Internationalizing the History of American Art

American art history is a remarkably young, but rapidly growing, discipline. Membership in the Association of Historians of American Art, founded in 1979, now totals nearly 600. As a result of this growth, geographical and cultural borders no longer contain the field. American art history has become “internationalized,” represented by scholars and exhibitions around the globe. While this international transmission and exchange of ideas will certainly prove to be valuable, it has been left largely unexamined. Internationalizing the History of American Art begins a critical examination of this exchange, showing how it has become part of the maturation of American art history.

In this volume, a distinguished group of scholars considers the shaping and dissemination of the history of American art domestically and internationally, past and present, theoretically and practically, from a variety of intellectual positions and experiences. To do so, they draw on a literature that, collectively, constitutes a bibliography for the future of the field. Three sections—“American Art and Art History,” “Display and Exposition,” and “Post-1945 Investments”—provide the structure in which the contributors examine the existing narrative framework for the history of American art. This examination indicates a direction for the field and a future historiography that is shaped by international dialogue.

Barbara Groseclose is Professor and Graduate Chair in the Department of the History of Art at Ohio State University. She was a Distinguished Chair of American Studies in Utrecht (1994) and in Florence (2001) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2006). Her major publications are Nineteenth-Century American Art (2000) and British Sculpture and the Company Raj (1995).

Jochen Wierich is Curator of Art at Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art. He has published articles in such periodicals as Winterthur Portfolio, American Art, American Studies International, and Film and History. He is a contributing author to a number of exhibition catalogues, including New World: Creating an American Art (2007) and The Eight and American Modernisms (2009).