Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Ansel Adams (1902–1984) were two of the foremost American photographers of the twentieth century. In their own day Weston and Adams attracted the attention of both critics and collectors, and more recently they have been given prominent places in the scholarship and exhibitions accompanying photography's 150th anniversary. These two Californians were good friends, achieved an influential modernist aesthetic, and created images with an enduring power and grace. They concentrated upon natural subjects, Adams tending towards monumental depictions of hulking mountains or clouds, and Weston tending more toward intense close ups of smaller objects such as fruits and vegetables. Such subjects were consistent with their deepest principles, for Weston and Adams believed that the artist should remain beyond the turmoil and confusion of current events, and instead focus upon the more enduring and transcendent qualities of nature. Thus stability and solidity became the leitmotifs of Adams's art, and even in those photographs where he included some turbulence to counterbalance the granite of his compositions – images such as Nevada Fall, Yosemite National Park (c. 1946) (figure 1) – Adams usually chose to focus upon the rush of a mountain stream or some other natural movement, rather than the social or political currents of his day. Likewise Weston brought a deep timelessness to his photographs. Images like Shell (1927) (figure 2) seem to hover in a decontextualized void of shimmering geometrical shapes, and have little connection to the predatory forces or environmental disasters that may have threatened a particular mollusk.

The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s through to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists and action painters; among its leading lights were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Franz Kline. The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. And while this led to the development of a number of independent styles, rather than a single group style, the overall result was a characteristic American avant-garde approach to art which had much influence internationally.

It is the contention of Clement Greenberg that the development of modern painting can be seen as a self-critical process whereby this art entrenches itself more firmly in its area of competence. The area of competence of each art, according to Greenberg, coincides with all that is unique to the nature of its medium. Each art form, then, has an essence (albeit one which is only revealed over time) and the constitutive limitations peculiar to painting are considered by Greenberg to be “the shape of the support, the properties of pigment” and above all “the flat surface.” At first sight such a formalist perspective appears to have the advantage of being able to offer an overall picture of the development of modern painting, a unified narrative leading from Manet to American abstract artists of Greenberg's own time, such as Jules Olitski. I shall be arguing here, however, that a clear gestalt is provided by Greenberg's theory only at the cost of eliminating consideration of meaning in art. My point is not that Greenberg gives too much attention to form and not enough to content, and that therefore we merely need to balance the scales. Simply to supplement Greenberg's discussion of the formal aspects of artworks with a consideration of their content would be to accept implicitly the strong division between these two aspects which he makes. It is that very separation which I am contesting: I do not believe that it is possible to make worthwhile statements about form whilst considering it, as Greenberg does, in a vacuum.

Recently, revisionist scholars of the “new Western history” have challenged the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner who, in 1893, canonized a view of the American West as wild and uncivilized, an area penetrated, conquered and subdued by the rugged individual fighter. These historians point out that highly developed Indian civilizations existed in the West, that “cultural convergence” not conquest was the historical reality, and that women played a prominent role in the over-all story. What has gone unnoticed by these revisionist scholars, however, was an earlier attempt by a Victorian woman artist to re-write the myth of the West in her own time, a re-telling much like the new Western scholars of today.