She’s rewritten the textbook on U.S. art

More than a decade ago, in a darkened lecture hall at Pomona College, art historian Frances K. Pohl projected a slide of Winslow Homer’s Civil War painting “Soldiers From the Front.” She presented the 1866 image as an example of a traditional theme: a confrontation between the vanquished and the victor after a war.

Pohl told her students how Homer adhered to conventions and how he deviated from the norm. Then she issued a challenge: “Look at the image. What do you see?”

One student noticed a relatively dark-skinned figure in the background and asked: “Is the Union soldier standing behind the Confederate soldier black?”

“I never thought of that,” Pohl replied, suddenly realizing that Homer, an abolitionist, might have included an African American in his symbolic commentary on the Civil War. “If so, what might that mean?”

The classroom discussion ended long ago, but the question lingers in Pohl’s new book, “Framing America: A Social History of American Art.” Approaching the subject with an inquiring mind and a wide-angle lens, she covers the icons -- from Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of George Washington to Jasper Johns’ paintings of the Stars and Stripes. But she also includes New Mexican retablos, Northwest Coast totem poles, New England needlework, World War I recruitment posters, Watts Towers and the “AIDS Quilt.”

Advertised as “the first comprehensive survey of the new, enlarged view of American art,” the 560-page book encompasses the art of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and women, as well as the usual white men. It also goes beyond painting and sculpture, and it crosses U.S. borders -- venturing into ceramics, basketry, textiles, furniture and illustration from Mexico to Canada.

If Pohl had framed all this material as straight art history, she would have had an enormous task, but she didn’t leave it at that. Her book is a social history, with each object set in the context of its life and times. Art is woven into the fabric of a 500-year epic.

“Images as well as guns were enlisted in the scramble for control of the Americas,” Pohl writes in the first section, “Art and Conquest,” which covers the arrival of the Spanish through the American Revolution. The frontispiece is “France Bringing the Faith to the Indians of New France,” a circa-1675 painting attributed to Franciscan artist Frere Luc (Claude Francois). Intended to illustrate Native Americans’ eager acceptance of Christianity, it depicts a Native American man in a French robe kneeling by a painting of the Trinity while a female personification of France points to a scene in the clouds, in which God hands Christ the Earth.

In the final chapter, “From Cold War to Culture Wars,” Pohl leads with an image of “The Great Wall of Los Angeles,” Judith Baca’s gritty view of California history, painted on a mural in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel. Created from 1976 to 1983, with the help of other artists and young assistants, the mural depicts such scenes as “Division of the Barrios & Chavez Ravine” and “The Birth of Rock & Roll.”

Seated in her book-jammed office on Pomona’s idyllic campus in Claremont, Pohl says she wrote “Framing America” as a textbook and as a scholarly contribution to her field. Noting that it includes “close readings” of artworks that address aesthetic issues the old-fashioned way, she says she set out to examine “how the meaning of a work is a function not only of its content but also of where it is produced, where it is displayed, the identity of the artist and how this identity is affected by race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.”

In short, she wanted to determine where art fits within power struggles and to rethink the notion of art itself. One of her favorite works is Harmony Hammond’s 1973 “Floor Piece VI (Sculpture).” A lowly hooked rug with a fancy title, it pokes fun at the high-art pretensions of Minimalism.

As Pohl points out, many historians of American art wrestle with feminism, multiculturalism and political issues in their work. “The ideas are not all my own,” she says. “I chose artworks for the book in large part on the basis of literature in the field. Writing on a range of American material gave me the opportunity to synthesize the flowering of scholarship of the last 20 to 25 years, which had not been integrated into the survey texts.”

She credits her colleagues in the text, occasionally citing differences of opinion. In the case of Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” -- a table with 39 ceramic place settings, conceived as “a symbolic history of women in Western civilization” -- Pohl takes note of “overwhelmingly positive” response. But she also quotes feminist scholar Annette Kuby, who deemed Chicago’s sexual imagery offensive and asked how critics would have received “a similar piece celebrating famous men with male genitals rising up off of plates.”

“Survey texts tend to erase different voices, even if not intentionally,” Pohl says. “I wanted to take issues that are quite complex and simplify them without closing off the opportunity to discuss them further.”

A growing field

Publishers Weekly issued a strong vote of approval: “Written less as a series of static tableaux than as a set of provocations for discussion and exploration, this large, satisfying and beautifully produced volume ... will be of value ... to anyone interested in the contradictory forces at the heart of American life.”

In a Library Journal review, Savannah Schroll lauded Pohl’s “unprecedented” investigation of “the cultural production resulting from interactions between Native Americans and several exploratory European groups” and recommended “Framing America” as “the most up-to-date American art textbook available.”

In the vast scope of art history, the study of art in the “New World” is -- of course -- relatively new. Even so, scholars of American art haven’t always been taken seriously. Until the 1960s American art was “the impoverished, unwanted stepchild of art history,” as Stanford art historian Wanda M. Corn wrote in “Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art,” an essay published in the College Art Assn.’s Art Bulletin in 1988. But the field had already grown enormously by then, and it has continued to gain respect.

Pohl, a Canadian who earned her bachelor and master of arts degrees at the University of British Columbia, plunged into the field in the early 1970s, “when the social history of art was in its early, exciting, formative days,” she says. At the suggestion of a professor, Serge Guilbaut, she went on to UCLA, earning her PhD in 1985. “It was a good place for art and politics, leftist politics,” she says, “and I was there when there was an expansion of attention to American art in a way that wasn’t apologetic.”

With a longtime interest in art and politics, she is the author of two other books that put art in a social context: “Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold War Climate, 1947-1954” and “In the Eye of the Storm: An Art of Consciousness, 1930-1970.” Still, many forces came to bear on “Framing.”

Early textbooks on American art include “furniture and silver and a little needlework, the whole material culture aspect,” says Pohl, who likes “the idea that creative expression appears in many guises and that there are overlapping worlds of popular culture and folk culture or mass media that feed on or inspire each other.”

She also gives credit to her environment: “All of us who write books bring our own experiences to those books, if only in the questions we ask because of where we live.”

A Canadian now ensconced near the Mexican border, Pohl had no desire to write a survey exclusively devoted to the United States, as her publisher, Thames & Hudson, envisioned. And she probably gives more space to Southern California art than she would have if she lived elsewhere. Along with Watts Towers and “The Great Wall,” she takes note of Jose Clemente Orozco’s “Prometheus” mural at Pomona College, David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “America Tropical” mural on Olvera Street and Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s “In Mourning and in Rage,” a 1997 L.A. performance that commemorated victims of a serial murderer.

“But this book really comes out of Pomona College,” says Pohl, who teaches “The Social History of North American Art,” “Women, Art and Ideology” and “Issues in Contemporary Art.”

“It’s a liberal arts education book,” she says. “Some of the ideas came out of conversations with students; others came from their questions. A teacher at a graduate institution might have had a graduate student help write this book. My undergraduate students helped me, but in a different way.”

The issue of Homer’s possible inclusion of a black man in “Prisoners From the Front” found a place in the book because “it relates to the presence of African Americans in the Civil War, as soldiers, as support personnel and as the moral justification for the war, in terms of being slaves,” she says. “All that came out of a question that a student asked.”

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From the book

In 1744, Lydia Hart completed a sampler containing a scene of Adam and Eve in paradise. A small work made of silk on linen, it contains an abundance of flora and fauna surrounding the two figures. [Folk art historians Robert] Bishop and [Jacqueline M.] Atkins note that Hart gives an added charm to her work by sewing a small goatee on Adam, which, along with his fig leaf and shorter hair, distinguishes him from Eve. They fail to note, however, that she also depicts Adam, as well as Eve, holding an apple, suggesting that the couple’s downfall was not the fault of Eve alone (the position of the snake facing Adam and almost touching the fruit in his hand reinforces Adam’s complicity). The sampler also has a border, which was unusual at the time but which suggests the ultimate location of such works -- not rolled up and stored away, but framed and hung on the wall within the home, a testimony to the skill and learning of its maker.