American Antiquarian Society
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United States
A Flood of Pictures excavates the foundations of our picture-saturated 21st century. When and how did pictures begin to permeate everyday lives in the United States? What happened to those daily lives when they did? And what happened to pictures in the process? The formative period for this cultural transformation was the three decades before the Civil War, when the ordinary experiences of a large segment of the population came to include pictures of many kinds, including illustrations in books, pamphlets, and newspapers; photographs on cards; full-sheet printed pictures collected in scrapbooks or albums or hung on walls; posters and broadsheets; spectacular paintings displayed in theatrical venues; and more.
In a surprisingly short span of time pictures assumed important functions. They supplemented verbal texts—and in some cases overshadowed them—for conveying news and information; portraying people, places, and events; focusing public discourse; selling things; educating and instructing; generating excitement and aesthetic gratification; promoting and disguising political agendas; shaping social identities; and building and undermining social bonds. All sorts of individual and collective experiences were increasingly mediated by visual representations.
The book’s seven chapters focus on early landmark projects that successfully achieved mass circulation, a feat that required carefully calibrated design decisions and effective marketing strategies for attracting an expansive audience across a radically heterogeneous population. A Flood of Pictures recovers a time before successful pictorial formulas for mass appeal were established, before an audience habituated to consumption of pictures existed, and before pictures had become thoroughly commodified.
Michael Leja is James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. During 2025-26 he is in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as the Lauder Distinguished Scholar at the Met’s Leonard A. Lauder Center for the Study of Modern Art.
He studies the visual arts in various media (painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, illustrations) in the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in the United States. His work is multidisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. He is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and particular audiences.
His most recent book is A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States (2025), which reconstructs the era in which mass-produced pictures in many media began to permeate Americans’ everyday lives. Another book, Art of the United States, 1750-2000: Primary Sources (2020), co-authored with John Davis, surveys the art of the US through a broad array of historical writings by artists, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Earlier books include Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (2004), which traces the interactions between the visual arts and the skeptical forms of seeing engendered in modern life in northeastern American cities between 1869 and 1917. It won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2005. Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (1993) situates the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others in a culture-wide initiative to re-imagine the self in the midst of a traumatic history. It won the Charles Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (Paris), the Getty Grant Program, and the Clark Art Institute. He earned his PhD at Harvard University and held tenured appointments at Northwestern University, MIT, and the University of Delaware before joining the Penn faculty in 2005. In 2025 he won the College Art Association Award for Distinguished Teaching of Art History.