Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture
1999; Wiley; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1542-734X
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoMania: The Unknown Period in American Art and Culture. Annette Stott. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998. This book was released on November 18, 1998, to coincide with Heritage Day in the U.S., and published simultaneously in the Netherlands in by the Olifant Pers, in association with Ambo/Anthos publishers. It deals with a currently almost unknown change in sensibility in U.S. art and culture, between 1890 and 1920, when a significant part of the American middle and upper classes celebrated all things and Dutchness, which tendency, for a time, turned into a true craze, Holland mania, as the author calls it. In October 1903, Edward W. Bok, editor of the monthly Ladies' Home Journal, announced to millions of readers that Holland, not England, was the cradle of American civilization. The editor (himself a immigrant) cited evidence of colonial influence in American politics, cultural institutions, social customs, and language, and concluded that all truly American characteristics and ideals originated in the Netherlands. This bold statement summed up more than a decade of influence as selectively received within American art and history. It marked the height of this fascination for that affected Americans from almost every geographic region of the United States. This became manifest in a wide range of cultural domains, from tourism and advertisements to women's fashion and interior design. The idea that American identity originated in the Netherlands emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and was one of several competing claims on America's cultural roots among the proliferating interests in ethnicity at the time. Inspired by the country's centennial, which focused attention on the colonial era, as well as by the immigration of Eastern and Southern Europeans-which in the eyes of the settlers threatened their cultural identity-these ethnic studies (as Stott calls them somewhat anachronistically) attempted to anchor American cultural identity in each of the countries of origin of the earliest immigrants. Most of these claims were consciously aimed against the dominance of England in contemporary theories of American history and culture. Stott's monograph draws on art history, social and cultural history, popular culture, and immigrant studies, and is based on both and American archival sources. Its main focus is on two of the primary components of mania: visual images and revisionist history. Stott's main argument is that a boom in the master art market, followed by a rapidly expanding U.S. market for contemporary fine art and popular images of Holland, ushered in a period of increasing importance in American culture. By 1890 the market in the United States for contemporary visual representations of the Netherlands had become so important that it offered a commercial niche for six colonies of American artists in the Netherlands. In the next decade, historians reinterpreted seventeenth-century American history in terms of origins, and visual images contributed in shaping and spreading this new historical view. Many Americans also used paintings and illustrations of as models and sources of inspiration for fashion and interior design. They searched for a personal heritage in their genealogies, and hung old portraits on their parlor walls. They built or remodeled homes in Dutch and colonial styles, celebrated festivals and entertainments, and traveled in Holland. After the turn of the century, advertisers built on this widespread popularity of and Dutchness to market a variety of products. In her conclusion, the author mentions other aspects of the cultural climate that produced or supported the fashion for Holland: children's literature (with Mary Mapes Dodge's tale, Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates as the prototypical example of a highly selective illustration of national character); the links of immigrants in the U. …
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