Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art

Abstract

Although others in this series have begun their essays by attending to the upheaval within art history, that is not my first thought in writing about American art.¹ To be sure, not all is well; the same divisiveness marks the study of American art as other fields. But this in itself is remarkable. There are now enough mature scholars of American art to give this once-fledgling field the same diversity, the same “crises,” and the same kind of intellectual ferment to be found in better-established areas of art history.

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Notes on contributors

Wanda M. Corn

Wanda M. Corn has written on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American art. Her most recent book is Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (Yale University Press, 1983), published simultaneously with a traveling exhibition she organized under the same name. Presently she is completing a study of cultural nationalism in American modern art after World War I. [Department of Art, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305].