Review of The Painting & Politics of George Caleb Bingham.

Nancy Rash\u27s superb study exemplifies the sort of reevaluation that results from tearing down the artificial walls of the gallery and the salon and relocating an artist within an accurate historical and cultural context. Rash introduces Bingham the total person: artist, certainly, but also writer, politician, legislator, polemicist, and social activist. Indeed, Bingham considered himself a public servant who just happened to be also a painter. This important distinction has been blurred by generations of critics who refused to see the whole Bingham and who consequently constructed an image of an artist depicting-in the scenes of Missouri life that form the bulk of Bingham\u27s ouevre-a sentimental, mythologized view of the West. Rash corrects that misperception immediately: the mythic or archetypal qualities that scholars have found in Bingham\u27s pictures have existed more in their own minds than in the mind and work of the artist (5). Her book explodes this critical fallacy by reconstructing in painstaking, revealing detail the particular historical, political, and cultural contexts from which Bingham\u27s pictures emerged and to which they responded in ways that contemporary critics are only beginning to appreciate