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Although globalization feels recent, questions directed at nationalism from a more worldly perspective were already being posed during the Great War.In 1916, for example, US legal scholar Randolph Bourne wrote an essay entitled "Trans-National America," in which he advocated for a cosmopolitan mixture of cultures rather than the "melting pot" that had long been promoted in the United States (BOURNE, 1916). 1 Across the Atlantic (and within the enemy country), philosopher Franz Rosenzweig was rhapsodizing in Frankfurt about "world-historical spatial concepts" in his 1917 essay "Globus" (ROSENZWEIG, 1984).These prophetic intellectuals had no impact whatsoever on American art history, which remained, paradoxically, both provincial and fixated on Europe for at least the first half of the twentieth century, largely ignorant of universalist and transnational debates.The "global turn" happened in US art history most dramatically after the fall of Communism, when the giddy fantasy of a one-world economy galvanized thinking in the academy, spanning from the humanities to social science and political theory.This essay traces the stuttering history, and future potential, of global thinking in art history as the discipline evolved in the United States.We will begin with a brief summary of the development of the field in this country, and then review the contextual forces and historical scholarship that established the landmarks of a new art history aspiring to globality.In conclusion, we will offer a polemic: that it is with the histories of art and architecture in the Cold War that "the global" becomes a necessary analytical tool. 2Globalization has taken art history and museums for a bumpy ride.It is a simple fact that our discipline was fueled by taxonomies organized by language, nation, and place that emerged from the great collector-connoisseurs of the Enlightenment (Pierre-Jean Mariette and Adam Bartsch), and were consolidated by the keepers of the treasure hoards of Europe (from Alois Riegl to André Malraux).In these domains, art history was for the most part ruled by national and linguistic schools, driven by a romance with geographical genius ("Dutch landscape"), and periodized under the sign of nations that had in fact been established long after the artworks in question ("Italian Renaissance").Not surprisingly, then -with a few exceptions here and there -the discipline has been Global turns in US art history Perspective, 2 | 2015 1 slow to propose questions on a global, transnational level, especially when compared with the fields of anthropology, sociology, or history in general. Provincial beginnings 3The provincialism of US art history was a factor, since this condition prevailed in American national narratives more broadly, couched as they were in notions of our own exceptionalism, which excused this general state of happy ignorance.2 The first author of a national art history, William Dunlap, was the son of a British loyalist who became eager to prove his American patriotism after the revolution.He simply sought to contribute American material to an English-language literature regarding the existing European (and in this language mostly Anglophile) taxonomies.He considered his 1834 book, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States 3 to be a "reverse Gibbon."Instead of the "Rise and Fall" of an empire, his chronicle would show the rise and further rise of a new republic's visual culture, centered on his home town, New York (LYONS, 2005).Any nod to the rest of the world enters the author's text only as a means to further highlight the ascendance and rapid maturation of American art and architecture.Against Dunlap's boosterism, the next phase of US art history would be dominated by Charles Norton Eliot, whose Ruskinian teaching and values privileged only certain kinds of art -the Italian Primitives, say -as worthy of having a history, or of being taught to the young Boston Brahmins at Harvard. 4 Norton's selective and moralizing curriculum in the late-nineteenth century -which in turn informed the founding in 1896 of Harvard's Fogg Museum and the early "museum course" taught by Paul Sachs in the 1920s and 1930s (Sachs helped propel Alfred Barr as the Museum of Modern Art's founding director) -stands in sharp contrast to post-World War II art history.These keepers of art history's nineteenth-century commitments (Norton, Sachs, Barr) saw little difference between historical study and connoisseurial discernment; the burden of art history in the US was to educate the predominantly ignorant citizenry in the finer fruits of Western Civilization.5 What was the point of learning or teaching about African American quilts or Native American drawing, when these were manifestly neither internationally-important signifiers of civilization, nor enhancements to US cultural capital?The fact that a late-nineteenthcentury Native American ledger drawing 6 now hangs in the newly reinstalled Harvard Art Museums in a room devoted to seventeenth-to nineteenth-century European and American art is proof of many revolutions.7 Not the least, we argue, is the transvaluation of the indigenous itself.On the one hand, the inclusion of a Native American drawing can stand for "First Peoples" as A History Before Us (always already local and chthonic, but also revealing a trace of prehistoric global migration).On the other hand -in the case of ledger drawings in particular -such a work, in concert with Harvard's conscious mixture of American and European art, can bring traces of the global into what was formerly an "early American gallery" via the object's testimony to colonial, imperial, and epistemological violence. 4Despite the overall provincialism of US art history, in a few instances before the professionalization of the discipline that would take place in the 1930s, some US-based art historians nodded towards global, comparative questions in their analyses of art.
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