Book Review

The liner notes promise that Annie Cohen-Solal's Painting American "offers an utterly new understanding of one of the great sea changes in cultural history." It would be more correct, however, to describe this study as a broad, ambitious synthesis based on a venerable model of modernist progress and seldom departing from canonical figures and narratives. As the title suggests, the focus is on transatlantic artistic exchanges or, more precisely, the looming presence of French cultural authority in the history of American painting from the Gilded Age to the mid-twentieth century.

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Cohen-Solal begins by examining the critical response that greeted the American paintings section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. Anticipating triumph, the Americans instead found a cold reception that took them to task for adhering to an old-fashioned style of painting especially evident in the predominance of large, panoramic, sublime landscapes. This humiliation sparked the Americans' determination to refashion themselves as modern cosmopolitans in a French mold. In the course of the next seventy-odd years, American artists learned from, competed with, and eventually surpassed their French mentors. With Jackson Pollock, the "first real [American] master," the United States at long last achieved cultural independence.

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