Re-envisioning the Everyday

Often seen as backward-looking and convention-bound, genre painting representing scenes of everyday life was central to the work of twentieth-century artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence, who adapted such subjects to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art. Re-envisioning the Everyday asks what their works do to the tradition of genre painting and whether it remains a meaningful category through which to understand them.

Working with and against the established narrative of American genre painting’s late nineteenth-century decline into obsolescence, John Fagg explores how artists and illustrators used elements of the tradition to picture everyday life in a rapidly changing society, whether by appealing to its nostalgic and historical connotations or by updating it to address new formal and thematic concerns. Fagg argues that genre painting enabled twentieth-century artists to look slowly and carefully at scenes of everyday life and, on some occasions, to understand those scenes as sites of political oppression and resistance. But it also limited them to anachronistic ways of seeing and tied them to a freighted history of stereotyping and condescension.

By surveying genre painting when its status and relevance were uncertain and by looking at works that stretch and complicate its boundaries, this book considers what the form is and probes the wider practice of generic categorization. It will appeal to students and scholars of American art history, art criticism, and cultural studies.

“In embracing and rethinking ‘the genre of genre,’ Fagg restitutes ‘the small things that get swept aside by grand narratives.’ That alone would make this a pioneering volume, but it is in fact only one of many contributions of this scholarship.”

—Leo Mazow, Louise B. and J. Cochrane Harwood Curator of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

“Re-envisioning the Everyday assembles a surprising cast of characters and visual styles around the category of ‘genre,’ reconsidering what the term can be said to encompass and describe.”

—Jennifer A. Greenhill, Endowed Professor of American Art, University of Arkansas School of Art

John Fagg is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows, and Modernism and curator of Bellows and the Body and New York City Life.

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