Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon

“For all those who want to understand American art and the art world, written by the best person to tell the story.”—Dr. Kathleen Foster, Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art

A sweeping history of changing critical standards and values in American art across 200 years. Art lovers, perplexed why their favorite artists are no longer on the walls of their local museums, will understand why change is constant. All art lovers will find a cautionary lesson about the unpredictable future.

Each generation of experts believes its own taste is the last word.

As the author writes, “People are inclined to view past changes in taste as unique misjudgments that will not happen again…. How unthinking, how stupid, they think, not realizing that the pattern has been repeated again and again in the past and will be in the future. We now recognize that the process is a continual one. Each past canon was established for good reason; there are no mistakes, there is only history. Many of the favored artists of any period including our own will drop from favor, something that art dealers never tell their clients, or museum curators their boards.” Stebbins describes the taste and outlook of each generation through his extensive research on the critics, museum activities, and the art market of each era.

An entire section of the book is devoted to some of the most important collectors of the 20th century. Rejecting the typical curator’s role as a flatterer of collectors, Stebbins examines these collectors in depth for the first time, outlining their successes and failures and their quirky personalities. He takes a hard look at the warring brothers, Sterling and Steven C. Clark; the inhibited Grenville Winthrop who left over 4,000 works to Harvard; Maxim Karolik, the gifted Ukrainian Jew who miraculously created a new canon during the Second World War; and, more recently, the enormously wealthy Alice Walton who built a new, ambitious museum of American Art in Arkansas. Of special interest is the author’s explanation of the rise and fall of American Impressionism and of the role played by the New Yorkers Raymond and Margaret Horowitz in this development.

This important volume concludes with several chapters devoted to the aesthetic standards that came to dominate the art world in recent years. At their core is a new emphasis on diversity, and a greatly expanded effort to showcase Black and women artists. Nearly every museum with collections of American art took this direction. Stebbins describes the successes and failures of many of these museums’ efforts to reinstall their collections and redefine their audiences, from the Met and the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the East Coast, to Houston and San Francisco. Most importantly, he explores the question of whether the old ideal of seeking quality in art needs to be sacrificed to the aim of diversity.

The author, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., was in the center of every development in American art collecting and exhibitions from the 1960s to well into the 2000s, as curator of American art at the Yale UniversityArt Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Harvard Art Museum. He is the author of twenty-five books on nearly every important American painter starting with Copley. Stebbins is uniquely able to put recent shifts in the canon within the context of regular, generational shifts in taste that tell us much about the value that is placed on art—including who decides what matters and why. In this book, he presents a new way of looking at American art, and he doesn’t pull his punches.

Profusely illustrated, deeply informed, fascinating and controversial, Rethinking American Art is indispensable for those seeking an understanding of American art and art collecting.