AMERICAN VISIONS: The Epic History of Art in America.<i> By Robert Hughes</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 635 pp., $65</i>

Robert Hughes, art critic for Time magazine, has taken on the daunting task of producing a popular history of the arts in the United States. Published to accompany an eight-part television series of the same name to air May 28, “American Visions” is a gorgeously illustrated book, written, he confesses, as “a personal view--always opinionated, verging at times on bias.” In this “introduction” to American art, Hughes makes his own opinions and biases most clear in his appraisal of the contemporary art scene, and his epic history becomes a one-dimensional portrait of art in America, providing him with an occasion to historicize the views put forth in his “The Culture of Complaint,” a series of lectures delivered at the New York Public Library in 1992 and later, published as a book.

Hints of what he is up to appear on the first page of the first chapter, when Hughes, who was born in Australia and has worked in the United States since 1970, proudly declares that he is not an “American” but a “resident alien” with a green card. But then, he observes, nearly everyone is an immigrant, lured to the “newness” of this new America, willing to start over, to reinvent himself or herself. This becomes a continuing motif throughout “American Visions.” “A culture raised on immigration cannot escape feelings of alienness, and must transcend them in two possible ways: by concentration on ‘identity,’ origins, and the past, or by faith in newness as a value in itself. No Europeans felt about the Old in quite the same way Americans came to, and none believed as intensely in the New. Both are massively present in the story of American art, a story that begins weakly and derivatively in the 16th and 17th centuries and acquires such seemingly irrefutable power by the end of the 20th.”

Keeping his focus within the borders of the 48 states, Hughes begins with the Spanish occupation, beginning in the 16th century, of Florida and then later of New Mexico and California with its missions, altars and Santos images. He quickly moves to the New England of the late 17th century with its gable-roofed saltbox houses, blanket chests, “great chairs” and crude early attempts at portraiture by anonymous sign painters. As immigration accelerated and religious Puritanism lost its grip, wealthy merchants (in part plying the slave trade) desired to emulate the lifestyles and accumulate the luxury goods of their English contemporaries. To serve this new patron class, professional artists immigrated to the major colonial ports, bringing collections of Old Master paintings, English prints and art supplies, and our home-grown artists and architects traveled to Europe to train and to see at first hand the acknowledged masterpieces. Prominent in this narrative are men who achieved international fame: Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale and especially Thomas Jefferson, whom Hughes admires for his extravagance, his inventiveness and his passion for architecture.

Hughes is forthright in stating that he will not cite recent scholarship nor offer a bibliography because the book, like the television series, is “not intended as a scholarly text.” But because he leans heavily on the scholarship and interpretive acumen of a number of art historians, fair play ought to demand that he find a way to acknowledge them. Throughout the text, I noted again and again the repackaging of insights already won by others through creative and painstaking research. Many of these scholars, moreover, have become combatants in the recent culture wars.

For example, the curators of the 1991 show, “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920,” which opened at the National Museum of American Art in Washington only weeks after the start of the Gulf War, caught hell for “unpatriotically” asserting that 19th century pictures of the West, of the glorious landscapes, stalwart pioneers and American Indian-fighting cowboys, functioned in their time as either propaganda for Western expansion or as a gloss on racist policies against Indians. One of the few critics who praised the show, Hughes has now popularized those revisionist interpretations and provided a larger circulation for such images as the 1903 photograph of New Jersey artist Charles Schreyvogel, who stands by his easel on the rooftop of his Hoboken apartment and paints an action scene of a male model costumed in U.S. Cavalry garb. The point here is worth repeating--that images of the West were literally constructed (rather than experienced) by the metropolitan culture of the East.

Two more chapters on 19th century painting, photography and architecture reflect recent art histories that incorporate the reception of art--by patrons, critics, and curators--as the necessary cultural pendant to the production of art. While we may miss original interpretation of the art of the era, Hughes is a journalist and this is what good journalism can do for art history.

As engaging as all this is, Hughes’ replay of current scholarship in fact ignores a major category of art: genre painting, the pictures of “typical” everyday life. During the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, art writers, private collectors and institutional art patrons, such as the American Art-Union, an organization formed by New York merchants, lawyers and railroad directors to encourage art in America, promoted these pictures of anecdotal scenes of people in rustic or domestic settings because of their power to comment on the American scene. Of course the pictures are fictions, but interpreting them brings us closer to the real “epic” United States than does landscape painting, which Hughes believes best symbolizes 19th century America. By missing the role genre painting played in defining the American character, he captures only half of the story.

Hughes also misses the opportunity to talk about African Americans as subjects in art and as participants in the struggles, contentions and contradictions of American social life. Hughes’ claim that from the 1770s to the 1870s, no pictures represented blacks “on equal terms of will and action with whites, without the slightest tone of demeaning caricature” forgoes an investigation that would tell us about the ambivalence that whites had about slavery and the place of the newly freed slaves. Nor is it entirely accurate.

In fact, during the 1860s African Americans dominated the subjects of the most talked-about genre painting shown in the annual exhibitions. For example, Eastman Johnson, a New York artist and the most famous of the 1860s genre painters, painted an ambivalent version of slavery, “Negro Life at the South,” in 1859, a picture that won him election to the prestigious National Academy of Design. The subjects in his painting are not caricatures, but they do act out the stereotypes of happy slaves dancing, courting and playing the banjo. However, the Civil War and the abolitionist movement led him to abandon these stereotypes. While traveling with Gen. George B. McClellan’s Union troops at Centerville on the advance to Manassas in 1862, he witnessed an incident that led him to paint “The Ride for Liberty--The Fugitive Slaves.” Here a family of four slaves, not picturesque rustics nor docile victims, act as agents of their own freedom--riding a single horse toward Union lines. In 1867, Johnson exhibited “Fiddling His Way,” showing a freedman entertaining a white family--an image of the kind of hoped-for entrepreneurship that might open up to former slaves. In the same year, Thomas Noble exhibited a painting of Margaret Garner, a real-life runaway slave, whom he shows in dramatic confrontation with slave-catchers immediately after she murdered one of her children. She planned to murder her three children rather than return them to slavery. (Toni Morrison drew on the story for her novel “Beloved.”)

Such empathetic pictures of blacks disappeared from the art scene by 1870, at the very time when the optimism among abolitionists collapsed. Forty acres and a mule didn’t happen; the plantation owners were not about to let their land be confiscated for the sake of the economic independence of the freed slaves. The liberals of the day, the radical Republicans, turned their attention to other things. The art world--artists, patrons, and critics--followed suit. It’s all in the record and that’s the story that needs telling. But Hughes leaves it out.

In the chapters on the 20th century, Hughes follows many strands in the tangle that was early Modernism in America: the 1913 Armory Show that introduced European modern art to America, Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, the idealization of the machine as a source for imagery and the successes of Georgia O’Keeffe in creating an alternative Modernism based on organic forms. Hughes’ stars of the 1930s are Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence and Diego Rivera. (Although Hughes generally avoids political art, he relates the story of how Nelson Rockefeller stopped Rivera’s mural in Rockefeller Center in 1933 because of Rivera’s portrait of Lenin and had the work destroyed several months later.) In the last chapters, Hughes focuses on the male artists of Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism, adding some women at the end.

A telling symptom of Hughes’ macho approach is his use of dismissive epithets guaranteed to raise the hackles of some readers and pander to the prejudices of others. For example, art patron and salon hostess Mable Dodge Luhan is “the Miss Piggy of the early American avant-garde” and later “an intolerable bitch.” Even so, Hughes prefers Luhan’s Taos of the 1920s to the Taos of today, which he sees overrun with its “wannabe witches, ethnic kitsch dealers and matched blond lesbians in Jeep Cherokees.” He explains the ambiguity in Grant Wood’s paintings by outing him to a mass audience, reading such work as “American Gothic” in the context of Wood’s “timid and deeply closeted” homosexuality. In the same way, he gratuitously refers to Marsden Hartley as “an aging queen” with “a crush on Adolf Hitler.”

Although he vented himself against “political correctness,” “multiculturalism” and “identity politics” in “The Culture of Complaint,” Hughes doggedly returns to these topics at the end of his history. Granted, there is some truth in his assertion that “identity politics have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art, in which victim credentials come first and aesthetic achievement a very late second--all posited on an unrealistically schematic division of the world into oppressors and victims.” However, when we disparage “single-issue art” and treat “identity politics” as a pathology, we run the risk of trivializing the voices of groups from whom we might learn.

Hughes’ own handling of the social and psychological contexts is itself quite schematic. Throughout “American Visions,” not only does he point out closet homosexuals but he identifies anyone who is Jewish. At times, such information seems relevant to an artist’s aesthetic achievement; at other times it seems simply gratuitous. Perhaps Hughes, as a green card holder, sympathizes with the outsider status that “being Jewish” has traditionally conferred.

But I believe it is more than that. Hughes’ agenda for a centrist vision of America (neither “politically correct” nor “politically patriotic”) is premised on the old melting pot mythology of an America that absorbs all ethnic groups willing to be assimilated. Hence, when he calls Bernard Berenson a “29-year-old Boston Jew,” he quickly adds, “who would rise to become the feared and waspish pontifex of I Tatti [and] the world’s ultimate authority on Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture.” But Hughes’ version of the melting pot disregards such ethnic and cultural groups as Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans, as well as blacks and women unwilling to be assimilated on the old terms. Hughes’ refusal to confront these resistances and take them seriously when manifested in art explains why of the 365 illustrations, only 22 pictures represent works by women, only four by African Americans and only one by a Latino. “American Visions” thus turns out to be a seriously blinkered vision of art in these United States.