By organizing this collection of essays around the concept of “social conflict” and insisting on the “representational capacity” of so-called “low” forms of cultural expression, Patricia Johnston puts her finger on two of the most prominent features of scholarship on American art today: the concern with the ideological implications of the visual and the corresponding drive to address the visual in its complex and diverse variations (1). Indeed, as she claims in her introduction, the “history of American art has typically emphasized quality less than the art history of other nations” and has “made more space for a variety of artistic forms” (8). This has long been seen as a product of insecurity: scholars of American art, having few first-rate objects to work with, champion the second-rate. Johnston’s volume probes the meanings of these sorts of distinctions—of elite and popular, “high” and “low”—from the Early Republic to the present day (although Alan Wallach’s brilliant piece critiquing the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge and Patricia M. Burnham’s essay contrasting Euro- and Native American visions of Custer’s last stand are the only ones that push beyond the artificial cut-off date—1945—that still brackets the field). Painting, photography, furniture, caricature, sculpture, and advertisement are treated as mutually informing cultural expressions that feed and sometimes bounce off of one another as their makers negotiate the market, critical demand, and institutional mandates. There is great range here in terms of material, but the fifteen essays manage to cohere—no small task—around Johnston’s theme of the hierarchies that structure art and life. Because of this coherence, one might actually teach this text in its entirety, as a persistent and focused yet still multivocal investigation.

The book’s ambition is clear from the outset in Johnston’s introductory “overview” of the current state of visual culture studies (19). As she explains the methodological inclinations of this interdisciplinary project and tries to pin down the meanings of high, low, and everything in between, Johnston takes the reader from Immanuel Kant to Andreas Huyssen with various stops along the way. The problem with the overview genre, however, is that it puts the reader on the alert for what is missing. Johnston seeks to provide a long history for the terminology and concepts that structure the volume and to locate, more specifically, the seeds for the twentieth-century’s sense of the “high” in nineteenth-century discourse (in, for example, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy from 1869). But in jumping from a discussion of the social impetus behind Arnold’s tract to the politics of Clement Greenberg’s sense of kitsch in the late 1930s, Johnston bypasses a potential link in the chain, Edwin L. Godkin, who is quoted in Katherine Martinez’s piece entitled “Consumers and Commercial Visual Culture, 1880–1920” (164). In his essay “Chromo-Civilization” (The Nation, September 24, 1874: 201–2), Godkin uses the popular medium of chromolithography to emblematize the dilution of culture as it spread to the masses. This “pseudo-culture,” Godkin railed, “passes with a large body of slenderly-equipped persons as ‘culture,’ and . . . raises them in their own minds to a plane on which they see nothing higher, greater, or better than themselves.” Because Godkin’s critique so exquisitely tangles the aesthetic and the social, it might have been worth wrestling with yet another way into the pressures informing the high/low divide.

It is worth asking, I think, why Johnston makes the jump to Greenberg to pay special attention in her introduction to “Modernism/Mass Culture Debates of the 1930s” (16). This decade of pronounced social unrest, when artists in the United States began attending to social problems with greater force and directness than perhaps ever before, has been privileged as a site for the exploration of “social conflict” in histories of American art, perhaps because the work oftentimes wears the social openly. Important volumes have been produced to address the complications of this imagery, such as The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), co-edited by Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (click here for review). What I like about Johnston’s anthology, however, is the way it addresses work that doesn’t wear its politics on its sleeve. Some of the most compelling arguments of the volume focus on erasures, evasions, or failed attempts at social commentary. They recognize the fundamental difficulty (the “irreconcilability,” Edward Said would say) of the relationship between art and life, and they account for this in their analyses by calling attention to fissures or mismatched contours—to those moments when the aesthetic fails to line up fully with the social, and thus ends up providing a remarkable glimpse into period tensions (Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 63). Take Anne Whitney’s Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God, or Africa (1862–64, reworked 1865–66). In her essay on Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and “the iconography of emancipation,” Melissa Dabakis tells the fascinating story of how Whitney attempted to negotiate a path between the demands of Neoclassical sculpture and the racial stereotypes of her day. Spurred on by criticism that her allegorical representation of the continent, formulated on the template of Neoclassical whiteness, constituted a “denial,” Whitney reworked the figure’s facial features, hands, and feet (92). Dissatisfied with the result, the sculptor eventually destroyed her revision. She found it, she said, “impossible . . . to make an abstract of all possible African types,” and simply did “the best with what [she knew] of the negro” (92). Lack of knowledge of the “real” is trumped by Whitney’s internalization of the ideal, which she thought could contain racial difference. Dabakis doesn’t analyze Whitney’s adherence to the Neoclassical framework as critically as she could have (a celebration of the artist’s politics sometimes gets in the way), but she makes the compelling case that what resulted from the artist’s negotiation of the real and ideal is a kind of “mixed-race” Ethiopia (94).

Over half of the essays in this volume in fact focus on issues of race and ethnicity. Although “identity politics” is not the construct around which the authors frame their arguments, this is the book’s main concern: race, class, and gender in, perhaps, that order (it must be noted that sexual difference gets very little play, although religious difference, refreshingly, does). In Dabakis’s essay, a discussion about race intersects with gender in the figure of Sojourner Truth, who performed “multiple and complex identities: former slave, worker, orator, feminist, and woman” (89). In the best cases, the essays allow their subjects to maintain this kind of nuanced complexity; indeed, one goal of the book, as Johnston puts it, is to develop flexible “analyses that cross borders” (21). The interpretive framework of “high and low [is] a tool” that is supposed to facilitate this movement (4). Responding in part to Huyssen’s critique that in the United States the “low has won the battle,” so that the complications of the “high” are often ignored (to balance out centuries of lopsided criticism), Johnston cautions that we must not simply “celebrate the popular” or “replicate the hierarchies” that organized the past (20, 21). But at times it seems difficult for some of the writers to resist “celebrating the popular” in their efforts to avoid reinscribing hierarchies. What ironically results from this treatment is precisely the kind of border policing that Johnston wants to avoid.

Take Johnston’s own essay on Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33). The piece considers how anti-Catholic prejudice, which can barely be contained in Morse’s writings, is written out of his ideal world of study among the masters, where formal beauty overrides Catholic content. The engravings of caricaturist David Claypoole Johnston serve as contextual material in a section entitled “The Ideal World in Popular Culture” (47). “Popular art” is thus used “as evidence to illuminate high art,” a tack that Johnston herself considers objectionable (3; emphasis in original). But this strikes me as a minor transgression. The bigger problem is the way Johnston cites critics’ approval of the caricaturist’s “broad humor” to legitimate the work, as if this were enough to convince the reader that it ought to be treated seriously (51). This one-sided line of argumentation does David Claypoole Johnston’s work a disservice, because it refuses to allow for complication and thus consigns it to a position somehow below analysis and, therefore, ancillary to the (ostensibly) more nuanced work of Morse. Johnston’s piece is extremely thoughtful as it works through the politics of Morse’s idealism; that the caricaturist ends up taking a backseat to this analysis testifies to the difficulty of the proposition she sets up in her introduction. One might have perhaps more productively brought the caricaturist into conversation with Morse by considering: 1) his paintings that address the practice of art making; 2) his own complicated relationship to Catholicism; and 3) the views of his detractors, which balance out the praise and give us a better sense of the stakes of his work.

In Patricia Hills’s provocative essay, “Cultural Racism: Resistance and Accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast,” the popular caricaturist also suffers somewhat in comparison to the painter. In her examination of Nast’s figuration of African American identity, Hills praises the progressive politics of images such as “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” (Harper’s Weekly, November 20, 1869: 745)—a multicultural feast that in its day was seen as remarkable (see Lydia Maria Child’s letter to The National Standard, August 27, 1870)—and laments his lapse into stereotype in images depicting “African Americans’ lack of middle-class manners” (116). “Such exaggerated images have staying power,” Hills writes, and “conceptually they replace in our minds Nast’s more positive images—those in line with our own everyday experience” (117). One senses here, and at other points in the book, the discomfort the twenty-first-century scholar feels when faced with the racism of the past. There’s an insistence on the present moment’s enlightened separation from it, even as lingering injustice is presented as, in part, the motivation behind the book (4). It would be fascinating to use Nast’s work as a case study of this kind of irresolution, which almost can’t help but structure conversations about race in the United States.

Hills wants us to “read [Nast’s] caricatures in relation to the more sympathetic images,” but I wonder if there were gradations between these poles (117). In engravings like “Arrival of a Federal Column at a Planter’s House in Dixie” (Harper’s Weekly, April 4, 1863: 220), Nast grants the black figure the kind of agency that Hills suggests only Johnson may have been capable of (111). The print contains a black musician who, from the center of the composition, has put down his banjo to bend over with rear end in the viewer’s face. That Nast cut out this figure when he translated the composition to oil paint (a medium he explored during the period under Hills’s purview that, unfortunately, she doesn’t treat) suggests to me that he possesses some significance. It is hard to know what to make of this conspicuous figure, who puts down the instrument that would mark him as a kind of “Sambo,” who does not offer up his face to caricature but instead gives the Harper’s reader a good look at his backside. Was this figure the Rabelaisian twist that wasn’t seen to jive with the medium of oil (even though there are plenty of painted precedents)? Is it possible that Nast had invested the African American figure with the potential for subversive critique, making him into a kind of jester who gets the last laugh? How would we square this with Nast’s politics and with the representational conventions of the day? Hills deftly negotiates the complicated dynamics of Johnson’s and Nast’s imagery—indeed, she is especially impressive on Johnson—but one wonders how a work like “Dixie” might complicate the account.

It is perhaps not surprising that caricature assumes such a prominent place in a book about aesthetic and social hierarchies. Jeffrey Belnap’s “Caricaturing the Gringo Tourist: Diego Rivera’s Folkloric and Touristic Mexico and Miguel Covarrubias’s Sunday Afternoon in Xochimilco” and Sarah Burns’s “Cartoons in Color: David Gilmour Blythe’s Very Uncivil War” also treat the subject. Belnap’s conception of caricature is somewhat undertheorized and leads him to reinforce old teleologies. “Perhaps Mexican muralism’s High Modernist appropriation of caricature,” Belnap writes, “is most appropriately conceptualized as an anticipation of—dare I say it?—postmodernity” (277). Burns more masterfully handles Blythe’s satirical paintings of the early 1860s and suggests paths for further study by contextualizing the work in relation to the strategies of the period’s literary humorists. Although his essay is focused primarily on the corporate concessions of the Norman Rockwell Museum, Wallach offers perhaps the most compelling theorization of caricature and its political stakes in his discussion of the “grotesqueness” and “disfigurement” of “Rockwellian verisimilitude” (282). In his analysis of Rockwell’s Dog Biting Man in Seat of Pants (Fleeing Hobo) (1928), Wallach shows how the invitation to laugh amounts to an inscription of “social distance between audience and subject,” a tenet of theories of humor that hold that part of the pleasure of laughing at the misfortune of others is the superiority one feels as a result (283). The “seemingly harmless joke” that oftentimes graced Rockwell’s covers confirmed middle-class values, sometimes rather insidiously (284). Wallach demonstrates the tenacity of these values and how they have continued to structure the discourse surrounding the illustrator’s work and the way it is presented at the museum bearing his name.

Wallach’s and Burns’s essays are two of the best in this volume, although almost all of them have some significant contribution to make. Janice Simon’s “Reenvisioning ‘This Well-Wooded Land,’” which considers the various ways in which painters and printmakers envisioned environmental changes in the mid- to late nineteenth century, speaks provocatively to the present ecological crisis; Donna M. Cassidy’s “The Invisibility of Race in Modernist Representation: Marsden Hartley’s North Atlantic Folk” participates in the recent move to look again at Hartley’s male figures; David Steinberg’s “Education for Distinction? Art, Hierarchy, and Charles Willson Peale’s Staircase Group” perhaps best responds to Johnston’s charge to see the social and the aesthetic as interwoven discourses; and Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s “The Colors of Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Cheney Brothers, and the Relationship Between Art and Industry in the 1920s” offers a fascinating look into a forgotten moment in O’Keeffe’s career, even though the advertisements the author reproduces could have been more productively plumbed in support of her argument.

I suppose one could argue that Seeing High and Low’s “impatience with the high-low hierarchy is not exactly a fresh idea,” to borrow a statement made by Christopher Wood back in 1996, as part of the journal October’s “Visual Culture Questionnaire” (October 77 (1996): 68). And there are moments when the framework feels like a burden to which the author dutifully returns even though it doesn’t necessarily facilitate the argument (as in Joanne Lukitsch’s essay on Alfred Stieglitz’s erasure of the social in his New York photography between 1892 and 1913). But, again, the anthology with this kind of focus is rare, and for that reason alone Johnston’s book is a major achievement. One could build a course around it that would investigate the methodological stumbling blocks and payoffs of the high-low binary as a way into American culture. Perhaps such a course could use the book as a jumping-off point to follow a path charted by Huyssen, who argues that “the model of high vs. low can be productively rethought and related to cultural developments in ‘peripheral,’ postcolonial, or post-communist societies” (“High/Low in an Expanded Field,” MODERNISM/modernity 9 (2002): 367). By insisting on the continued usefulness of this interpretive framework and giving it renewed critical attention, Johnston’s volume opens up possibilities to move into this terrain. It thus stands as a timely contribution to current debates about visual culture studies and the contested fields of social, political, and aesthetic representation.