The Fruits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in Post-Civil War American Art and Culture
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University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Art & Art History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-1-2015 The rF uits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in Post-Civil War American Art and Culture Shana Klein Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/arth_etds Recommended Citation Klein, Shana. "The rF uits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in Post-Civil War American Art and Culture." (2015). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/arth_etds/6 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art & Art History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Shana Klein Candidate Art and Art History Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Kirsten Buick , Chairperson Dr. Catherine Zuromskis Dr. Kymberly Pinder Dr. Katharina Vester ii The Fruits of Empire: Contextualizing Food in Post-Civil War American Art and Culture by Shana Klein B.A., Art History, Washington University in Saint Louis M.A., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Ph.D., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Art History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May, 2015 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to acknowledge the bottomless amounts of support I received from my advisor, Dr. Kirsten Buick. Dr. Buick gave me the confidence to pursue the subject of food in art, which at first seemed quirky and unusual to many. She never flinched at the connections I forged between discourses of art, food, and racism, and always trusted my intuition that representations of food are intensely political. Through her example, I see how researching and teaching the subject of American art can be a vehicle for social change. I would also like to express deep gratitude for my other committee members: Drs. Catherine Zuromskis, Katharina Vester, and Kymberly Pinder—who generously joined my committee last minute in replacement of my late professor, Dr. David Craven. It was in Dr. Craven‘s Central American Art History course that I first considered the political circumstances for the production of foods such as the banana, and how they bear meaning on the cultivation of art and empire in the broader Americas. Dr. Zuromskis also made an indelible mark on this project, pushing me to advance my arguments and contemplate how systems of empire are not only built, but dismantled. I am equally grateful to Dr. Vester who has provided a scholarly model for interdisciplinary research on American art, politics, and food, and its role in the construction of a nation. The Fruits of Empire is also indebted to several institutions that have shaped my research, including fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur Library, American Antiquarian Society, Huntington Library, Henry Luce Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I am especially grateful for the support and iv conversation of Eleanor Harvey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, David Mihaly at the Huntington Library, Helen Langa at American University, and Lisa Strong at the Corcoran Museum. I also consider myself an unnamed fellow of an imaginary scholarship at the library of William Gerdts, who has so kindly given me access to his unrivalled collection of artist files and paintings in New York City. The Fruits of Empire is a reflection of the generosity of these institutions and scholars, whose collections of objects and thoughtful advice underlines every word of this project. Lastly, I am thankful for my family. After attending many of my conference presentations, visiting me in fellowships across the country, and reading countless versions of this project, they have earned an honorary Ph.D. in American art. v THE FRUITS OF EMPIRE: CONTEXTUALIZING FOOD IN POST-CIVIL WAR AMERICAN ART AND CULTURE by Shana Klein B.A., Art History, Washington University in Saint Louis M.A., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Ph.D., Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque ABSTRACT The Fruits of Empire is a social and visual history of food in American art. With four fruit case-studies on representations of grapes, oranges, watermelons, and bananas, this project demonstrates how the visual culture of food provides a platform for examining the expansion and reconstruction of the United States in the decades following the Civil War. While chapters on grape and orange representations from California and Florida reveal the ways in which fruit serviced national expansion and the colonization of America‘s fruit-lands, a chapter on watermelon imagery illustrates the racial stereotypes assigned to food that reinforced social divisions between white from ―colored‖ eaters. A final chapter on depictions of bananas investigates the exploitation of land and labor underwriting American fruit corporations in Central America. By directing attention to representations of fruit in the Sunbelt and broader Americas, this dissertation reorients the American Art History canon centered in the Northeast to art and artists in the country‘s borders. This project also widens the scope of American Art History by looking beyond the fine arts to the visual culture of cookbooks, crate labels, and vi silverware. Examining those who labored and prepared the fruits visible in artistic depictions sheds light on another overlooked subject. In the end, readers discover that representations of food in American art and culture are neither innocent nor straight forward, but politically-charged pictures driven by ideologies that support or challenge an imperial agenda in North America. By excavating the cultural histories of food in American art, The Fruits of Empire reveals how the cultivation of fruit in soil and on canvas participated in the cultivation of American empire. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 Methodological Approaches to the Representation of Food ........................................................ 8 Chapter Summaries .................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter One Purple Globes and Glories: Grapes and the Construction of an American Empire ...................................................................................................................................... 22 The Grapes of Wrath and Reunion ............................................................................................ 23 Grape Empire: The Quest for Viticultural Supremacy at the Philadelphia Centennial ............. 29 ―Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way‖: Mission Grapes and Westward Expansion .... 37 Missionaries of Art: Painting Fruit and Progress in ―America‘s Rhineland‖ ............................ 44 Treading the Wine Press: Representations of Grape Labor in California .................................. 54 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 61 Chapter Two The Golden Apple: Florida Oranges and Yankee Politics in the Reconstruction South .............................................................................................................. 64 ―The New South‖: The Cultural Awakening of Florida in the Era of Reconstruction .............. 65 Post-Marked Flowers and Painted Souvenirs: Florida Art, Oranges, and Tourism ................... 75 Florida on Wheels: The Mobility of Fruit and People on the American Railroad ..................... 89 Orange Trees, Black Lives: Imagery of Citrus Labor in Florida ............................................... 95 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 103 Chapter Three Cutting Away the Rind: Uncovering the History of Race and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Watermelon ....................................................... 106 Breasts, Blood, Guts, and War: Watermelon and the Human Form ........................................ 107 ―Oh! Dat Watermelon‖: Race and Black Identity in Images of Watermelon .......................... 118 Building and Dismantling the Watermelon Narrative in Genre and Still-Life Painting .......... 127 ―You Are What You Eat‖: Racial Transformation in Representations of Food ...................... 135 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 143 Chapter Four Seeing Spots: The Fever for Bananas, Land, and Power in American Art .. 146 ―Landing Bananas‖: The Arrival of Tropical Fruit on American Soil ..................................... 147 From Field to Table: The Cultivation of Fruit and Progress in North America....................... 154 ‗The Raw and the Cooked‘: The Transformation of the Banana Trade under the United Fruit Company .................................................................................................................................. 160 Rotten Empire: The Aftermath of the Banana Wars in Contemporary Art ............................. 169 viii