This multi-author, multi-century account of the evolution of the portrait collection of the New York Chamber of Commerce arrives at an opportune moment. As lead author Karl Kusserow notes at the outset of his introduction, the financial scandals and crises that have defined much of the current century make this volume a timely consideration of how business elites articulate and consolidate identities public and private, and how they address “the predicament of portraying power in a democracy” (6). Picturing Power also joins a recent flurry of rewarding and thoughtful studies of collections and exhibitions in the United States that redirect attention from matters of cultural production to the less charted terrain of cultural consumption (among them, Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012; Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art, 1934, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [click here for review]; and Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 [click here for review]). Drawing upon a mix of material and visual culture studies, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and thing theory, Picturing Power identifies itself from the outset as a biography of a collection. (The concept of a “biography of things” originates with Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodization as a Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed., Arjun Appadurai, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 64–91.) With six contributions by five authors from varied disciplines, the text also epitomizes the challenges of synthesizing micro and macro histories of art. Cogent examples of close visual analysis and institutional history alike fill the book but too infrequently intermingle.

Following a short introduction, Kusserow’s opening essay, “Portraiture’s Use, and Disuse, at the Chamber of Commerce and Beyond,” reveals the variable utility of the chamber’s collection over the centuries, from its first commissioned portrait, of New York colonial lieutenant governor Cadwallader Colden in 1772, to its dissolution and dispersal into banking and financial firms during the Reagan Era. He apportions his narrative into six epochs in which the collection “reflected and actualized . . . changing institutional concerns and agendas” (9). During the “Totemic Era” (1772–1844), the inaugural portraits of Colden and Alexander Hamilton (neither of whom were chamber members) became ancestral icons that conferred legitimacy during a period of institutional instability, signaled fealty to the crown before the American Revolution, and intimated Federalist sentiments thereafter. The “Rhetorical Era” (1845–1902) witnessed the collection’s greatest growth as the chamber acquired and commissioned portraits of its officers dating back to its charter. This conscious effort to manufacture a visual institutional history burnished the chamber with a patina of pedigree and dignity and affiliated it with more august and established organizations with like institutional holdings. The inclusion of noteworthy nonmembers in the collection promoted the illusion that the chamber was a disinterested body of virtuous citizens and rebutted the tarred reputation of businessmen during the Gilded Age.

During the “Corporatized Era” (1880–1910), both the presentation of the collection and the operation of the chamber signaled the declining influence of family firms and the rise of much larger industrial and financial concerns while nonetheless “suggesting that the new order evolved naturally from the old” (68). As evidenced by its official catalogues, the chamber tried to establish its holdings as fine art during an “Aestheticized Era” (1910–1929) that coincided with a larger Colonial Revival. Pedestaling its increasingly passé portraits allowed the body to distance itself from a collection ever more out of step with the chamber’s emerging identity as a more modern business entity. Over the course of the “Burdensome Era” (1930–1980), the accelerating dominance of corporate managers meant an end to portrait commissions and the gradual sale of the collection during a series of institutional mergers. Finally, the collection’s fragments became “Rhetorical Again” (1983–present) as young securities firms sought, acquired, and eagerly brandished these venerable relics of blue-chip business history.

Lingering mostly in the Gilded Age, Paul Staiti’s “The Capitalist Portrait” unpacks the varied rhetoric of these visual profiles of American businessmen. It nicely complements Kusserow’s chapter by offering valuable synchronic information about the collection’s prototypes and kin, counterimages of business leaders from more critical contemporaries, the typology of individual portraits, and the kinds of artists patronized. Rhetorically, the works generally downplayed occupational markers for an emphasis on sitters’ respectability. Again and again the images are of simple men of letters whose sober and spartan presentation attributes their success to a Protestant work ethic and personal character. Aesthetically and pictorially conservative, the portraits steer clear of more charismatic grandiosity and, in the case of Jewish sitters, signs of ethno-religious difference. Not surprisingly, then, the chamber typically supported established academicians who belonged to many of the same clubs as its own members. The 1902 installation of this “Valhalla of American capitalism” (135) in the Great Hall on Liberty Street created a “parthenogenic” (175) dynasty that offered insiders a sense of tradition, stability, and unity even in the face of internal rifts and social and economic upheaval.

In her instructive institutional history, “Exercising Power: The New York Chamber of Commerce and the Community of Interest,” Elizabeth Blackmar maps the entwined changes in its rosters and politics from its founding at the Fraunces Tavern in 1768 to its merger with the Commerce and Industry Association in 1973. For antebellum members—mostly New England merchants who presided over family firms active in the global import-export trade—the chamber was a flexible tool of self-governance that set business standards, arbitrated disputes, and lobbied for internal improvements. After the Civil War, and with the rise of corporate industrialists and financiers, the body took a more active role in public policy and helped, for example, orchestrate the ouster of the Democratic Party machine known as the Tweed Ring. Finally, as the organization increasingly drew from corporate officers in the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector, the chamber abandoned the Good Government coalition of the Progressive Era for a sharply laissez-faire, anti-tax politics.

The chamber’s first and only permanent home—the five-story, French Renaissance headquarters designed by James B. Baker and built in 1902—is the focus of architectural historian Daniel Bluestone’s “Portraits in the Great Hall: The Chamber’s ‘Voice’ on Liberty Street.” In a chapter that deftly connects an impressive range of formal considerations to institutional mission and philosophy, Bluestone shows how the chamber’s selection of its own building communicated permanence and longevity; how elements like unfenestrated exteriors and a grand stairway indexed the symbolic preeminence of the portrait collection; and how the conscious choice of a low-slung building, a Beaux-Arts vernacular, and even the closed, semi-random selection of an architect all intimated (like the portraits themselves) civic and philanthropic rather than purely commercial aims. Although it weathered poorly and was destroyed in 1926, the building’s peculiar exterior sculptural program largely and regrettably escapes discussion here.

A worthy addition to a growing literature that reads picture frames as cultural texts, David L. Barquist’s “‘The Whole Lustre of Gold’: Framing and Displaying Power at the Chamber of Commerce” is the most conventionally connoisseurial of the volume’s contributions (see W. H. Bailey, Defining Edges: A New Look at Picture Frames, New York: Abrams, 2002; Jacob Simon, The Art of the Picture Frame: Artists, Patrons, and the Framing of Portraits in Britain, London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996; and Eli Wilner, ed., The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000 [click here for review]). Generally the chamber’s taste in frames followed period fashion: an antebellum preference for Greek Revival and Louis Quinze was joined by a proliferation of Renaissance Revival styles in the Victorian era and a smattering of Arts and Crafts designs in the early twentieth century. But while Barquist largely attends to matters formal or practical—readers learn, for instance, of the utility of rectilinear coved frames for group hangings like the Great Hall’s—he nevertheless massages some choice insights from objects long mute in the histories of fine and decorative arts: that antebellum frames bespoke their domestic origins; that an overriding historicist impulse imbued the collection with tradition and pedigree; and that the chamber roughly grouped the four walls of its Great Hall into presidents, vice presidents, national military and political leaders, and family dynasties.

In the final chapter, “Memory, Metaphor, and Meaning in Daniel Huntington’s Atlantic Cable Projectors,” Kusserow undertakes a more familiar art-historical analysis of a single work of art. The collection’s largest canvas, Projectors (1895), is an unusual depiction of a quasi-mythic 1854 convocation of luminaries planning the construction of a transatlantic telegraph wire. Kusserow’s rich account offers a feast of lively and imaginative close and comparative readings, albeit with varying degrees of persuasiveness. In addition to safer interpretations that the canvas mantles the chamber with the patriotic pride in the nation’s technological ingenuity and offers Cyrus Field and the other sitters as paragons of leadership and character, Kusserow also elicits a dense web of metaphors of communication in the painting, teases out umbilical references that enact a kind of Oedipal drama between the United States and Mother England, and argues that the painting forges a partnership between often-rival epistemologies: artistic, theological, and scientific.

The virtues of Picturing Power are many. It helps flesh out the Victorian chapter of the larger saga of American portraiture, which tends to linger in the eighteenth century and early twentieth centuries. It also draws attention to work by academic, conservative, and even arrière-garde artists, all of whom garner little interest in larger field narratives that often still hew to a familiar cavalcade of avant-garde styles (one recent exception is Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris, eds., Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900–1960, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009 [click here for review]). Staiti’s essay in particular demonstrates that artworks with rear-guard aesthetics are not necessarily formulaic or unworthy of close visual scrutiny. No less than its more experimental brethren, official art has its own dense and intricate syntax. The long chronological span of the book also opens up refreshing longitudinal analyses less common in the discipline.

At the same time, the overall effect of the book is prismatic. Kusserow’s explicit segregation of essays that “apply the tools of social art history” from those that “engage the internal mechanics of specific works” is an effective short-term solution to accommodating disparate art histories, but it is also a lost opportunity to find ways to bridge “microcosm and macrocosm” (5). Furthermore, by defining these approaches as “two divergent sorts of methodology,” Kusserow, like other recent historiographers of the field of Art History of the United States, both assumes and reifies their alleged irreconcilability. This narrative fracture is more than just a matter of method. The volume’s organization diffuses its major themes and arguments across its various components, and those considerations that do not fit so comfortably within its schema—most notably the facade sculpture displayed along Liberty Street—slip between the cracks.

As the book’s interpretive outliers, Blackmar’s contribution and Kusserow’s second essay suffer most. While reviewing the former, entirely imageless chapter, a reader must make her or his own analytic connections between this useful institutional history and the portraits that populate the other essays. Conversely, during the latter discussion of Huntington’s tableau, the activities and ideologies of the chamber often disappear from view. And I occasionally found it difficult to reconcile Kusserow’s arguments about Projectors with the chamber’s politics: would, for example, the members of an association virtually synonymous with industrial advancement have embraced so fully a work that by the author’s reasoning “suggest[ed] the price of progress” (348) and expressed “fears about the end of nature” (352)? This is not to say that the painting’s antimodernism could never settle comfortably within the chamber’s tony halls, but Kusserow might more explicitly account for its presence within a modern business organization. For all these reasons, Picturing Power is an impressive collection of essays about an important but neglected collection of art; but unlike its subject of inquiry, its valuable component parts do not quite become a greater whole.