Art and Life in America

Oliver W. Larkin's survey traces American painting, sculpture, architecture, and design from the colonial period into the middle of the twentieth century, treating the visual arts not as a separate, self contained tradition but as a running record of the country's changing social and economic life. Larkin organizes the book across six sections tied to successive historical periods, following how each era's art, from portraiture commissioned by colonial merchants to the public murals and industrial design of his own century, reflected the democratic ideals and material conditions of the Americans who made and paid for it. He gives roughly equal weight to painting, architecture, and the decorative and industrial arts, refusing to treat any one medium as more historically significant than the others.

Larkin spent five years revising the manuscript after beginning it in 1944, and the finished book reads as a comprehensive teaching survey rather than an argument built around a single thesis, dense with specific artists, buildings, and movements organized to be consulted as much as read straight through. He moves confidently between fields most historians of the period kept separate, discussing a painter, a cabinetmaker, and an architect from the same decade in the same breath whenever their work answered to the same underlying social conditions, and he keeps returning to the idea of democracy itself as the value American art was, at its best, actually trying to express. It suits a reader who wants American visual culture explained as a direct expression of the country's social history, period by period, rather than through close formal analysis of individual masterworks alone.