Chapter one. Building patronage and institutions, 1750-1830. $t Benjamin West: a new world genius conquers the old --
John Singleton Copley: ambition and practicality --
John Adams on the arts --
Charles Wilson Peale's museum --
John Trumbull paints Revolutionary history
plan for governing patronage of history painting --
The National Academy of Design: the founding --
William Dunlap champions the arts --
Thomas Cole and a patron --
For the birds: John James Audubon and American nature --
Chapter two. Landscape, democracy, race, 1830-1850. Horatio Greenough's George Washington --
Thomas Cole and the American landscape -- --
Responses to daguerreotype --
George Catlin portrays the Native Americas --
The Public display of slavery --
Frederick Douglass on African American portraiture --
Washington Allston in Boston --
Hiram Power's The Greek Slave --
The American Art-Union --
Düsseldorf and the Düsseldoerf Gallery --
Chapter three. The Civil War and its aftermath, 1850-1870. Lily Martin Spencer: making it in New York --
Asher B. Durand formulates the American landscape --
Harriet Hosmer in the Eternal City --
Frederic Church's Heart of the Andes --
Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South --
The photograph and the face --
Photographs of Antietam --
John Quincey Adams Ward's Freedman --
Albert Bierstadt's great picture --
The Nation versus Prang & Co. --
Sculpture in midcentry America --
Chapter four. The Gilded Age, 1870-1885. Thomas Moran and the Western Sublime --
J. Alden Weir writes home about Jean-Léon Gérôme --
Henry James reviews some American painters --
Thomas Eakins in Spain --
Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic --
Eakins and the School of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts --
Young Turks: the formation of the Society of American Artists --
Otto Bacher on Whistler in Venice --
Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer assesses the progress of American art --
Winslow Homer's sea change --
Friedrich Pecht: a German critic on American art --
Sylvester Koehler reflects on a decade of American art --
Chapter five. A new internationalism, 1885-1900. William Harnett's The Old Violin --
Kenyon Cox's lonely campaign for the nude --
James McNeill Whistler's platform --
William Merritt Chase, seeing machine --
Albert Pinkham Ryder: the myth of the Romantic Primitive --
Childe Hassam on painting street scenes --
Marry Cassatt, modern woman --
Experiencing the World's Columbian Exposition --
Should women artists marry? --
Cecilia Beaux: becoming the greatest woman painter --
Booker T. Washington on Henry Ossawa Tanner --
Alfred Stieglitz on Pictoralism --
Chapter six. Progressivism and modernism, 1900-1918. John Sloan on the life of an artist in New York --
Lewis Hine: social justice through photography --
The Making of a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz --
Robert Henri advocates individuality and freedom in art education --
Alfred Stieglitz and John Marin introducing Modernism at the Armory Show --
Kenyon Cox: the case against Modernism --
Theodore Roosevelt offers a layman's view of Modern Art --
Explanatory notes from the Modernists --
Marcel Duchamp surveys New York --
Duchamp, with the help of Louise Norton and Beatrice Wood, defends his infamous Readymade --
Chapter seven. Prosperity and Depression, 1918-1939. Georgia O'Keefe paints as she wants to --
Joseph Stella on the divine and the demonic in the modern city --
Edward Hopper finds kindred spirits in John Sloan and Charles Burchfield --
George Schuyler and Langston Hughes propose different paths for African American culture --
Romare Bearden and Aaron Douglas: the situation of African American artists --
Putting artists to work during the Depression --
Dorothea Lange on documentary photography --
Thomas Hart Benton and the US scene --
Swinging abstraction: Stuart Davis --
A voice of radical cultural politics in the 1930s --
Meyer Schapiro's critical analysis of Modern Art --
Norman Bel Geddes streamlines design --
Life Magazine and the demand for pictures --
Chapter eight. War and Cold War, anxiety and affluence, 1939-1960. Norman Rockwell brings the four freedoms to life --
Jackson Pollock remakes Abstraction --
Mark Rothko: agitation and calm --
Barnett Newman declares space --
Clement Greenberg identifies an American Avant-Garde --
Harold Rosenberg defines Action Painting --
Confrontation pieces by Louise Bourgeois --
Berenice Abbott: documentary photography in a world of pictures --
Oscar Howe on creative freedom and Native American traditions --
Walker Evans & Robert Frank on Frank's Americans --
Robert Rauschenberg's disparate visual facts --
John Cage on Robert Rauschenberg's Combines --
Jasper Johns seeing and knowing --
US painting and the Cold War --
Chapter nine. Political polarization, counterculture and reaction, 1960-1980. Allan Kaprow and happenings --
Claes Oldenburg: an art of bending, kicking, and breaking --
Roy Lichtenstein: capitalism, industrialism, and Pop Art --
Andy Warhol on Pop Art and homosexuality --
Carolee Schneemann and Aphroditean performance --
Frank Stella and Donald Judd: unbroken wholeness --
Robert Morris: physical evidence of the visual field --
Michael Fried's objections to Minimalism --
A manifesto for Conceptual Art: Sol LeWitt's paragraphs --
Artists organize to demand rights and reforms --
Emory Douglas, The Black Panther Party, and Revolutionary art --
AfriCOBRA pursues the cultural liberation of Black America --
Robert Smithson reshapes land --
Judy Chicago's feminist imagery --
The Art of Light and Space in Los Angeles --
Adrian Piper's philosophical and engaged Conceptual Art --
Analyzing pictures culture through art --
Chapter ten. Culture wars and postmodernism, 1980-2000. Martha Rosler: social documentary photography versus appropriation --
Cindy Sherman, pictures and identities --
Hans Haacke and the critique of arts institutions --
Jean-Michel Basquiat's raw and subtle graffiti --
David Hammons: defiant Street Art --
Robert Mapplethorpe's embattled photographs --
Inciting action through art to end the AIDS epidemic --
Coco Fusco performing Otherness --
Fred Wilson exhibits suppressed histories --
Kara Walker: surreal, silhouetted panoramas of slavery