| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Rosand. The Invention of Painting in America. (The Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. Pp. xxiv, 210. $29.50.
This book's startling title announces David Rosand's enterprise: to examine American artists' task, from colonial painters such as John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) to the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s, of defining what it means to be an artist. Delivered as the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at Columbia University, this short, very fine book proposes a new way of looking at the nation's history of painting. Rather than focusing on what artists would paint, Rosand asks us to look at how they would paint and why.	1
Earlier scholars, trying to define "what is American about American art," posited American paintings' dependence on citizens' practical minds, fascination with the new world as observed, and distrust of beauty. For these reasons, historians explained, painters avoided obvious brushstrokes or other evidence of their individuality. Exceptionalism—the theory that Americans have a distinctive culture—permeated art historical scholarship about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as late as the work of Barbara Novak in the 1980s. After the "triumph" of Abstract Expressionism in 1950, the task of finding continuity within the flow of two centuries of American painting became more complicated, but historians such as John McCoubrey in The American Tradition in Painting (1963, rpt. 2000), posited that an emphasis on vision linked early American artists such as Copley and their modern successors.	. . .

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