Michael Leja
Michael Leja is James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Leja, Michael
Leja, Michael
United States of America
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Description: Humans
When industrially produced, printed pictures began to achieve mass circulation in the early to mid-nineteenth century, cultural...
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Related print edition pages: pp.90-109
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00289.4
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00199
Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with quality reproductions of artworks, it offers a resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures—including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederick Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman—are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists.

A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.
Print publication date April 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171689
EISBN 9780300257335
Illustrations 127
Print Status in print
Description: Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00101
In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition seemed increasingly outdated and inadequate to many commentators, Abstract Expressionism gave a compelling visual form to a new subjectivity—a new experience and idea of self.

In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping "primitive" and unconscious components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors—including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness—that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated. According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity. This feature helps account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date June 1993 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300044614
EISBN 9780300229998
Illustrations 92
Print Status in print