1. Scholars and curators of decorative arts have long debated the value of aesthetic evaluation and cultural hierarchies. Michael J. Ettema, "Forum—History, Nostalgia, and American Furniture," Winterthur Portfolio 17, nos. 2/3 (summer/fall 1982): 135—44. Ettema argued that the antiquarian approach should be abandoned in favor of interpretive methods that placed history and culture, not objects and aesthetics, at the center. The essay provoked a wide range of responses. Some scholars acknowledged Ettema's conclusion that the field was not living up to its potential, some voiced concerns that he was not offering new directions that were in accord with the traditional mission of art museums, whereas others rejected his argument that interpretive strategies based in aesthetics were necessarily more limited than methods grounded in cultural history (see Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 4 [winter 1982]: 259—68, and Winterthur Portfolio 18, no. 1[spring 1983]: 80—90.)Wendy Kaplan, "R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts," Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (spring 1982): 43—53. For a discussion of the divide between curators and scholars, see Jules D. Prown, "Can the Farmer and the Cowman Still Be Friends" in Learning From Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies, edited by W. David Kingery (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), pp.19—27.
2. R. T. H. Halsey and Charles O. Cornelius, A Handbook of the American Wing, 4th ed. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1928), p. xv. Notable examples of earlier scholarship, much of it well researched, include Irving Whitehall Lyon, The Colonial Furniture of New England (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1891); Esther Singleton, The Furniture of our Forefathers (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1908); Luke Vincent Lockwood, Colonial Furniture in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913); and Frances Clary Morse, Furniture of the Olden Time (New York: MacMillan Co., 1917). For a thoughtful overview of early decorative arts installations, see Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers: The Lives and Careers, The Deals, The Finds, The Collections of the Men and Women Who Were Responsible for the Changing Taste in American Antiques, 1850—1930 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).
3. Stillinger, The Antiquers, p. 124.
4. "The Editor's Attic," Antiques 16, no. 2 (August 1929): 101.
5. Girl Scouts Loan Exhibition of Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Furniture and Glass (New York: Girl Scouts, Inc., 1929), preface.
6 Quoted in Stephen Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876—1926 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 241.
7. See Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 185—208. Neil Harris, "Museum, Merchandising, and Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influence," in Material Culture and the Study of American Life, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, 1978), p. 142.
8. Charles Over Cornelius, Early American Furniture (New York: Century Co., 1926), p. 16. Henry Watson West and Florence N. Levy, Catalogue of an Exhibition of American Paintings, Furniture, Silver and Other Objects of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1909), p. 29.
9. Thomas Hamilton Ormsbee, Early American Furniture Makers: A Social and Biographical Study (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1930), pp. 37—38. On the formation of white racial identity and its dependence on the marginalization of the non-white, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
10. Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House Museums (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), pp. 48—50. On the influence of gender in twentieth-century decorative arts studies, see Catherine L. Whalen, "American Decorative Arts Studies at Yale and Winterthur: The Politics of Gender, Gentility, and Academia," Decorative Arts 9, no.1 (fall/winter 2001—2002): 108—44. The emergence of a more masculinized period room aesthetic and an increasing emphasis on the manliness of American craft traditions were associated, as West argues, with the diminished status of female museum professionals throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet women, including Helen Comstock and Alice Winchester, played prominent roles as the authors of popular histories and publications of American furniture. Future scholarship on the gender politics of early decorative arts might benefit by examining the connections between the relative prominence of women as authors of decorative arts publications and female dominance of the literary marketplace more generally.
11. Cornelius, Early American Furniture, p. 105. On the "elevation of the craftsman" and the link to the founding fathers, see Kaplan, "R. T. H. Halsey," p. 51. Edmund Stratton Holloway, American Furniture and Decoration Colonial and Federal (Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott, 1928), pp. 8—9.
12. Paul Dimaggio, "Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theater, Opera, and the Dance, 1900—1940," in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, edited by Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 47. David Carr, "Balancing Act: Ethics, Mission, and the Public Trust," in Museum News 80, no. 5 (September/October 2001): 29—31. Harold K. Skramstad, Jr., "Interpreting Material Culture: A View from the Other Side of the Glass," in Quimby, ed., Material Culture and the Study of American Life, p. 181.
13. For an overview and analysis of the key developments and issues in twentieth-century literary studies, see Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
14. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and The Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 40. As Robert F. Trent has suggested, furniture scholarship could be enriched by incorporating post-colonial theory that considers American art and culture as the products of a broader, international colonial context (correspondence with the authors, June 10, 2002).
15. Edward S. Cooke, "Study from the Perspective of the Maker," in Perspectives on American Furniture, edited by Gerald W. R. Ward (Newark: University of Delaware for the Winterthur Museum, 1985), pp. 115—16.
16. Albert Sack, Fine Points of Furniture, Early American (New York: Crown Publishers, 1950). This formula has since been augmented to include "superior" and "masterpiece." Scholarship in the field could benefit from greater consideration of the role played by the antiques market in the emergence of the American decorative arts canon. A number of the most influential dealers were first or second generation immigrants who sold American antiques to a growing market composed of clients hoping to become part of the cultured classes. Analysis of the emerging market in American antiques might, for example, incorporate recent scholarship on the early film industry, which was in many ways influenced by similar cultural dynamics and desires, or pay closer attention to the broader relationship between the market and the preoccupation in the culture at large with issues related to class, ethnicity, and assimilation. Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 1—3. Jules D. Prown, "Can the Farmer and the Cowman Still Be Friends?" p. 20. Glassie, Material Culture, pp. 1—3.
17. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the Decorative Arts," in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University of New England Press for the Chipstone Foundation, 1995), pp. 39—69; Amanda Carson Banks, Birth Chairs, Midwives, and Medicine (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 2—6 and passim.
18. Steven C. Dubin, Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 14. Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), p. 105. One particularly innovative example of re-thinking museum exhibits is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, a fascinating and, at times, surrealistic place that "deploys all the traditional signs of a museum's institutional authority—meticulous presentation, exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, and state-of-the-art armature—all to subvert the notions of the authoritative as it applies not only to itself but to any museum" (Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology [New York: Vintage Books, 1995], p. 40).
19. Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1996). This book was written as a direct response to the politically and culturally conservative interpretation in Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown, Southern Furniture, 1680—1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), pp.142—46. The widely held belief in the non-canonical status of southern furniture makers from the American furniture canon is epitomized in Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (New York: New York University Press, 1950).
20. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790—1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. xvi.
21. Edward S. Cooke, Jr., "The Social Economy of the Preindustrial Joiner in Western Connecticut, 1750—1800," in Beckerdite, ed., American Furniture (1995), pp. 113—14; and Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Making Furniture in Preindustrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 3—12.
22. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 9; Lauter, Canons and Contexts, pp. 256—70; and Lillian Robinson, "Canons to the Left of Them," in In The Canon's Mouth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 120—V23. |