Professor Michael Kammen displays his new book on artist Robert Gwathmey in his McGraw Hall office. Charles Harrington/University Photography
Historian Michael Kammen's two most recent books are a rare and impressive display of vocation and avocation fulfilled in service to history and to art.
Kammen, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell, is the author of American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (Knopf), which came out in August, and Robert Gwathmey, The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (University of North Carolina Press), released this month. Both works have received wide notice, hit bookstores back-to-back and have enhanced two distinct categories.
In American Culture, American Tastes, Kammen presents the distillation of a vast and protean topic, a decade's worth of gritty scholarship packed into 260 pages. In the biography of Gwathmey, we find Kammen no less painstaking in his research, but riding on the updrafts of a personal labor of love -- and to boot, co-curating an exhibition of the artist's work.
The two books posed contrasting challenges for the author.
"Writing the American Culture book was agonizing and difficult and full of hurdles," said Kammen, who received a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1973 for People of Paradox. "The Gwathmey book just flowed," he said.
There is an important relationship between the subject of American culture and teaching at Cornell, as well, Kammen said, whereas Gwathmey was a private passion -- but not without its own Cornell connection. Robert Gwathmey is the father of architect Charles Gwathmey, who designed Cornell's Theory Center, Kennedy Hall and Field House.
In 1993, Kammen developed an undergraduate seminar on cultural stratification and taste levels in America, beginning in the 1880s. Spurred by his own eclectic tastes and fascination with American culture, Kammen dove into the subject and found a surfeit of material rife with contradictions, inconsistencies and heavily laced with attitude. That's not surprising: Americans spend more than a trillion dollars a year in the pursuit of leisure, more than we spend on cars, houses or health care.
Prioritizing the material was an enormous task, and the course work helped fine tune the process.
"The book was sort of tested and dry run in various ways on Cornell students and benefited enormously from a rich, ongoing interaction with them," said Kammen. "When I develop a new seminar I draw on many different secondary sources as well as my own research, but my major emphases or lines of interpretation I try to develop creatively."
The evolution of his work on Gwathmey followed a much different path, starting with a colorful serigraph by Gwathmey of three black sharecroppers that Kammen and his wife, Carol, found, almost accidentally, in a New York gallery.
"We both fell in love with his work, and I began to look for his stuff in other galleries and found them here and there," said Kammen. "But then I discovered that virtually nothing had been written about him."
Gwathmey (1903-1988), turned out to be as colorful a personality as his works, and Kammen's antennae as a historian were aquiver. Gwathmey, an eighth-generation Virginian, was a social realist whose main themes were race relations in the South. He was one of the first white American painters to depict African Americans with empathy and respect.
Gwathmey also was a civil rights activist who was under FBI surveillance for 27 years, an innovator who helped develop the silk-screen process (serigraphy), a sportsman, a hell-raising drinker, a gifted teacher and a raconteur with a redneck drawl. To top it off, Gwathmey's art dealer, widow, his son and longtime friends "were remarkably candid," Kammen said, and told him "incredibly intimate things" about the artist.
Kammen decided to forgo writing a few articles with illustrations to pursue a full-blown biography as well as an exhibition. The result is a superbly designed, eye-pleasing paperback with 48-color plates, 67 halftone illustrations and the first traveling retrospective of Gwathmey's art, co-curated by Kammen. The exhibit opened Sept. 5 at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, and will run through Oct. 17. Upcoming exhibitions will be held at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla., Nov. 7-Dec. 26; the Virginia Historical Museum, Richmond, Va., Jan. 9-Feb. 27, 2000; Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Ga., March 12-May 28, 2000; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, June 18-Aug. 13, 2000.
"His art will finally receive the broad exposure that it so richly deserves," Kammen wrote of Gwathmey in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "For a painter ... whose greatest concern was America's most persistent social issue, that seems altogether fitting."
It is also fitting that a biography of an artist who embraced all levels of culture, written by a historian of eclectic tastes, should greet the public alongside American Culture, American Taste, a book that says so much about the enduring role of leisure and culture in America.
Kammen will appear in a one-hour interview with Brian Lamb for "Book Notes" on C-Span, Sunday, Oct. 24, at 8 and 11 p.m. EDT and Monday, Oct. 25, at 6 a.m. EDT.
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