russell, “Synchromy” (1914-16)

William Van Allen, “Chrysler Building” (1926-30)