Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WHEN I STARTED WORKING on this book in 2012, I was beginning to transi- tion away from journalistic art criticism and toward history. I expected that one of the pleasures of writing a big book on a major artist would be the solitariness, a pleasant loneliness. Instead it ended up being a richly col- laborative project. A quick story demonstrates how: In early 2016 I traveled to New England to research Carleton Watkins and his circle. Family friends David and Kathy Holdorf kindly put me up in their Concord, Massachusetts, home. One of my research targets was Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom Watkins enabler Thomas Starr King regularly corresponded. I planned to study Starr King- Watkins-Emerson links at Harvard, which has a rich trove of Emerson papers and Watkins photographs, and at the Concord Free Library, which Em- erson helped establish and where he probably left a set of Watkins’s glass stereographs of Yosemite. If I had time, I thought I’d try to talk my way into Emerson’s house, which is typically open only in the summer. Maybe, maybe, a picture that Starr had sent Emerson might be somewhere in the house, maybe in a desk or a closet. If I ran out of time to get there, so be it, but thoroughness dictated that I make an eff ort. Then, from my fi rst day in Concord, I encountered a repeating weird- ness: Friendly Concordians, such as the baristas at Haute Coff ee, two staff - ers at the Free Library, and my server at dinner one night, would ask me why xiii I was in town. I told them I was researching a book on the artist Carleton Watkins. Usually the farther away from the West Coast I was, the more I’d have to explain who Watkins was. Not in Concord. Time and time again, Concordians nodded at my mentions of Watkins and asked me if I was going to the Emerson house. I fi gured that the Concordians were, in their friendly way, thinking of the oldest photographs in town and that I might be inter- ested in them. I responded by politely nodding and saying that yes, I hoped to visit Emerson’s house. After several days, after everyone to whom I’d mentioned Watkins asked me if I was going to the Emerson house, I realized that seemingly all of Con- cord knew something about which I had only dimly theorized: there really were Watkinses at the Emerson house. With belated urgency, I asked the Holdorfs to help me network my way through Concord until I found Marie Gordinier, who opened the Emerson house for me. Sure enough, collective Concord was right: there were two big pictures by Watkins on the wall of the most important, most public room of the house. This key discovery of prints previously unknown to scholars guided me toward understanding probable links that previously had been mere fuzzy musings. While not every trip resulted in that kind of payoff , everywhere I went I found warmth and helpfulness. In Ukiah, California, volunteers at the Mendocino County Historical Society guided me to the best and most reliable sources on local history and even explained the politics of why one Mendocino-area repository of nineteenth-century material would likely turn me away. (I made the drive anyway; the Ukiahans were right.) In Berkeley, Christine Hult-Lewis, one of the most thoughtful and reliable scholars on Watkins, generously tolerated my ideas in progress and pointed me in better directions. In California’s Kern County, museum curator Lori Wear dropped everything for a day or two to show me the least-known great collection of Watkinses in America and to share with me her knowledge of the region’s history. Would that there were space here for another forty examples of the kindness I found on my research travels. One of the joys of this project has been experiencing the collegiality of other historians, librarians, archivists, curators, artists, and others. Early on, Mark Stevens sent me an encouraging letter full of guidance and advice. I still read it every week or two. In Los Angeles, Bill Deverell and Jenny Watts welcomed me into their circles of knowledge and friendship. Their rich xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS knowledge of the nineteenth-century West and, in Jenny’s case, of Watkins in particular were valuable resources. I’d have to cut a chapter to name everyone at the J. Paul Getty Trust who helped me out, but Kara Kirk was particularly helpful. Eleanor Harvey took my work seriously at a time almost no one else in the art and history worlds of Washington, DC, did. Sarah Meister was among those who invited me into rooms I hadn’t earned my way into. Walter Holemans’s willingness to hear my weekly debriefi ngs on all things Watkins was much needed; his life of informed exploration and research into the unknown has provided a model for how I’ve chosen to work and to try to have a career. Terry and Tom Zale, whose quiet acceptance of this project as something that made sense to do, were supportive and reas- suring at a time I needed it most. Karen Levine acquired this book for Uni- versity of California Press, larded me up with good advice, went above and beyond in putting me up during some of my research, and became a trusted friend and mentor after leaving the press. Nadine Little, Maeve Cornell- Taylor, and Erica Olsen shepherded the book toward publication. My agent, Erika Storella, was one of the fi rst people to think this could be a meaningful project. Corey Keller, Jeff rey Fraenkel, Douglas Nickel, and the aforemen- tioned Christine Hult-Lewis were among the Watkinsians who helped me as soundboards and guides. Artists such as Julie Mehretu, Robert Adams, John Divola, Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel, Judy Fiskin, Jo Ann Callis, and Mark Ruwedel are among those who have helped me fi nd ways into Wat- kins’s work. I’m particularly grateful to the over two dozen art museums that have advertised on The Modern Art Notes Podcast since its inception in 2011. Their support made it possible for me to make a living while I worked on this book. This book would not have been possible without a signifi cant recent change in the way many nonprofi t institutions make material known as open content available to scholars. Museums such as the J. Paul Getty Mu- seum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art and libraries such as Stanford’s and Yale’s Beinecke allow scholars to publish any artwork in their collection free from rights fees that many of their peers charge. (All images in this book from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, are courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.) Outside of these and some other exceptional institutions, image-rights fees ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv are so routine that even the University of California’s Bancroft Library charged me a substantial amount to publish out-of-copyright Watkinses in a University of California Press book. As luck (and a little bit of advance planning) would have it, Watkins’s work is unusually well held by institutions with open-content policies. Two institutions that have major Watkins holdings charge particularly high fees: the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and the Hispanic Society of America. Their holdings are important, but Watkins’s work from those collections and others that restrict scholarship and knowledge via fees that prioritize revenue generation over mission and scholarship is not reproduced here. The most signifi cant obsta- cle to historians’ understanding and sharing how artists have contributed to history is fees that eff ectively prevent knowledge of and the dissemination of artists’ work. One of the most special joys this project provided me has been getting to know Peter Palmquist through his work. Like me, Palmquist was not trained to be an academic historian. No matter; he was a ferocious and perceptive researcher who built a preposterously intense knowledge of photography in the nineteenth-century American West. His greatest project was to help re- store Carleton Watkins to his proper place in history. Palmquist curated the fi rst Watkins retrospective in 1983 for the Amon Carter Museum and kept working on Watkins until his death. Every historian who has worked on Watkins starts with Palmquist. Even though later discoveries, many made possible by technologies that came online after Palmquist died, superseded parts of Palmquist’s 1983 show and catalogue, every Watkins scholar starts there. From it, I went through the exhibition archives at the Amon Carter Museum, the Palmquist archives at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and fi nally a set of uncatalogued papers that Palmquist left at the Huntington Library. To his great credit, Palmquist was not satisfi ed with the Watkins he presented in 1983. He kept working on Watkins and discovered new material all his life. He was obviously building to a major project that would update his 1983 work, but he died before he could complete his update. His papers at Yale and at the Huntington Library taught me not just about Watkins but about the value of continuing to research, trying to learn more, and challenging previous understandings. Scholars of Watkins, photography, and American art owe Palmquist even more than any of them knew at the time of his death. I’m disappointed that I never met him. xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Historians also benefi t from the Watkins collection that curator Weston Naef built at the J.

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