hypothesizing cultural criticism in us intellectual history—comments for “a province to intensify: intellectual histories of cultural criticism in the 20th century” panel @ the society for us intellectual history conference, detroit, 07 november 2025.
Expanded from comments delivered at the 2025 Society for US Intellectual History Conference, Detroit, MI, 07 November 2025.
I am beginning to work on an overarching history of cultural and arts criticism in the US so this panel is of obvious interest to me both in its details and also in its larger conversation about conceptualizing the topic.
Here, in the image you can see, we glimpse Norman Rockwell’s playful portrayal of an older man—well dressed, middle aged, bourgeois (I, of course, identify with his haircut!)—from behind as he gazes upon what looks like a painting by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Rockwell created the image, titled The Connoisseur, in late 1961 and it served as the cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post, on January 13, 1962. It is an oil painting on canvas, mounted on board, and of course reprinted in the millions. Circulation was about 6.5 million in 1960 for the Post.
I would hypothesize that this cheeky image reveals some of the American register of cultural criticism. I am not arguing that it was exclusively or exceptionally American. Maybe. I need to research that question more. I just mean, at this point, that it marks an American key of cultural criticism. How so?
What we have here is a play of levels. Rockwell, the popular illustrator, was imagined as the polar opposite of Pollock the avant-garde painter, but, of course, in this image he has painted a Pollock in his popular illustration! And quite an interesting one at that. The painter Willem de Kooning, famous for quips, remarked after seeing it, “square inch by square inch it’s better than Jackson!”
One can agree or disagree with de Kooning’s art criticism, but the image itself suggests what I call a play of levels that often appears in American cultural criticism. The image itself, after all, works by layers of foreground and background, of incorporation and clever suggestion, of abstraction and illustration. And its levels deepen and deepen, quicken and quicken, the more one looks at and thinks about the image: it is funny but serious, teasing but announcing a kind of critical interest, a gag but one rich with allusions, implications, and possibilities.
Perhaps it mocks Pollock a bit, but Rockwell is also getting in on the action of Pollock’s action painting. Rockwell as America’s most ostensibly middlebrow, normal, commercial, figurative illustrator is taking on Pollock’s new drip approach to painting himself rather than merely rejecting it. He chooses to represent it not as a child’s drawing or ridiculous absurdity, as so often appeared in other popular representations, but as serious art. There is even a photo that seems, possibly, to show Rockwell using Pollock’s technique of laying the canvas flat on the ground and throwing and dripping paint to create Rockwell’s own version of Pollock’s work.
We are fellows, Rockwell proposes, but we also are different. We are both artists, in mutual experimentation with form and technique, but we are not quite the same.
And what about the man in front? Who is he, exactly? The Connoisseur hangs Pollock—and us—up with a delicious, Twainian irony and uncertainty. Are we with Rockwell, looking at the man looking at the Pollock, which was created by Rockwell, who is looking at the man looking at the Pollock—a wonderful recursive circle? Or are we the man himself, the viewer, striving to be the connoisseur, the critic, caught between Pollock and Rockwell looking at us looking at Pollock?
In this play of levels, perhaps we are all intermediaries. The layers thicken, collapse, grow apart. They move. The play of levels intensifies. Who’s to judge, the image asks. Perhaps no one. Perhaps everyone.
And in this way the critical community widens with the play of levels.
Add other images by Rockwell and one glimpses how cultural criticism, focused on the arts, also links to what we might call social criticism, focused on politics and society as a whole, in a way that is not as concerned primarily with aesthetic issues. The boundaries between cultural and social criticism, or between art and criticism for that matter, need not be impenetrable, but rather permeable.
Rockwell’s 1963 The Problem We Live With portrays a young African American girl surrounded by deputy US marshals. We do not see their heads since the image centers on a child-level height. We only see the bodies of the marshals, stiffly moving forward, and the girl, notebooks and pencils in hand, dressed neatly for school, on the march herself but also just trying simply to go to school. There is a racial slur on the wall behind her, the Ku Klux Klan initials scratched next to it, and a tomato’s bloody red splatter as well.
Here Rockwell becomes social as well as artist as well as cultural critic. It’s the problem we all live with, not just the girl’s problem, or the government’s problem. The viewer is implicated once again. Rockwell invites us into the capacity to see both histories of racism and the fight against it, to include ourselves in the story and to do so critically. The play of levels intensifies between culture and politics, between different racialized subjectivities, between the girl, the viewer, the racism on the walls, and the power of the state to protect or not. Cultural and social criticism intersect, creating a multidimensional thickness of potent meaning, a calling for political action (instead of action painting this time). The sense of motion and movement, right to left across the canvas, generates a moral force.
Add still other images of critics and the play of levels expands even further still. Life would come to imitate art when Cora Ward snapped a photo of abstract expressionist art critic Clement Greenberg—with his balding head— looking at a painting by Kenneth Noland in 1974. Rockwell’s connoisseur in the flesh?!
In other images, Greenberg appears in front of other avant-garde paintings, sometimes pressing his temples up as if to become himself almost an abstract painting—lines flowing across his face, eyebrows echoing the swoops on the canvas behind him. Play of levels indeed.
The postmodern art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss, author of the classic essay of art criticism “Grids,” poses in front of what appears to be a rather grid-like Joel Shapiro painting.
Elaine de Kooning’s painting of art critic Harold Rosenberg from 1956.
Audre Lorde before a chalkboard in a 1983 photograph by Robert Alexander. She (or someone) has written in chalk, “Women are powerful and dangerous,” with the comma insisting that we need to try to complete the sentence, carry on the analysis, figure out a new way of seeing and thinking as cultural and social critics. The most intriguing details to me appear at the bottom of the image however: her bracelet on one wrist and what looks like her glasses, held in her hand, ready to unfold, to try to see things more clearly, more accurately. She looks back at us, ready to try to look together at the world better.
Or look at Philip Pearlstein’s portrait of art critic Linda Nochlin, who is reading a book titled Art of Painting (when I first looked at it I thought the title was Lots of Paintings) as she gazes up at the viewer. We see a neon Pop Art Mickey Mouse on the cover and the portrait of a nude woman among other images. Nochlin looks up at us from her reading and viewing, red bracelets gathering in an unruly stack on her wrist as she holds the book. Maybe we are the art, the object, the person she is assessing in the image.
I always think of the figures behind and to the side of the musicians in Romare Beardon’s 1979 painting Train Whistle Blues. They might be seen as critics too, and certainly connoisseurs: attentive, critical listeners as crucial to the painting as the musicians themselves. They take in the music, make sense of the sounds. Beardon’s foreground, mid-ground, and background matter here. We are on a front porch on a rural African-American Southern farm. We are in a Matisse painting. We are with Ralph Ellison and the little man at Chehaw Station. We are in a salon as fancy aesthetically, maybe more sophisticated in many respects, than any living room in a big city. Levels upon levels as the musicians play.
Back to Rockwell. Even before The Connoisseur, he had presented art about art critics, as in a 1928 humorous painting titled The Critic, again appearing on the cover of The Post, or in a 1955 painting, Art Critic, in which the people in the paintings look back skeptically at the critic himself, who leers at them through a magnifying glass, himself seeking to become not only critic, but also artist, palette of paint in hand.
As we think about the intellectual history of cultural criticism, we have the opportunity to peer over shoulders of critics, of connoisseurs, of artists themselves (since here we are looking at Rockwell looking at “the connoisseur” looking at the Pollock). In the multi-layered processes of making and responding to art, of seeing and seeing ourselves, meanings proliferate. There is a mix of biting humor and earnest engagement, of a little silliness and a little earnest engagement. Self and other—and something communal created out of the similarities and differences between the two—fosters a society in which we are leveled, made equal, yet in an unruly cackle of multifaceted connoisseurship.
Maybe, Rockwell suggests (and Pollock too in his way as well as all these other painters and photographers and critics), cultural democracy is about getting in on the joke. But that is a serious proposition; and it is a serious project. An intellectual history of American cultural criticism might continue to join the play of levels that Rockwell paints. If it does so with vivacity, with clarity, and with a healthy dose of serious fun and fun seriousness, it might have the capacity to generate and sustain fresh ideas about what it means to be US American—and what it means to respond to culture in the world.
Standing behind the connoisseurs, realizing that we too are part of the picture, historians can try to see themselves as well as others who have gazed upon and tried to respond to culture. We can attempt to do so in all necessary if flawed ways possible. After all, in this illustration—and maybe in the very concept of trying to write critically about criticism itself—the joke is on us. We cannot escape the play of levels no matter how far we try to step back from the art or from the artifact. Yet we also can all be in on the joke if we want to pay attention to it. We can think about who gets to be in on it and who does not. We can widen the circle.
Implicated in the illustration already, historical analysis of cultural criticism by way of ideas can try to illustrate more, and illustrate it better. It can increase participation by contextualization and by letting more in on the play of levels. In short, more play, more levels, and more awareness of them. Dive in and step back. Try to see what others are seeing, get their jokes, see their sense of things, picture what might exist beyond the canvas, beyond the frame. Get into the past by way of what others left behind. Be in the present by way of looking. You must look yourself and you must look at yourself. You are in it already, after all.
Carefully, then, and with scrutiny, intellectual historians of cultural criticism can attempt to make history too—illustratively and critically, playing with the levels, expanding and deepening their reach, their stretch, their strain, their saturation, their allusions and their elisions, what’s there, what’s missing, what’s covered up, what’s implied, and all that is in between. Nothing left to do but train the lens on the art, let in the light, focus and snap the shutter. Or pick up the brush and throw some paint at the canvas. See what clicks, see what sticks.
A final image, then.
