摘要：Modern and, more especially, post-modern art has adamantly reinstated the picture-as-object next to the picture-as-illusion. Think of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Whereas a long tradition —strategies of the frame, of linear perspective, of the internal relation of forms and narratives (2) — had virtualized the painting, much of the art since the 1960s has returned the issue of the work’s real space to the visual process: witness Smithson’s Land Art, Institutional Critique, the Installation. In a welcome gesture linking contemporary art with the art of the early American Republic, Jennifer L. Roberts, as it were, “rematerializes” paintings produced between 1760 and 1850 and enables us, through her virtuoso interdisciplinary construct, to re-imagine their material history.
