Norma Desmond, JFK, a Martian Pastel, and What’s American Studies?

Lots of topics intervened, so I’ve been remiss all summer in not saluting David Lubin, who retired in June as an American art professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. David’s not your run-of-the-mill professor. He’s a pioneer, a buccaneer, and the gold standard among scholars and teachers of American art. David and I both got our Ph.D.s at Yale, David a few years before I did, both of us students of Jules Prown and both immersed, in different ways, in American Studies. I’ll write today about David, his scholarship and impact, that creature called American Studies, and the symposium in his honor this past spring.

In 1985, David published Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, and James, focusing on two paintings — Eakins’s Agnew Clinic, from 1889, and Sargent’s Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, from 1882 — and Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady, from 1881. Each work is a portrait, each concerns motivations and consciousness, and each subject is set in multiple worlds, among them the ones of masculine control and feminine obeisance, with the questions of who has control — the subject or the artist — and how propriety molds and distorts us.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Lots of topics intervened, so I’ve been remiss all summer in not saluting David Lubin, who retired in June as an American art professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. David’s not your run-of-the-mill professor. He’s a pioneer, a buccaneer, and the gold standard among scholars and teachers of American art. David and I both got our Ph.D.s at Yale, David a few years before I did, both of us students of Jules Prown and both immersed, in different ways, in American Studies. I’ll write today about David, his scholarship and impact, that creature called American Studies, and the symposium in his honor this past spring.

In 1985, David published Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, and James, focusing on two paintings — Eakins’s Agnew Clinic, from 1889, and Sargent’s Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, from 1882 — and Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady, from 1881. Each work is a portrait, each concerns motivations and consciousness, and each subject is set in multiple worlds, among them the ones of masculine control and feminine obeisance, with the questions of who has control — the subject or the artist — and how propriety molds and distorts us.