AGNSW Symposium: Revolutionary Ideas

Welcome, Michael Brand, director, Art Gallery of NSW and Jennifer Milam, Sydney Intellectual History Network, University of Sydney

Laura Auricchio is Associate Professor of Art History and Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School in New York. ‘American art’ has always been created in a context of international exchange. In the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the art that we now consider American was made by artists who spent many years living and studying in Europe, and whose work was steeped in European traditions. Yet other US-born artists working in the same period set out to develop a distinctly national idiom, forging styles and focusing on subjects that, in their view, expressed the unique character of their native land. Is one of these groups more American than the other? Or do they represent two different but related understandings of what it means to be American? Looking closely at a selection of paintings by artists ranging from the European-inspired John Singleton Copley, Mary Cassatt and F Childe Hassam to the self-consciously American Edward Hicks and Frederic Remington, this presentation proposes a variety of answers to the central question: what makes ‘American art’ American.

Kate Fullagar is a senior lecturer in modern history at Macquarie University. This paper traces both the broad history and the European representation of Native Americans through the 18th and 19th centuries. Specifically it looks at the rise and fall of two key ‘revolutionary ideas’ in this period. The first is that, far from a tale of destruction or neglect, Europeans in 18th-century North America in fact accommodated indigenous people more often than not. This engagement, however, narrowed after the American War of Independence when several key circumstantial factors changed for indigenous people. The second is that European representations of Native Americans during the early 18th century can be seen to stand for a critique of European activity just as often as they could for a confirmation, whereas into the 19th century their ‘savage’ attributes began to signify less and less with a European viewing public. Even while Native Americans began to shake off some initial stereotypes, their graphic representation became increasingly elegiac.

Jennifer Milam is Professor of Art History and 18th-century Studies at the University of Sydney. In a 4th of July letter written in 1805 to his granddaughter, Thomas Jefferson defined gardening as a fine art, 'not horticulture, but the art of embellishing grounds by fancy…it is nearly allied to landscape painting’. This talk looks at the relationship between landscape painting and garden design in 19th-century America. It considers how nature was perceived as an expression of democratic ideals in the formation of American identity following the Revolution of 1789. Although drawing on pastoral conventions established in Europe, American artists and garden designers were nevertheless keenly aware that the landscape presented elements for the creation of a novel visual language, full of promise for the future. The American landscape – extending further westward and the object of exploration – became a source of inspiration for forging a new nation.

Shane White is the Challis Professor of History and an Australian Professorial Fellow in the History Department at the University of Sydney. Nearly 70 years ago now the great novelist Ralph Ellison asked: 'Can a people live and develop for over 300 years simply by reacting?’ He went on: 'Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?’ Bearing this admonition in mind, White will talk about slavery, and the way white painters have depicted the so-called 'Peculiar Institution’. Slavery was central to American development in both the 18th and 19th centuries and its legacy still helps shape the United States to this day. Then the talk jumps to the 20th century to look at the Great Migration and examine those who, in search of what Richard Wright called 'the warmth of other suns’, moved to Harlem. In the 1920s, Harlem became the Negro Mecca, the Black Metropolis, the black capital of the world. It was a place of wonder that inspired the Harlem Renaissance. As the then recently coined Negro adage put it: 'I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than Governor of Georgia’.