Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, With a New Preface
"Nature and Culture is more than a study of landscape painting: it is the story of the American imagination finding what will suffice. Wonderful is the only adequate word for Novak's 'reading' of American painting. Like the opening of the new American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nature and Culture is an important event. Miss Novak herself has some of the sublimity of the landscapes she analyzes. Her book is awesomely good."--Anatole Broyard, The New York Times"An admirable blend of ambition, elan and hard research. Novak is not one of that vanishing line of critics who tend to treat the history of art simply as the history of pictorial form. Instead, she disentangles and shows the content behind the forms: the iconography that links painting to the culture of its time. Hers is not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole."--Robert Hughes, Time"A model of its kind, a thouroughly engrossing study of the intersection of history and esthetics."--James R. Mellow, Art News