THE HAUNTED
The United States has the reputation of being a hard-headedly rationalistic, materialistic nation, but in fact, Americans have been ghost-obsessed from colonial days down to the present time. The harsh conditions faced by the early settlers, the frequent violence of their lives, and the rugged landscapes that surrounded them combined to create of sense of being haunted. The Puritan religion, with its emphasis on sin and punishment, brought the other world shudderingly close to its adherents. In later times, the supernatural stream was more likely to run underground, but it was always there, bubbling beneath the surface. In the middle of the 19th century, America gave the world Spiritualism, a mass movement dedicated to making contact with the souls of the dead. In the 20th century, interest in Spiritualism persisted, bolstered by the tremendous grief of the world wars, joined by new otherworldly pursuits such as ESP research, astrology, the occult, and the New Age.
That all these phenomena are present in American art should come as no surprise, even if their presence remains—perhaps appropriately—somewhat subliminal and often overlooked. It is the ambition of Robert Cozzolino, curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), to make sure that they are overlooked no longer, and to that end he has organized
