Tyler Green - Carleton Watkins: Making the West American

AS CARLETON WATKINS OFTEN gave different titles to different prints of the same work, titles reflect the most common usage.

Images of additional works may be found at carletonwatkins.com.

WHEN I STARTED WORKING on this book in 2012, I was beginning to transition away from journalistic art criticism and toward history. I expected that one of the pleasures of writing a big book on a major artist would be the solitariness, a pleasant loneliness. Instead it ended up being a richly collaborative project.

A quick story demonstrates how: In early 2016 I traveled to New England to research Carleton Watkins and his circle. Family friends David and Kathy Holdorf kindly put me up in their Concord, Massachusetts, home. One of my research targets was Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom Watkins enabler Thomas Starr King regularly corresponded. I planned to study Starr King-Watkins-Emerson links at Harvard, which has a rich trove of Emerson papers and Watkins photographs, and at the Concord Free Library, which Emerson helped establish and where he probably left a set of Watkinss glass stereographs of Yosemite. If I had time, I thought Id try to talk my way into Emersons house, which is typically open only in the summer. Maybe, maybe, a picture that Starr had sent Emerson might be somewhere in the house, maybe in a desk or a closet. If I ran out of time to get there, so be it, but thoroughness dictated that I make an effort.

Then, from my first day in Concord, I encountered a repeating weirdness: Friendly Concordians, such as the baristas at Haute Coffee, two staffers at the Free Library, and my server at dinner one night, would ask me why I was in town. I told them I was researching a book on the artist Carleton Watkins. Usually the farther away from the West Coast I was, the more Id have to explain who Watkins was. Not in Concord. Time and time again, Concordians nodded at my mentions of Watkins and asked me if I was going to the Emerson house. I figured that the Concordians were, in their friendly way, thinking of the oldest photographs in town and that I might be interested in them. I responded by politely nodding and saying that yes, I hoped to visit Emersons house.

After several days, after everyone to whom Id mentioned Watkins asked me if I was going to the Emerson house, I realized that seemingly all of Concord knew something about which I had only dimly theorized: there really were Watkinses at the Emerson house. With belated urgency, I asked the Holdorfs to help me network my way through Concord until I found Marie Gordinier, who opened the Emerson house for me. Sure enough, collective Concord was right: there were two big pictures by Watkins on the wall of the most important, most public room of the house. This key discovery of prints previously unknown to scholars guided me toward understanding probable links that previously had been mere fuzzy musings.

While not every trip resulted in that kind of payoff, everywhere I went I found warmth and helpfulness. In Ukiah, California, volunteers at the Mendocino County Historical Society guided me to the best and most reliable sources on local history and even explained the politics of why one Mendocino-area repository of nineteenth-century material would likely turn me away. (I made the drive anyway; the Ukiahans were right.) In Berkeley, Christine Hult-Lewis, one of the most thoughtful and reliable scholars on Watkins, generously tolerated my ideas in progress and pointed me in better directions. In Californias Kern County, museum curator Lori Wear dropped everything for a day or two to show me the least-known great collection of Watkinses in America and to share with me her knowledge of the regions history. Would that there were space here for another forty examples of the kindness I found on my research travels.

One of the joys of this project has been experiencing the collegiality of other historians, librarians, archivists, curators, artists, and others. Early on, Mark Stevens sent me an encouraging letter full of guidance and advice. I still read it every week or two. In Los Angeles, Bill Deverell and Jenny Watts welcomed me into their circles of knowledge and friendship. Their rich knowledge of the nineteenth-century West and, in Jennys case, of Watkins in particular were valuable resources. Id have to cut a chapter to name everyone at the J. Paul Getty Trust who helped me out, but Kara Kirk was particularly helpful. Eleanor Harvey took my work seriously at a time almost no one else in the art and history worlds of Washington, DC, did. Sarah Meister was among those who invited me into rooms I hadnt earned my way into.

Walter Holemanss willingness to hear my weekly debriefings on all things Watkins was much needed; his life of informed exploration and research into the unknown has provided a model for how Ive chosen to work and to try to have a career. Terry and Tom Zale, whose quiet acceptance of this project as something that made sense to do, were supportive and reassuring at a time I needed it most. Karen Levine acquired this book for University of California Press, larded me up with good advice, went above and beyond in putting me up during some of my research, and became a trusted friend and mentor after leaving the press. Nadine Little, Maeve Cornell-Taylor, and Erica Olsen shepherded the book toward publication. My agent, Erika Storella, was one of the first people to think this could be a meaningful project. Corey Keller, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Douglas Nickel, and the aforementioned Christine Hult-Lewis were among the Watkinsians who helped me as soundboards and guides. Artists such as Julie Mehretu, Robert Adams, John Divola, Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel, Judy Fiskin, Jo Ann Callis, and Mark Ruwedel are among those who have helped me find ways into Watkinss work.

Im particularly grateful to the over two dozen art museums that have advertised on The Modern Art Notes Podcast since its inception in 2011. Their support made it possible for me to make a living while I worked on this book.