Choice-Rezension

Kammen (Cornell Univ.) first presented this material as the 1989 Tandy Lectures at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Despite his fine credentials and the book's splendid title (taken from a painting by Arthur B. Davies), the author does not adequately discuss the art he illustrates. Nor does he demonstrate the more complex role of the American past that he proposes for American painting. He suggests three promising themes; truth, time, and history; time and space; and the old house and elm trees, and reproduces about 100 lesser-known American works. But his jumbled comments are more ahistorical than analytical. His pat appraisal of Eakins is typical: "Around 1880 American artists seem to have acquired an obsession with notions of 'real memory' and 'remembrance,' as though currents in the culture had thrown a switch. That year Thomas Eakins painted his Retrospection, in which a pensive young woman wearing an old-fashioned dress sits in a homely chair, thereby becoming, perhaps, both the subject as well as an object of memory" (p.41). For a more useful overview of history painting in America see Grand Illusions by W.H. Gerdts and M. Thistlethwaite (CH, Dec'88). For thematic surveys of American painting consult Barbara Novak's American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (CH, Jul'70) and her Nature and Culture (CH, Oct'80). Meadows of Memory is recommended for research collections for its illustrations and useful references. M. Hamel-Schwulst; Towson State University