A salute to David Lubin, an American art buccaneer now retiring from Wake Forest University.

L ots of topics intervened, so I’ve been remiss all summer in not saluting David Lubin, who retired in June as an American art professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. David’s not your run-of-the-mill professor. He’s a pioneer, a buccaneer, and the gold standard among scholars and teachers of American art. David and I both got our Ph.D.s at Yale, David a few years before I did, both of us students of Jules Prown and both immersed, in different ways, in American Studies. I’ll write today about David, his scholarship and impact, that creature called American Studies, and the symposium in his honor this past spring.

In 1985, David published Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, and James, focusing on two paintings — Eakins’s Agnew Clinic, from 1889, and Sargent’s Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, from 1882 — and Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady, from 1881. Each work is a portrait, each concerns motivations and consciousness, and each subject is set in multiple worlds, among them the ones of masculine control and feminine obeisance, with the questions of who has control — the subject or the artist — and how propriety molds and distorts us.

Act of Portrayal, which made David famous in art history circles, is neither art history nor literary criticism but an amalgam of both and, at the time, an unexpected, bracing approach. The old art history mostly concerned narrative, style development, connoisseurship, provenance, art movements, and the history of the artist and subject. This approach was quick to exhaust, and many storylines were missed as well as avoided.

In 1994, he published Picturing a Nation, profiling six American artists from the 19th century. John Vanderlyn, William Harnett, and George Caleb Bingham were well known, but Lilly Martin Spencer, Robert Duncanson, and Seymour Guy weren’t. Using contemporary letters, diaries, fiction, poetry, political speeches, and close looking at the art by each, David exposed the contradictions these six presented us. The history of American art wasn’t one story but countless zigzag stories fashioned by class, race, region, politics, and gender. As were the artist’s partners, who were what I’d call lookers.

Different people see things in different ways. The creative work of revision unfolds as long as there are people looking.

All of this seems good and logical today, but in ye olden days was far-out. Each book expressed the phenomenon called American Studies, a field that crosses disciplines. It started with American exceptionalism, the idea that our culture isn’t derivative but unique to us. Everything’s fair game. We can cross without ado the old, impenetrable border between, say, high art like paintings and low art like illustrations but also material culture, the pots and pans, buttons and bows, and broomsticks and bedpans of everyday life. High culture and popular culture overlap.

At Yale, in my day and David’s, close looking at, for example, the geometries of a painting or the curves of a coffee pot was the foundation of inquiry, as was material culture. Jules Prown did his dissertation at Harvard on John Singleton Copley and, later, the catalogue raisonné, or definitive compilation, of all of Copley’s pictures. Copley’s faces tend to look like porcelain masks. Psychology is diminished, as if his Boston Brahmin and Yankee-artisan subjects said, “That’s no one’s business.” We plumb character and status from his subjects’ satins, brass buckles, waistcoats, books, and furniture.

Jule’s method, used by most Yale-trained Americanists, doesn’t smother the work of art in artifacts and arcana. Rather, it takes a single work of art and builds its own world around it. It’s revelatory and refreshing. David, like me, came to Yale and our dissertations via uncommon if not oddball paths. I’d been in politics. David had studied film at the University of Southern California and was a music critic for Rolling Stone. He met his wife, Libby, when he was studying French film in Paris. They planned to open a café/bookstore/record rack on the Left Bank, part Midnight in Paris, part anti-materialist, and solicitous of the best in human nature. David’s mother suggested he apply for an American Studies Ph.D. as a backup. That he did. Criteria for an American Studies success story are less narrow and exacting than in art history. Catholicity of tastes, curiosity, a generosity of spirit, and an aversion to snobbery are essential. A film whiz and Rolling Stone music critic would leaven a chunk of the Yale campus.

David went to Wake Forest in 1999 after 15 years at Colby College in Maine. Like many Southern universities, Wake Forest wanted a higher national academic profile. Part of its strategy involved the recruitment of mid-career star professors from elite schools in the Northeast. David’s books made him an art history rascal, his lecture style was both saucy and solid, and, among his Colby students and among young American-art scholars, he was known as a caring, conscientious mentor.

His 2004 book Shooting Kennedy won prestigious awards. David wove images of Jack and Jackie from 1960 into that catastrophic last weekend of November 1963. The couple and their two adorable kids were the supreme flower of the nuclear family. Photogenic? Jack beats the pants off, say, Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover. Jack’s image, David suggested, runs more parallel to 007 and Elvis. He was glam, cool, robust, and then, via the Zapruder film, dead before our eyes. David described the Zapruder film as “26 seconds unfolding like a three-act play.” Talk about close looking. Oswald was the new Norman Bates. He also brandished his rifle in a self-portrait that’s a maniac inversion of Daniel Chester French’s bronze Minute Man statue, from 1875. Jackie was a sharp image maker. Gore Vidal said she wanted to be a movie star. She had an eye for spectacle. Cecil B. DeMille couldn’t have planned a more epic funeral.

David is a talented storyteller. Like all American Studies people, he’s a leaper and he goes from what’s narrow to what’s universal. He holds readers and listeners with juxtapositions that shock and dazzle but, though outside the box, have the ring of truth. His paternal look and quips made for a reassuring presence as he opened up art history. “David, your prose is so consumable,” a colleague once told him, a dig, maybe, but David took it as a compliment. You ought to give your audience, readers or students in the classroom, a good ride.

In the 1980s and ’90s, at Yale and most other places, deconstruction, the science of squishy meaning, reigned. I never bought it. Deconstruction is many things, but, overall, with its fakery and foolery, it’s best suited to psychos. The best scholars coming from Yale in the ’80s especially, and I count David among them, had to wean themselves off of it. The best thing about it is that it forced scholars to admit that great art always has multiple meanings. Like great art historians, it’s worldly.

Wake Forest recruited him, and he said no, recruited him again, and he said no again, but on the third try he and Libby decided to give the place a look. When they left Maine for a weekend in Winston-Salem, they were 99 percent sure they’d never move. By the time they left the campus, they were 99 percent sure they would. Kudos to Wake Forest for recognizing talent. It’s a great university on a pretty campus, with Reynolda House, among my best-loved museums and specializing in American art.

At Wake Forest, David’s signature classes were Classics of World Cinema, 1928-1968; American Visual Arts, 1550–1915; and a class he regularly team-taught called Midcentury Modernisms. Last year, he and an English Department colleague mixed postwar short American fiction — Cheever, Updike, Carol Oates, and others — with film noir and Hopper. Every time they taught it, they did a new mix. In his classes, he elicits a plethora of perspectives. Close looking is essential, giving the art autonomy. Subjectivity’s fine, and it’s a given that we’re creatures of our time, but students need to bring curiosity and self-awareness to class.

David’s Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War, published in 2016, is my favorite book of his and one of my favorite art history books. He starts with a settled presumption — that our barely 18 months of war had very little impact on American art — and perforates it senseless, drawing from a quiver packed with evidence of all sorts.

Until Congress’s declaration of war on April 6, 1917, the country was notably split but not inflexibly so. A preparedness movement in 1916 had pushed an abundance of caution, but war was the goal. The odious Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 as the man who “kept us out of war,” but he got us into war a mere month after his 1917 inauguration. Once the New World fat was in the Old War fire, art and artists proved themselves essential in rallying support. David united recruitment poster art — Uncle Sam’s “I Want You” poster becoming an icon — what he called “flagophilia,” notions of honor, sex-role expectations, the cult of celebrity, Hollywood melodramas like The Hun Within, songs like “Over There,” paranoia studies, atrocity propaganda, and modern advertising. Teddy Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Henry Ford, and a Daddy Warbucks hoard play a part.

The book includes a photograph from 1918 that’s riveting. It depicts Douglas Fairbanks lifting Charlie Chaplin onto his shoulders before a packed, enraptured crowd at a Liberty Bonds rally on Wall Street. Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Mary Pickford, America’s biggest in the new mass medium, raised millions. Chaplin later said that the rally’s euphoria left him cold. “The ogre of militarism was everywhere,” he wrote. “America was cast into a matrix of obedience, and every thought was secondary to the religion of war.”

The Little Tramp reaches toward the heavens, toward the sun, lifted by Fairbanks, the ebullient action hero and, we forget, bestselling author of the self-help book Laugh and Live. They two are perched on the edge of the stage, a sea of faces fixed on them. Can they do it? Of course they can. They’re larger than life. They’re movie stars and dwell among the gods, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Can we do it? Only we can do it. The business of America, after all, is business, yes, but it’s making the world safe for democracy, too.

Chaplin is what we today call problematic (he was later accused of communist sympathies and left the U.S.), but within months if not weeks of the springtime war declaration, a mass hysteria and hypnosis were in full swing. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that American and British propaganda bested Germany’s in visual sophistication and power. “Pictures are first principles,” an early marketing czar said. Reader or not, what you see, you know instantly. Hitler’s propaganda machine owed much to ours.

David wrote about how meticulous, purpose-made World War I cemeteries helped the living fathom the costs in young lives, a tall order given that postwar Americans became revolted by the adventures in 1917 and 1918 and the Versailles debacle. War is hell, but it’s also a subject for artists. Once over there, being there and making art pushed John Singer Sargent to new heights and created new stars like Otto Dix, Paul Nash, and, among Americans, the long forgotten Claggett Wilson. David’s book considers them but also looks at another way, along with cemeteries, that winners and losers assuaged the pain. There’s a chapter on masks and plastic surgery after injuries left young men gruesomely deformed.

In his epilogue, David moves from King Kong, the flagpole-sitting craze, Lewis Hines photographs of workers building skyscrapers, and the theme of the Forgotten Man. Congressional hearings exposed the falsity of most WWI atrocity propaganda, leaving the public embittered and betrayed. Hitler was on the rise. In 1933, Laurence Stallings, a double amputee wounded at Belleau Wood and co-author of the war drama What Price Glory, published a compilation of 500 war photographs with sardonic captions written by Stallings. “Bystanders in East Prussia” described a picture of rows of corpses. “This was a church” shows a church blasted to smithereens, its bell lying in the wreckage upside down. Stallings called his book The First World War, thought to be the premiere of an ordinal ID for what had been called the Great War. A new catastrophe was on its way.

Grand Illusions became a superb exhibition that I took when I was the director of the museum division at the New-York Historical Society.

At his retirement this spring, Wake Forest honored David with a symposium. I couldn’t go, alas, because of work travel but watched it online. Three of his long-ago protégés, each now a superstar and all former Yale students of Jules Prown, gave talks. Two, Martin Berger, now the provost at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Jennifer Roberts, now at Harvard, were my classmates. Alex Nemerov is a professor at Stanford. Jennifer has been a Harvard professor for more than 20 years now. She’s the first American-art professor Harvard ever hired. Through Harvard’s history — it opened in 1636 — snoots there believed that American art was derivative and boring. Jennifer, trained by David, gives it depth, breadth, and razzle dazzle. Harvard is blessed to have her.

Martin spoke about race stereotypes in the 1920s and ’30s, using two or three paintings by Chicago’s Archibald Motley, a black artist whose work concerned resilience and accommodating the past to the present. Black life wasn’t one thing but endless variations and nuances. Alex spoke about mentorship and about standing on the shoulders of the scholars before us. He did a looking exercise with Winslow Homer’s Veteran in a New Field, his iconic 1865 painting about grief and hope. Using Photoshop, he excised the figure of the veteran — the farmer with a scythe in a field. What was left was only a sweep of soaring wheat, the foreground where the figure stood already harvested, flat, and empty. Art is about what’s there on the canvas but also about what’s not there. What do we leave? Who follows us? And is art really about the real world or a mystical one? It was lovely. For once, I thought, the best art historians are priests.

Jennifer’s talk, drawing from her next book, was about the extraterrestrial, microscopic, and aesthetic. She looked at the first image of another planet — Mars — that we Earthlings ever saw. It’s man-sized pastel based on data transmitted to teletype machines in 1965 by NASA’s Mariner 4 probe. It would take hours for computers to convert the digital data to a TV-screen image, and the scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., were too impatient, so a pair bought a box of pastels from a local art-supplies shop, mounted a surface on the wall, stapled the strips of numerical data next to it, and rendered the image by hand, color-by-numbers style, strip by strip over the hours it took for Mariner 4, a gazillion miles away, to send.

Mars, an alien world, came to life through, of all things, pastel, a delicate chalk medium famously used for French portraits in the 1700s. These portraits look dreamy and evanescent, with powdery lines and blushing yellow, red, orange, and brown rather than saturated color. Counterintuitive as it seems, pastel suited Mars and the eventual TV images perfectly, with an added dividend. Pastels are made from ground marine fossils, not far from what we think composes parts of Mars’s once-watery surface. Jennifer’s dissertation, supervised by Alex Nemerov during his years as a Yale professor and Jules’s successor, was on Robert Smithson and the American landscape tradition. She dives into the links between art and science.

David’s latest, just-published book is Ready for My Closeup: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream. It’s supremely good. The Billy Wilder movie is 75 years old now — David’s age in a couple of months. Its central character, Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, is an avatar of faded fame, ego, villainy, second acts, though hers went wonky, and a very American “I did it my way” style. The movie itself, like life, is comic, ironic, melancholic, and gothic. Goodness, a dead man, floating in a swimming pool, is the narrator! It’s partly a horror movie, too, but Wilder is a cynic. The movie is about writers as well — about Wilder and Charles Brackett, collaborators gone bad on each other; the failing screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden; and even Norma, who’s peddling a script. The book about the movie is about David, too, the writer, scholar, and art historian who tells the story with humanity, a love of learning, and a love of life in all its kinks and flip-flops.