September 14, 2012: Augustus Saint-Gaudens

[There are few Boston sites that I would more highly recommend for a fall visit—for anybody, from tourists to lifelong residents, students to seniors, and American Studiers of all varieties—than the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For this week’s series, I’ll be blogging about five topics connected to the Museum and its historical and cultural contexts. Please add your responses, and your suggestions for other unique American sites and experiences, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the artist whose inspiring American and international legacy is written in stone.

I’ve already said a good bit in this space about Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Irish American sculptor and Boston Cosmopolitan par excellance: first in this post on his most inspiring work, Boston’s Robert Gould Shaw Memorial; and then in his March 1^st Memory Day nomination. Saint-Gaudens has a great deal in common with the week’s other figures: not just in his artistic and cultural community and relationships, such as his lifelong working friendship with the architects Stanford White and Charles McKim; not just as an international traveler who brought inspiration from all those places back to his work on distinctly American monuments and memorials; but also and most especially in his dual and complementary desires for American art and society. Like all of the week’s focal figures, that is, Saint-Gaudens sought both to more fully link America to the old world (in every sense) and to bring it more successfully into its own new world future.

Two of Saint-Gaudens’ other impressive public sculptures and monuments exemplify that balance. His “German Sherman Led by Victory,” located in the Grand Army Plaza of New York’s Central Park, took Saint-Gaudens more than a decade to complete; the result weds the old and new worlds explicitly, in its iconography and in its link of a distinctly mythological figure (one sculpted as such) to a highly realitistic one (in both content and style). Far more intimate and yet just as compelling and thematically rich is his “Adams Memorial or Grief,” a sculpture located in Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Cemetery; the sculpture, a tribute to Henry Adams’ wife Clover after her 1885 suicide, casts that real person and American as a mythological figure, one generally known as Grief but also called by Saint-Gaudens “The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding.” In some ways the sculpture echoes dramatically Sargent’s end-of-life portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner; but in others it weds such a humanistic portrayal to millennium-old mythological narratives, bringing the American present and the world’s past together in particularly striking ways.

To me, that connection and combination sums up quite concisely the goals of all this week’s figures, and and certainly of Isabella Stewart Gardner and her Museum. There’s no question that Gardner and her fellow Cosmopolitans loved much of what they found in Europe, especially its historical and cultural depth and breadth. But there’s likewise no question that these artists, authors, and activists worked throughout their lives to strengthen America, to help construct an American culture, community, and tradition that could learn from the best of and ultimately rival those in Europe. Such a goal might fly in the face of the new world mythos, and of American ideals and narratives of independence and self-making and the like. But once we dissociate American history and identity from such narratives—and as I have argued many times, there’s very good reason to do so—we open ourselves up to the possibility that Gardner and her fellow Cosmopolitans were right: that one of the best ways to build an American future is to learn about and incorporate the cultural, historical, artistic, and inspiring strengths of the world beyond.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So what do you think? Thoughts of this post or any of the week’s posts? Other unique sites or figures you’d highlight?

9/14 Memory Day nominee: Margaret Sanger, the nurse, sex educator, and birth control activist whose founding of Planned Parenthood and radical views remain controversial to this day, but who unquestionably helped expand 20^th century American women’s options and futures.

September 13, 2012: An Education by Henry Adams

[There are few Boston sites that I would more highly recommend for a fall visit—for anybody, from tourists to lifelong residents, students to seniors, and American Studiers of all varieties—than the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For this week’s series, I’ll be blogging about five topics connected to the Museum and its historical and cultural contexts. Please add your responses, and your suggestions for other unique American sites and experiences, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On what we can all learn from Henry Adams’ European adventures and perspective.

It’s difficult to overstate how talented and impressive Henry Adams was. Adams retired from his Harvard Professorship of Medieval History in 1877 at the age of 39, but not before he had pioneered the methods of scientific history that would come to define the profession; later, while doing plenty of other things, he served as president of the American Historical Association (1893-1894) and wrote a 9-volume History of the United States of America, 1801-1817 (1891-1896). Upon that retirement he promptly resumed his pre-Harvard career as one of the nation’s foremost political and social journalists, and during his time pursuing that career in Washington also wrote two complex and important novels (on the second of which more below).  And after his wife tragically committed suicide in 1885, he traveled the world extensively, turning those experiences into some of the most insightful and significant works of travel and autobiographical writing in American literary history, including the amazing Education of Henry Adams (1907).

There’s a lot that all Americans can learn from Adams’ life, career, and writings, but in following up yesterday’s post on the Cosmopolitans, and in light of the week’s overall focus on the Gardner Museum, I wanted to highlight two distinct and equally valuable sides to his European-influenced perspective. In two of those later works, Adams makes a clear case for the value of Europe, on its own terms and for America: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904) brings together travel writing and poetic reflections to argue for what these medieval spaces and the communities that built them have to offer; and Chapter 25 of Education, “The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900),” contrasts the Virgin of Chartres with the most famous feature of the Paris Exposition of 1900, the Dynamo engine, to argue for the value of remembering historical and spiritual ideas in a technological and modern age. In neither text is Adams simply or willfully antiquarian—he admits his own fascination with the Dynamo, for example—, making his ability to highlight and argue for the best of the past and its places, icons, and ideas that much more nuanced and convincing.

Adams’ earlier and less overt European influences have just as much to offer Americans, however. He spent most of the 1860s across the Atlantic, first as a student and then serving as his father’s private secretary while the former was Lincoln’s ambassador to England, and his work and writings in the 1870s and 1880s reflect those experiences and the impact that Europe had already made on Adams. Take Adams’ second novel, the social and cultural romance Esther (1884). Many readers and critics have focused on the similarities between the titular heroine and Adams’ wife Clover, parallels that of course became more tragic after Clover’s subsequent suicide. But in many ways Esther is more broadly representative and exemplary, a type of the “new woman” that would come to dominate late Victorian fiction and society. She did so more in English and European works and conversations than in American ones, however—or at least her rise was not greeted with quite as much hostility across the Atlantic, as compared for example to the brutalities directed at American suffragettes. And so what Adams’ novel really offers is a European-influenced take on a new American woman, one willing to see her with more complexity and balance than many American authors of the period could have managed.

Final Gardner Museum link tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Lessons from Europe, or any international connections, that you’d highlight?

9/13 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two turn of the 20^th century pioneers in their respective fields, Walter Reed and Sherwood Anderson.

September 12, 2012: The Boston Cosmopolitans

[There are few Boston sites that I would more highly recommend for a fall visit—for anybody, from tourists to lifelong residents, students to seniors, and American Studiers of all varieties—than the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For this week’s series, I’ll be blogging about five topics connected to the Museum and its historical and cultural contexts. Please add your responses, and your suggestions for other unique American sites and experiences, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the elite, snooty, and deeply inspiring community of which Gardner was an integral part.

As Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) convincingly demonstrated, Americans have long had some serious issues with our cultural elites. I don’t think those issues necessarily go all the way back—Ralph Waldo Emerson sold out his highly intellectual lectures—nor have they ever been an uncontested trend, but there’s no question that to be considered a know-it-all in America is generally not a good thing; note Willy Loman’s casual dismissal of young Bernard as precisely such an egghead, compared to Willy’s own football-playing Adonis-like sons Biff and Happy (the three men’s respective fates reveal that Miller doesn’t share Willy’s disdain, of course). And if you’re a know-it-all who also tends to prefer European culture to American, and who has the money and ability to pursue that preference through travel? Forget about it.

That’s an over-simplified but not inaccurate description of the Boston Cosmopolitans, the group of artistic and cultural elites—including Gardner as well as such figures as Henry Adams, Henry and William James, Charles Eliot Norton, Augustus Saint Gaudens, and more—whose presence on both sides of the Atlantic significantly influenced turn of the 20^th century society. Like Gardner, these figures came from prominent American families and only gained in prominence in their own lives, used that prominence and its accompanying wealth to travel extensively, developed strong affinities for and attachments to Europe (Henry James spent much of his adult life and set most of his novels there, for example), and generally constructed international and, yes, cosmopolitan identities. Each individual is worth his or her own attention and analysis—and I’ll have more to say about Adams and Saint Gaudens in the next two posts—but collectively, the Cosmopolitans certainly exemplified a new possibility for transnational experience and identity, one that would seem to place them distinctly outside of America even if we refuse to buy into anti-intellectualism or its ilk.

Or did it? In The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters (2008), scholar and long-time mentor and friend to this American Studier Mark Rennella seeks to reclaim the Cosmopolitans, both from critiques of them as elitist or out of touch and from the idea that they were not centrally and inspiringly American. In Rennella’s argument, the key components to the Cosmopolitans’ lives, such as new modes of travel and international connection, were central features of their era, and their experiences can thus serve to illustrate the best possibilities for both the American and world communities in that moment and beyond. Moreover, as Rennella likewise notes, the Gardner Museum itself exemplifies the Cosmopolitans’ lifelong and genuine desire to use those experiences to benefit their native county and their fellow Americans—Gardner may have constructed her Museum out of a Venetian palace and filled it with (mostly) European art and culture, but she built it in the Fenway and hoped that it would become an important part of the city and of America in the centuries to come. That’s the heart of the Cosmopolitan project, Rennella and I would both argue, and it’s a very American and powerful one.

Next Gardner Museum link tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? What’s your take on this community or these questions?

9/12 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two ground-breaking, boundary-pushing, controversial and inspiring 20^th century cultural icons, H.L. Mencken and Jesse Owens.

September 11, 2012: John Singer Sargent

[There are few Boston sites that I would more highly recommend for a fall visit—for anybody, from tourists to lifelong residents, students to seniors, and American Studiers of all varieties—than the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For this week’s series, I’ll be blogging about five topics connected to the Museum and its historical and cultural contexts. Please add your responses, and your suggestions for other unique American sites and experiences, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the diverse talents of the Museum’s most prominently featured American painter.

As I noted in yesterday’s post, John Singer Sargent was perhaps Isabella Stewart Gardner’s closest friend, across much of her inspiring life—his portrait of a young Gardner in Venice is probably the most famous image of her, and his portrait of the aging Gardner represents one of (to reiterate what I said yesterday) the most humanizing and powerful American images period. He also painted many other portraits of Gardner in between, and many of them, along with other Sargent works and paintings by some of his American contemporaries, are prominently featured in one of the Museum’s most intimate and compelling rooms. In a lot of ways Sargent could be said to be the Museum’s Muse, just as Gardner seems to have been his, and taken together the two of them offer as impressive a picture of the American artistic scene (particularly as it came into its own at the turn of the 20^th century) as any I’ve encountered.

Just as the Gardner Museum’s impressiveness goes well beyond Sargent’s presence, of course, so too does  Sargent’s importance to American art extend beyond the Museum’s Venetian walls. Sargent’s most prominent and influential works were his portraits, and I would argue that he brought the same kind of pioneering realistic style and perspective to these works that literary contemporaries such as William Dean Howells and Henry James did to their novels. Sargent wasn’t alone in that advancement, but he certainly ranks alongside his sometimes more acclaimed peers such as Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer in helping move American portraiture and painting forward in this way. Similarly, Sargent certainly built upon the legacies of prior prominent innovators of the American portrait, such as Gilbert Stuart and Charles Wilson Peale, but he extended and amplified their efforts and to my mind deserves the same place in our national artistic tradition.

Yet Sargent’s stylistic and thematic innovations aren’t limited to that one genre. His biography and life were even more international than Gardner’s—he was born in Italy to American parents, trained with Italian, German, and French masters, and spent much of his adult life in Europe—and he brought that transnational identity to his artistic career. Stylistically, for example, his training with the Frenchman Charles Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran emphasized a new method of painting directly on the canvas (rather than drawing and prepping first), one that certainly contributed to the more humanistic and realistic feel to Sargent’s works. And perhaps due to his increased exposure to the French Impressionists, Sargent turned later in his career to watercolors, producing more than 700 such works between 1900 and 1914; moreover, in those works he consistently portrayed European scenes, including many drawn from his and Gardner’s beloved Venice. If Eakins and Homer are thus more clearly and overtly American artists, Sargent exemplifies the same international influences and inspiration as Gardner—and to the same great effect.

Next Gardner Museum link tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other American artists you’d highlight?

9/11 Memory Day nominee: Daniel Akaka, the soon-to-be-retired Hawaii Senator who is both the first Native Hawaiian Senator and the chamber’s only Chinese American, and whose life of public service exemplifies many of America’s highest ideals.

September 10, 2012: Isabella Stewart Gardner

[There are few Boston sites that I would more highly recommend for a fall visit—for anybody, from tourists to lifelong residents, students to seniors, and American Studiers of all varieties—than the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For this week’s series, I’ll be blogging about five topics connected to the Museum and its historical and cultural contexts. Please add your responses, and your suggestions for other unique American sites and experiences, for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the inspiring life and the legacy of the woman herself.

On the surface, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s life would seem to exemplify an upper class experience of Gilded Age America. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier one—her husband John “Jack” Gardner was the descendent of generations of Boston Brahmins on both sides of his family—and benefitted from those connections immensely: traveling extensively throughout Europe and Asia, befriending numerous painters and artists, serving as a patron to many of them as well as to organizations such as the Boston Symphony, commandeering the Boston social scene for many decades, and so on. It was not a life without significant losses—her only child, a son, died at the age of two; she outlived her beloved husband by more than a quarter-century—but certainly it was a life of great privilege and all that comes with it; as Bruce Springsteen put it, “a life of leisure and a pirate’s treasure / Don’t make much for tragedy.”

Indeed they don’t—but the key question to ask of Isabella Stewart Gardner is what she did make of her life, and the answer is on multiple levels very inspiring. In her private life, Gardner followed her passions and loves without (it seems) the slightest worry about what was considered proper or how she might be perceived—some of those loves were stereotypically highbrow (Venice, the opera, priceless art and antiques), but others were anything but (Red Sox baseball and Harvard football, boxing and horse racing, entertainments and adventures wherever and however she could find them). In response to the rumors and gossip that often sprang up around her, Gardner simply noted, “Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth” and continued to live her life. Even more inspiringly, her relationships with the artists and authors she befriended were far from simply financial or one-way streets—John Singer Sargent, the painter to whom she was particularly close (and on whom more tomorrow), considered her a lifelong friend, and his painting of her from two years before her death is one of the most sensitive and powerful portraits ever produced in America.

Gardner’s legacy, as embodied in and exemplified by the Museum, is more inspring still. Literally every aspect of the Museum—known at its 1903 opening as Fenway Court—represents Gardner’s own design and inspiration, from its Fenway location to its use of a transported three-story Venetian palace, the arrangements and specifics of each room to the courtyard’s precise details of colors, flowers, and more. Gardner’s will bequeathed a substantial amount to the upkeep and expansion of the Museum, with the requirement that it maintain her vision and choices. And most importantly, that vision was anything but a Gilded Age stereotype: she hoped that the Museum could serve “for the education and enrichment of the public forever,” and openly and passionately hoped that all Americans could have the chance to visit the Museum and experience its artistic, cultural, historical, and educational environment and effects. Such goals are perhaps not unlike other Gilded Age figures’ Gospel of Wealth, of philanthropic giving coupled to vast fortunes—but in Gardner’s case, she offered not just her wealth but every inch of her identity and perspective, of what she cared about and what she most valued. You can feel that gift in every inch of the Museum.

Next Gardner Museum link tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on the Gardner? Other unique places and spaces you’d highlight?

9/10 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two iconoclastic, influential, and impressive 20^th century American authors and voices, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Stephen Jay Gould.

September 8-9, 2012: Fall Forward, Part Five

[I’m on my first sabbatical this fall, and will be working on a bunch of different projects. All of them could benefit from the input and ideas of my fellow American Studiers, and so this week I’ll be blogging about a handful of those projects and asking for your contributions (not financial, it’s a paid sabbatical). I’d love to hear your thoughts! And please feel free to share some of what you’re working on too, so I can return the favor.]

On three ways to get involved with the New England American Studies Association.

I’ve written a lot about NEASA in this space, of course, including numerous posts on last fall’s conference at Plimoth Plantation and this spring’s colloquium at the House of the Seven Gables. For this fall’s conference (to be held on October 12-13 at the University of Rhode Island’s Providence campus) I have passed the organizational baton to the current president, Sara Sikes, her co-vice presidents Elif Armbruster and Akeia Benard, and a great conference committee; but that doesn’t mean I won’t stay connected to NEASA this fall (I hope to have such a connection throughout my career), nor that I won’t keep pimping the organization here. To wit, here are three ways you can and should further your own connection to NEASA, wherever you live and work:

1)      The Pre-Conference Blog: Just as we did last year, we’re hosting a pre-conference blog where many of the conference’s speakers and participants are sharing their work and ideas ahead of October’s conversations. There are already a ton of really interesting posts up, on many different aspects of digital humanities and American Studies. Check ‘em out, add comments and responses, and keep coming back over the next couple months!

2)      The conference itself:  Is shaping up very nicely, including a full and diverse program, great keynote and plenary panels, a Friday evening reading and event, and a lot more. All of that and many other details are at that link; just as was the case last year, we’re offering a $20 Attendee registration rate, so if you’re anywhere near Providence, please consider joining us in mid-October! But no matter where you are, we plan to have a significant online presence for the conference, including a Twitter feed and more. So keep your eyes on that space, this space, and the web’s American Studies and #dh spaces in general, and join us from everywhere!

3)      The year to come: Like many such organizations, NEASA depends for its continued existence and strength on the participation and voices of as large and diverse a group of American Studiers as possible. For some of that you’d need to be in New England, and so partly I’m speaking to you guys—consider joining the NEASA Council! Watch this space and come to the spring colloquium (wherever it is and whatever it ends up focusing on)! But increasingly, organizations like this are digital and online as well, and so if you want to take part, not just in the fall’s efforts but in all that NEASA does moving forward, you can and should do so from anywhere in the world. Email me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu) for more info about any of this, or if you’re interested in adding your voice right now, and thanks!

Next series next week,

Ben

PS. What are you working on this fall?

9/8 Memory Day nominee: Joshua Chamberlain, for all of that and for his inspiring life beyond.

9/9 Memory Day nominee: Otis Redding, who in his tragically short life created some of the most compelling and powerful American music of the century.

September 7, 2012: Fall Forward, Part Four

[I’m on my first sabbatical this fall, and will be working on a bunch of different projects. All of them could benefit from the input and ideas of my fellow American Studiers, and so this week I’ll be blogging about a handful of those projects and asking for your contributions (not financial, it’s a paid sabbatical). I’d love to hear your thoughts! And please feel free to share some of what you’re working on too, so I can return the favor.]

On one specific question for my fellow American Studiers about my current book in progress.

Despite all of my goals and plans for those other projects, and despite the one I’ll discuss in the weekend’s post and lots of other things that are percolating as well, I have to admit that to my mind a truly successful sabbatical will mean one thing and one thing only: the completion of a manuscript for my fourth book, Hard-Won Hope: How American Novels Find Light in Our Darkest Histories. As I wrote in this post, my most explicitly focused on the project, the book certainly owes its existence to my blogs, both the more personal one I kept for much of 2007 and, of course, this one. That makes it a communal product to be sure, the result of the ideas I’ve shared here (loyal readers will find that the book’s focal texts have almost all been covered in this space, often multiple times) and of the kinds of conversations I’ve had and connections I’ve made here. I would and will say the same of my hopefully forthcoming third book (currently under publisher’s review) and, frankly, of everything I write and work from now on.

Compared to the other projects I’ve discussed this week, though, I still see a book as much more fundamentally individual and private, as something that a writer works on in his or her own space before sharing it with the communities beyond. I’m also superstitious enough not to want to say too much about it yet, as I’m afraid that might jinx the fall’s work in some way (not sure how exactly, but superstitions don’t have to be logical or rational to take hold, of course; don’t get me started on when the count is 2-2 and there are 2 outs and 2 runners on). So while I expect to provide at least one or two reminders and updates on those other projects as the sabbatical moves along, not least to make sure to give you (and all those new readers who will be joining us in the months to come!) lots of chances to share your voices and ideas, I don’t necessarily plan to provide the same play by play when it comes to Hard-Won Hope. To quote Westley, or more accurately the Dread Pirate Roberts, “Learn to live with disappointment” (it’ll be tough I know, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to cope).

But with all of that said, I’m also a big believer that very few of our ideas are solely our own, that research is a communal process, and that each of my prior books has come as much out of conversation as out of the voices inside my own head. And when it comes to the book’s starting points, as described in that above-linked blog post, I have one main question on which I’d love to hear your thoughts, fellow American Studiers. My central idea, that it is only out of an engagement with our darkest histories that these novels’ characters (and thus readers) are able to find utopian futures, seeks in part to bring together two very different American traditions: the jeremiad, warnings about our fallen and sinful nature; and millennialism, the belief that we’re moving toward a glorious future. So my question is this: do you guys know of other ways, in our history, in our culture, in our scholarship, or anywhere else, that these traditions have been brought together? Ideas or places where realistic (if not pessimistic) critiques of our failings and yet utopian hopes for our future can coexist, and in fact have depended on one another? I’d love to learn about such ideas, so I can put mine in conversation with them explicitly and clearly.

Thanks in advance! Last fall project this weekend,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

9/7 Memory Day nominee: Jacob Lawrence!