Framing America: A Social History of American Art

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Thames & Hudson, 2008 - Art - 600 pages
For more than a generation, critics and scholars have been revising and expanding the customary definition of American art. A tradition once assumed to be mainly European and oriented toward painting and sculpture has been enriched by the inclusion of other media such as ceramics, needlework, and illustration, and the work of previously marginalized groups such as Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Now, in a brilliant combination of original scholarship and synthesis, Frances Pohl's Framing America provides the first comprehensive survey of this new, enlarged vision of American art. Here are the many strands of North America's history and visual culture: the first contacts of the Spanish with the Aztecs and other Native Americans; the post-Revolutionary definition of nationhood; the visionary feeling for landscape and nature; the images of social and military conflict of the nineteenth century; and the tempering of the twentieth century's heady plunge into modernism by the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the culture wars. Pohl's account is an adroitly inclusive fusion of many themes. As our appreciation of the rich cultural diversity of American life has grown, our sense of American art.

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Contents

Preface
10
The Spanish and the Aztecs
20
The Northern Territories of New Spain
26
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Frances K. Pohl is the Dr. Mary Ann Vanderzyl Reynolds Professor of Humanities and Professor of Art History at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since moving to Pomona in 1985, she has taught a wide variety of courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American art. Her work has focused on the art of the United States, in particular the work of Ben Shahn, about whom she has written two books, and the relationship between the visual arts and working-class culture. Professor Pohl has taught in the United States for many years, but her Canadian origins give her a unique continental perspective on American art.

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